Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer . . . Gets Nearer

As the date of release date of Raymond Kurzweil's The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI (June 25 of this year) approaches we are seeing more reviews of the book, and commentary about its contents.

So far it seems that Kurzweil is not making any radical revisions to his earlier predictions, but endeavoring to show that we are continuing to advance toward the realization of what he predicted in his prior 2005 book, and indeed, what seems to me his more ground-breaking and foundational 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines.

This can seem less than surprising. While many assessing Kurzweil's forecasts, even when limiting themselves to just his forecasts regarding the area that is his focus rather than broader economic or political developments about which his knowledge has seemed fairly casual, have found him much more often wrong than right, Kurzweil has tended to regard himself as overwhelmingly getting it right rather than wrong. Defending his 147 predictions for 2009 in answer to Alex Knapp's critcisms of them as "mostly inaccurate" in Forbes, Kurzweil insisted that 78 percent of them were entirely correct, another 8 percent only off by a year or two, and only a mere 2 percent classifiable as wrong.

Still, when we consider what he had to say about matters like virtual reality and self-driving cars we are reminded that what he thought we would have in 2009 we still lack in 2024, all as the prospects of whole technological areas seem to have fallen sharply in the years since--as with nanotechnology, a bubble that can seem to have yielded next to nothing as compared with the promises then current, which were quite important to his vision. Yes, when someone points this those who refuse to brook any suggestion that this is anything other than an era of revolutionary technological changes insist that really nanotechnology is all around us, but when pressed admit that this is at best a matter of incremental improvements in a number of well-established fields rather than, for instance, the materials revolution promised by the use of exceedingly strong and lightweight carbon nanotubes in large-scale engineering, or even chip-making--never mind the wondrous nano-machinery an Eric Drexler described. In spite of that the buzz for Kurzweil's book has him continuing to project nanobots in our bloodstreams helping to keep us healthy in the 2030s. I admit myself skeptical about that one--but I do wonder what he has to say in support of his claim.