The Singularity Is Near

When Ray Kurzweil was five years old, he knew he wanted to be an inventor. He spent his free time building rocket ships and robotic theaters. His parents, artists who fled the Holocaust, pushed their son to be open-minded and engage with learning. His grandfather described to him what it was like to touch the original manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, instilling in Kurzweil an appreciation for human innovation and creativity. A love of Tom Swift Jr. Books led Kurzweil to appreciate the power of thinking to solve problems. Kurzweil believes that ideas have immense capacity and that no problem is without a potential solution.

As a teenager and adult, Kurzweil grew obsessed with computers. He tracked their development and built his own computer at home. An inventor himself, Kurzweil realized that the technologies he developed needed to meet the context of the time when they would be released—no small feat when things were changing so rapidly. His first book was published in 1990; The Age of Intelligent Machines predicted the future of technologies and artificial intelligence. Kurzweil argued that human and artificial intelligence would merge in a way that made it impossible to distinguish between them.