I've just finished reading
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
This is one of the books that took me the longest time to read. It's a hard to read book because it is full of technical and scientific details, quotes a great deal of facts and research and leads your mind into fields which deserve a separate books for themselves.
The purely technical side of the book makes it a bit hard to follow as you need to have a good deal of understanding of computing technology and concepts and keep in mind what's been said in previous chapters.
Ray Kurzweil starts with historical data about evolution and technological progress. He postulates his theory of technology evolution called "The Law of Accelerating Returns" and lists a great deal of examples to prove that evolutionary processes are indeed not linear but exponential.
The next two chapters explain how much is the computational capacity of the human brain, how to achieve that and how to reverse engineer the brain itself. Think about 3-D molecular computing, quantum computing, brain imaging and scanning :)
Increased computing capacity and understanding of the human brain (and general progress of science and technology in the mean time) will lead to the three revolutions which will make the Singularity possible: Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics (Strong AI). Ray gives a lot of examples and current research which is well under way currently or will become a reality in the next 10 to 30 years.
Following in the book is a list of impacts caused by the advancement of technology and the Singularity itself. On the human body and brain, on longevity, on warfare, on work and learning and play, on the Cosmos.
Because the Singularity is not a single event but rather many events which happen in parallel and gradually over time we will have a hard time defining what a human means. What is human, what is consciousness and where the line is are questions which need to be taken into consideration. Ultimately the human race will become (predominantly) non-biological.
How do you deal with dangers and shortcomings in technology? I myself as a QA engineer have seen software fail in spectacular ways. How about machine failures? Now how about nanobots in your blood stream or strong AI gone wild? Ray explains some of the possible threats and proposals to overcome them. His point is that benefits from advanced technology will be far greater than dangers and we will be able to first design our defense systems before anything else that may threaten our existence.
The last chapter contains examples of criticism and explanations why they are incorrect which is the first of its kind I've seen in a book.
Epilogue
Human Centrality. A common view is that science has consistently been correcting our overly inflated view of our own significance. Stephen Jay Gould said, "The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."
But it turns out that we are central, after all. Our ability to create models-virtual realities-in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.
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