A review of futurist Ray Kurzweil's new book The Singulatiry is Near.

2045. Save the date, for something which is at once exciting and terrifying, wonderful and horrible is lurking. It will be the end of everything we know and the beginning of everything we don’t. Author and futurist Ray Kurzweil has termed it the “Singularity - a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability brought about by the creation of non biological intelligence billions of times more powerful than all human intelligence today.” As a staging point in the development of life it will rank alongside multicellular organisms and photosynthesis but this time it isn’t nature calling the shots, it’s us. Kurzweil believes that the coming decades will see biological evolution reach its inevitable conclusion with a crescendo of unparalleled technological progress: “We won’t experience 100 years of technological advance in the 21st century, we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (when measured by today’s rate of progress,)” he writes.

Such a world will be radically different to our own in nearly every conceivable way with boundaries between rich and poor, real and virtual, nations and even past and present becoming things of the past. It will allow us to become anyone we want to be in terms of thought and appearance and will lead to a new economy where products (and indeed all physical objects) become essentially valueless. This will be a world where information is king and those with the most vivid imaginations will rule. This is the essence of what Kurzweil terms the Singularity.

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