The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

Imagining a world where humans are largely in competition with AI-powered machines is the wrong way of thinking about the future. To illustrate this, imagine a time traveler with a 2024 smartphone going back to 1924.[166] This person’s intelligence would seem truly superhuman to the people of Calvin Coolidge’s day. They could do advanced math effortlessly, translate any major language passably well, play chess better than any grandmaster, and command a whole Wikipedia’s worth of facts. To the people of 1924, it would seem obvious that the time traveler’s capabilities were radically enhanced by the phone. But to us in the 2020s it’s easy to lose this perspective. We don’t feel augmented. In a similar way, we will harness the advances of 2030 and 2040 to seamlessly augment our own capabilities—and this will feel even more natural as our brains interface directly with computers.