Kurzweil tends to bracket dour speculations with conditional assurances too broad to satisfy any non-optimized brain ... Kurzweil’s predictions may be of use to investors and science fiction novelists (at least until they are replaced by A.I. in five years), but the greatest value of The Singularity Is Nearer is to articulate, with bracing candor, the technocrat’s view of humanity ... What’s missing in all this is any conception of the subjectivity of art — the spark of recognition shared by poet and reader across time and space.
[Kurzweil's] impressive grasp of computing is on display once again in his disjointed and occasionally delusional new book ... Far from the sort of disciplined treatise we might expect from a veteran programmer, this book is a welter of free associations and shameless simplifications ... Unfortunately, Kurzweil rarely restricts himself to claims about the mechanics and history of AI. Instead, he ventures into foreign territory, with unfortunate results.
Kurzweil has been working on AI for 60 years. For almost as long, he’s been making accurate predictions about the internet, mobile devices and artificial neural networks. With that in mind, it’s worth listening ... The choice is easy, Kurzweil writes. After all, 'biological life is suboptimal.' To which some of us would reply, speak for yourself.
A feast for the (as-of-yet unenhanced) mind ... It educates and illuminates and asks profound questions that get to the heart of our relationship to technology and our own sense of 'humanness.'
The book contains several delightful philosophical digressions as well as an impressive rundown of all the many (many) advances that humankind has made lately in curbing poverty and disease. It’s stirring. And many of Kurzweil’s predictions could indeed happen—someday. Kurzweil certainly has a fertile mind, and who knows? Maybe this review will look silly when I’m 10 years younger in the late 2030s. But his unrelenting insistence that the Singularity is nigh undermines an otherwise sharp and provocative book.
