I've been working my way through Ray Kurzweil's new opus, The Singularity is Near, for the past few weeks. It's a stunning, Utopian vision of the near future when machine intelligence outpaces the biological brain and what things may look like when that happens (sometime in the next 30 years according to Kurzweil). I call it Utopian because there are really two fundamental schools of thought about how this inevitability will manifest itself.

The dystopian view, espoused in movies like The Terminator (SkyNet) and The Matrix is clear enough and requires little explanation. Even the first Start Trek movie had a superior machine intelligence complaining about the "carbon units infesting Enterprise".

Ray Kurzweil sees it differently. And, in a brilliant interview conducted by Declan McCullagh on C|Net, the reasons for his optimism and excitement become quite clear. It's a really fine piece of work and should get you motivated to pick up a copy of The Singularity is Near to investigate for yourself.

Like its physical counterpart (a black hole), there is an event horizon in play with this coming singularity. And, like a black hole - it's impossible to see beyond that horizon so some conjecture and educated guesswork is about the best we can do. Kurzweil has spent his incredibly productive career thinking about artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications. When McCullagh asks him, at the end of the interview, if we're not, in fact, hurtling towards a Matrix-type future he replies:

"My view is that we'll learn from this technology. We're already collaborating with our machines. No professional could perform his function without computers. We will literally enhance our own intelligence. It's not going to turn it over to a centralized machine."

There aren't too many books like this… Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science is the last one I can recall that so fundamentally shook my tree. The math in Wolfram's book was terribly daunting. This book is much more approachable and engaging.