Big Think — August 12, 2013 | Nicholas Clairmont

This is a summary. Read original article in full here.

Ray Kurzweil is on a mission. He is famous for, among other things, predicting the technological singularity. The singularity will be achieved at the time when the exponential growth of the power of computers and technology hits such a speed that it fundamentally changes the world, and humans’ role in it.

It is not a prediction of doom, though. Kurzweil predicts that we will be neurologically hooked up to computers in the not too distant future, and that technology will do more good than harm.

The term singularity is a metaphor borrowed from physics. Physics dictates that in a the gravity of a black hole, which also increases exponentially as it is approached, there is a threshold distance away from the center, the Event Horizon, past which nothing can return. […]