Progress at light speed

The future isn't just evolving, says Ray Kurzweil - it's exploding. We just can't quite see the pyrotechnics yet. That's because change is happening at an exponential rate.

"Exponential growth looks like nothing is happening, and then suddenly you get this explosion at the end," says Mr. Kurzweil, a prominent inventor, mathematician, and entrepreneur. Evolution has taken millions of years to bring humanity to this point, he says. With the help of technology, the pace of change is about to accelerate at an astonishing rate.

Where humanity will be by midcentury is barely conceivable to us now, he says. Humans will merge with their machines to make quantum leaps in intelligence and abilities. They will vastly improve their bodies using nanotechnology and live extremely long lives - or perhaps abandon their bodies altogether, continuing on indefinitely in a nonbiological form.

Kurzweil lays out these startling conclusions in "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology." It tops the science bestsellers list at Amazon.com.

"The Singularity" refers to a future time (Kurzweil says around 2045) at which technological progress accelerates beyond our current ability to understand it. The concept was popularized more than a decade ago by mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge.

While the Singularity itself may be hard to comprehend, the path to it is clear, Kurzweil says. It's based on decades of research and mathematical modeling. The book is "grounded in science with 2,000 scientific citations," says Kurzweil, an MIT grad with a dozen honorary doctorates and many inventions to his credit, including the first reading machine for the blind. A member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, he's been called "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison."

Kurzweil has won some converts already and hopes his book will persuade many more. "A lot of people, sophisticated scientists included, take a linear perspective," he says. "They assume the current [technological] tools will continue [along with] the current pace of progress." His research with mathematical models shows that the pace of technological change is quickening - radically.

"The common wisdom is that we can't predict the future," he says in an interview at Kurzweil Technologies, one of several companies he has founded. "You cannot predict the future of specific projects - like, 'Will Google's stock be higher or lower three years from today?'... But if you ask me what the price-performance [ratio] of computing will be in 2010 ... [or] what will be the resolution of brain scanning in 2014, I can give you a figure, and it's going to be very accurate."

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