Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsToo short, and missing important information
Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2024
While the original ”The singularity is near” was overly long and repetitive, this book is the opposite. It’s short (more than half the book is a list of references) and there is very little new information - much of the book is just repetition of content in the original book. Kurzweil also spends far too much time summarizing Stephen Pinker’s 2018 book ”Enlightenment Now”. If you’ve read ”The singularity is near” and ”Enlightenment now” then there is very little new information for you in this book.
Additionally, there are key things missing. Firstly, Kurzweil doesn’t actually explain how he arrives at many of his predictions, such as that the singularity will happen around 2045. There are lots of charts showing that things are getting better and better, but there is no explanation of the dates chosen for the most important predictions in the book.
Secondly, he doesn’t discuss the many incorrect predictions he made in ”The singularity is near”, like his prediction that fully immersive virtual reality would be widely available and widely used in the second decade of the twenty first century, and his predictions that people would by now have nanobots in their clothes, furniture, and blood streams. I would have liked to see some humility concerning earlier incorrect predictions and a discussion of why he thinks these things didn’t happen as predicted.