“La Singularidad está cerca” es la obra maestra de uno de los pensadores más influyentes de nuestros días, el ingeniero e inventor Ray Kurzweil. Este libro se centra en lo que el autor llama la ley de los rendimientos acelerados, una ley que ha de llevar a la humanidad a un escenario donde se producirá una singularidad tecnológica, un explosión de inteligencia que transformará el mundo de forma drástica. Las tres tecnologías que darán lugar a esta singularidad son la genética, la nanotecnología y la robótica (GNR). El desarrollo de estas tres tecnologías conllevará la inmortalidad, el paso de una economía basada en la escasez a una economía basada en la abundancia y la creación de inteligencia artificial fuerte. El hombre superará así sus condicionamientos biológicos y creará máquinas inteligentes que empazarán siendo indistingibles de los humanos y que luego convergerán con los humanos para alcanzar cotas de inteligencia mucho más elevadas que las actuales. Kurzweil fecha la Singularidad tecnológica en el 2045.

Ray Kurzweil is arguably today’s most influential, and often controversial, futurist.

In How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization — reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.

Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world’s problems.

He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.

Certain to be one of the most widely discussed and debated science books of the year, How to Create a Mind is sure to take its place alongside Kurzweil’s previous classics.

Visit the official book website for more information, and to purchase print, e-book, and audiobook versions of How to Create a Mind.

Amazon | What is the ultimate destiny of our universe? That is the striking question addressed by James Gardner in The Intelligent Universe.

Traditionally, scientists (and Robert Frost) have offered two bleak answers to this profound issue: fire or ice.

The cosmos might end in fire — a cataclysmic Big Crunch in which galaxies, planets, and life forms are consumed in a raging inferno as the universe contracts in a kind of Big Bang in reverse.

Or the universe might end in ice — a ceaseless expansion of the fabric of space-time in which matter and energy are eternally diluted and cooled; stars wither and die, and the cosmos simply fade into quiet and endless oblivion.

In The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner envisions a third dramatic alternative — a final state of the cosmos in which a highly evolved form of group intelligence engineers a cosmic renewal, the birth of a new universe.

Gardner’s vision is that life and intelligence are at the very heart of the elegant machinery of the universe. It is a viewpoint that has won outspoken praise from an array of leading scientists, including Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, and Templeton Prize winner Paul Davies.

The Intelligent Universe is both a look into the past and a road map for the future of the universe. It explores the mysteries of the universe and of consciousness, and provides a frank and fascinating look at where our minds are taking us.

Is all this longing for immortality driven by an obsession with youth or a fear of death? Readers can judge for themselves, as both Kurzweil and Grossman reveal the personal histories that led them to develop this plan. Fantastic Voyage is written in an easy-to-understand tone, with lots of sidebars giving examples of what the future holds for medicine and health.

Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace.

Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the “Law of Time and Chaos,” and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously.

This means that we’d better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible — they’ll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality.

Lavishly illustrated and easily accessible to the nonspecialist, The Age of Intelligent Machines provides the background needed for a full understanding of the enormous scientific potential represented by intelligent machines and of their equally profound philosophic, economic, and social implications. It examines the history of efforts to understand human intelligence and to emulate it by building devices that seem to act with human capabilities.

In a sweeping approach reflective of his intimate knowledge of the subject, Kurzweil systematically builds on the great landmarks of human intellect. He weaves together the singular achievements of such major thinkers as Plato, Euclid, Newton, Babbage, Einstein, von Neumann, and Wittgenstein to provide an orderly and comprehensive understanding of the impact intelligent machines will have on the world as it enters the third millenium.

Running alongside Kurzweil’s historical and scientific narrative, are 23 articles examining contemporary issues in artificial intelligence by such luminaries as Daniel Dennett, Sherry Turkle, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Edward Feigenbaum, Allen Newell, and George Gilder.

In 2004, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D., published Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Their groundbreaking book marshaled thousands of scientific studies to make the case that new developments in medicine and technology will allow us to radically extend our life expectancies and slow down the aging process. Soon, our notion of what it means to be a 55-year-old will be as outdated as an eight-track tape player.

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever presents a practical, enjoyable program so that readers can live long enough (and remain healthy long enough) to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace during the years ahead. To help readers remember the nine key components of the program, Ray and Terry have arranged them into a mnemonic:

Talk with your doctor, Relaxation, Assessment, Nutrition Supplementation, Calorie Reduction, Exercise, New technologies, Detoxification

This easy-to-follow program will help readers transcend the boundaries of our genetic legacy and live long enough to live forever.

Related:
Transcend official website featuring custom health questionnaire
Transcend book site from Rodale

In The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil postulates that we are already in the very early stages of this transition, and that within just a few decades, life as we know it will be completely different. As Kurzweil explains, “The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine nor between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”

For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he presented the daring argument that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, computers would rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now, in The Singularity Is Near, he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations.

That merging is the essence of the Singularity, an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near maintains a radically optimistic view of the future course of human development. As such, it offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

Hardcover: 672 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult (September 22, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN: 0670033847

In this debate with his critics, including several Discovery Institute fellows, Kurzweil defends his views and sets the stage for the central question: “What does it mean to be human?”