"40 years ago, life took a surprising turn" - from the Orlando Sentinel - by Sherry Boas

The other day, a columnist at the Orlando Sentinel reflected on a span of 40 years of her own life, and described a chance meeting with a friend in Boston, of a man whom she would marry, have children, and grandchildren by. And sort of in passing, she mentioned a favorite book of ours: Kurzweil's Singularity. In the Lake County News section of the website, she wrote:

Ralph is reading Ray Kurzweil's book, "The Singularity is Near." Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers and futurists. His predictions for the past 21 years have been remarkably accurate. In this 489-page tome, Kurzweil draws a detailed picture of what he believes the future will hold. For the next 40 years, he envisions a world far different from anything we've yet experienced. It's understandable that my husband finds Kurzweil's concepts intriguing. There comes a point in life when the road ahead looks decidedly shorter than the road already traveled. Kurzweil presents possibilities that extend the journey.

Read the full Orlando Sentinel piece, here. Kurzweil is a provocative author and champion of technology and futurology, but he does have street cred. Play the YouTube video for a standard introduction of the man.



Quite the showman, right? Love that parlor trick? What is he, a wizard? Kind of, swaths of folks out there, who you'd think would agree with the man, technologists such as Michael Dell, have come out against Kurzweil's assertions and hypotheses. Or take this article that was published the other week, by IEEE Spectrum, a technology magazine, that said:

Don't panic if you look for your computer today and can't find it. We have it on the authority of technology maven Ray Kurzweil that this year computers will have vanished because of miniaturization. As he said at the TED conference in February 2005: "By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities." If you have a different impression of the world today, Kurzweil would want you to know that he is technically correct. If the rest of the world fails to think that's enough, the rest of the world is wrong. Of course, Kurzweil did not mean to say that all computers would actually disappear. Rather, embedded microprocessors would allow many of the functions once uniquely served by computers to disseminate to phones, tablet computers, and even cars, clothes, and key chains. And in that sense, 2010 might indeed be seen as a ringing vindication of Kurzweil's prophecy, because smartphones and iPads are everywhere.

Read the full IEEE piece here. See this Wikipedia article on the criticisms of this Technological Singularity hypothesis. See also: Charlie Rose with Anthony Fauci, Nils Daulaire, Jeffery Taubenberger & Irwin Redlener; Ray Kurzweil (November 1, 2005), Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I., Singularity, Where is it?