The jewels in his soothsaying crown include: divining the fall of the Soviet Union, calling the defeat of the first chess Grandmaster by a computer and foreseeing the explosion of the Internet. But Kurzweil had exhibited an uncanny knack for predicting our seemingly uncertain future.
Death itself? A trifle.įrom almost anyone else, these predictions would have sounded insane. Kurzweil, the inventor, futurist and current Director of Engineering at Google, was telling me what I wanted to hear: all the biggest and woolliest of the world’s problems were easily solvable, and all we had to do was wait for the swiftly approaching technological revolution. When I first picked up Ray Kurzweil’s dazzling, utopian book The Singularity is Near (2005), some six years after its publication, I ripped through it at a breakneck pace, riveted by the unfurling of fantastical technological prognostications that seemed beamed in from science fiction. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 2005. Part of frieze magazine’s 200th issue.
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