Ray Kurzweil comes across to many people as a raving lunatic. In this book he claims many things, not least of which are that many people alive today will be able to live as long as they choose to, and that in less than thirty years, $1000 will buy more computational power than that of all of the human brains on Earth combined.

Although on the surface these ideas seem like science fiction, Kurzweil does a very good job at supporting his claims with strong arguments. In an all-too-brief nutshell, it all boils down to exponential (and faster-than-exponential) growth in processor speed and memory size, and in our ability to reverse engineer our bodies and brains. The titular "singularity" is a side-effect of the "faster-than" part of the exponential growth, which theoretically predicts that it will reach an infinite rate of change at some time within the next few decades.

I don't believe many of Kurzweil's specific predictions about which technologies will accomplish particular things on particular timescales, but I definitely do agree that the world is changing at an ever-increasing pace, and that most people drastically underestimate the effect of future improvements in technology (to us, the little bit of the exponential curve we see looks linear).

This is truly awe-inspiring stuff, and itmakes me thrilled to be alive to see it happening. (It does depress me a bit, however, that I've steered my career away from making this stuff happen.)

As a side note, I was quite surprised that Kurzweil makes no mention whatsoever of Jeff Hawkins' work (see On Intelligence) on reverse-engineering the neocortex. I don't know if this is an oversight or a swipe.