This week, Kevin Kelly is reviewing his favorite recent books. So far he has posted reviews of The Search (by our own John Battelle) and Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, by Edward Castronova. Kevin sent out his review of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil in his most recent Cool Tools newsletter; look for it on the Cool Tools blog later this week.
This book offers three things that will make it a seminal document. 1) It brokers a new idea, not widely known. 2) The idea is about as big as you can get: the Singularity — all the change in the last millions years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes, and 3) It is an idea that demands informed response. The book's claims are so footnoted, documented, graphed, argued, and plausible in small detail, that it requires the equal in response. Yet its claims are so outrageous that if true, it would mean… well … the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of Utopia. Ray Kurzweil has taken all the strands of the Singularity meme circulating in the last decades and has united them into a single tome which he has nailed on our front door. I suspect this will be one of the most cited books of the decade. Like Paul Erlich's upsetting 1972 book Population Bomb, fan or foe, it's the wave at epicenter you have to start with.
Reader comment: Pete says: "Ray Kurzweil was a guest blogger over on my friend Non-Prophet's (nprophet.com) blog about a week ago, and talked about his book, 'The Singularity.' The post, a self-interview, is a somewhat long but good read."
