Nathan Bick

  I’ve been familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s work since I was a child. His book The Age of Spiritual Machines was on the  bookshelves of my childhood home, and its message of technological future optimism was amazing and wondrous for my young imagination. To summarize his work, Kurzweil is an optimistic futurist and transhumanist. He places great faith in the power of exponential growth and improvement in computation, which has been the trend of the last 100 years, and he forecasts the same trend to continue into the future. If that is true, then it doesn’t take too many more doublings to reach a so-called Singularity, a moment beyond which forecasting is useless. The Singularity is a point at which the capabilities of humans and machines together reach a level like that of a god in speed, extent, depth, etc, and we can only guess what they might do. Kurzweil predicts that this will occur around the year 2045. Transhumanism and the Singularity have a very religious or messianic ch...