Indeed, if Kurzweil's predictions do come true, they are comparible in their size and implications to the Second Coming of Jesus - the conquering of death and the unification of all consciousness in to one computational substrate that is to become more powerful than anything in the Universe and spreads outward from the Earth at the speed of light. In fact, although Kurzweil says early on in the book that his view of the future is neither utopian nor dystopian, the future described is so rosy that the Singularity has also been called 'the Geeks' Rapture'. The clarity of Kurzweil's writing, the level of detail he went in to about each concept he discussed and the content itself were entirely captivating, not least because the predictions were set to happen in the near future and would change the world in to an unrecognisable utopia. As someone who'd always been fascinated by computers and technology since I started programming my first ZX Spectrum as a child, through to my teenage years programming in QBASIC, to my work as a Web Developer, I was well aware of Moore's law and very conscious of the accelerating progress in technology.Īs I started to read, it became clear that this was an exceptional book.

Back in 2007 I was very excited to start reading The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil which had been published 2 years earlier in 2005.

The singularity is here