Ray Kurzweil's Four Big Insights for Predicting the Future

Self-driving cars, virtual reality games, bioprinting human organs, human gene editing, AI personalities, 3D printing in space, three billion people connected to the Internet…. To answer some of these questions, our team decided to dig into Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, in which Kurzweil describes the exponential growth of technologies like artificial intelligence, genetics, computers, nanotechnology and robotics. According to Kurzweil, Moore's Law (describing the exponential growth of integrated circuits) is just one example of the law of accelerating returns, but it is perhaps the most powerful. New technology growing exponentially tends to progress deceptively slowly at first, but then its progress shoots upward and very quickly becomes disruptive.