The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

Remember, though, that technological abundance doesn’t automatically benefit everyone equally at once. For example, in 2022, $1.00 could buy more than 50,000 times as much computing power as it could in 2000 (adjusted for overall inflation).[153] By contrast, according to official statistics, $1.00 in 2022 could buy only about 81 percent of the health care it could buy in 2000 (adjusted for overall inflation).[154] And although some medical treatments, like cancer immunotherapies, got qualitatively better in that time, most health-care expenditures, such as hospital stays and X-rays, remained roughly the same. Thus, people who spend a lot of their money on computers, like students and young people, got a lot of benefit from falling computing prices. Meanwhile, those who spend a big part of their income on health care, like the elderly and those with chronic illnesses, may have even been worse off overall.