The famed futurist remains inhumanly optimistic about the world and his own fate—and thinks the singularity is minutes away.
RAY KURZWEIL REJECTS death. The 76-year-old scientist and engineer has spent much of his time on earth arguing that humans can not only take advantage of yet-to-be-invented medical advances to live longer, but also ultimately merge with machines, become hyperintelligent, and stick around indefinitely. Nonetheless, death cast a shadow over my interview with Kurzweil this spring. Just minutes before we met, we both learned that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and one of Kurzweil’s intellectual jousting partners, had suffered that fate.
A few days before that, the science fiction author Vernor Vinge had also passed. Vinge’s novels first described the singularity, that moment when superintelligent AI surpasses what humans can do and mere mortals need high-tech augmentation themselves to remain relevant. Kurzweil embraced the name for his own grand vision, and in 2005 wrote a best-selling book called The Singularity Is Near. He was by then an accomplished inventor and entrepreneur who had made breakthroughs in optical character recognition, synthesizer technology, and high-tech tools to boost accessibility. He’s racked up numerous honors—the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the $500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize, a Grammy. In 2012, Google hired him to head an AI lab... (Wired, continues)
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