The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

Personal computers started entering American homes during the 1970s, with machines such as the Kenbak-1, and in 1975 the wildly popular Altair 8800, which was sold in build-it-yourself kits.[92] By the end of the decade companies like Apple and Microsoft were transforming the market with user-friendly personal computers that ordinary people could learn to operate in an afternoon.[94] Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial got the whole country talking about computers, and the proportion of US households with a computer nearly doubled within five years of its airing.[95] During that period people mostly used computers for things like word processing, data entry, and simple gaming. But the blossoming of the internet in the 1990s massively expanded the usefulness of computers. In January 1990 there were roughly 175,000 hosts across the internet’s entire Domain Name System.[96] By January 2000 this had soared to around 72,000,000.[97] Likewise, the volume of worldwide internet traffic grew from about 12,000 gigabytes in 1990 to 306,000,000 gigabytes in 1999.[98]