Retell, Respond, Relate: Pages 1-100 of The Singularity is Near

This week, I read The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil, and wrote two Read, Retell, and Respond works about it.  You can find them below.

Pages 1-50 of The Singularity is Near:

Retell:  In the first 50 pages of The Singularity is Near, Raymond Kurzweil begins by explaining his back story and how he came to become an inventor and develop his ideas about the Singularity.  He then compares the magic in the book series Harry Potter to how in the future, we will be able to duplicate this.  In the first 50 pages he speaks about how technology is accelerating at an exponential pace, backing up his claims with various graphs showing the current slope of technological growth.  He also outlines the six epochs before we reach The Singularity, where technology becomes more advanced than the human brain.  At that point, technology will expand explosively, eventually allowing us to reach into space.

Respond:  The first 50 pages of this book are dense, I will not deny that it is an extremely dense and a bit dry of a read.  When he explains the Six Epochs, it’s very interesting to see what Kurzweil predicts will occur over the next thirty-some years.  Overall, I think this first part needs to be dry, because it gives the reader a very solid foundation for understanding the rest of his book.

Relate:  I can relate to these first 50 pages because it serves as an introduction to the whole concept of The Singularity.  While it is hard to read, the graphs are easy to understand and his explanations, while long, make logical sense.  I hope that later on, he does not go into the extremely long explanations.  All in all, I liked this part a lot.

Pages 50- 100 of The Singularity is Near:

Retell:  In the second 50 pages of Kurzweil’s book, Kurzweil goes more into the actual data backing up his claims.  Where the first 50 pages he outlines what he’s will speak about, the second 50 pages is where he brings several different graphs full of information into play.  The first of these is a series of graphs where it shows technology doubling in power while halving in price, starting in the 70’s or so and continuing to the time of writing and beyond.  He also shows an immensely interesting graph of how close computers are to having more computing power than the brain by the year 2020, with computers being more powerful than all human brains by the year 2040-2050.

Respond:  These 50 pages are much easier to understand than the first 50, since instead of a wall of text, it is a paragraph or two, backed up by a nice graph which he explains.  I learned a lot from these pages, especially on how, specifically, technology is going to grown in the next few decades.  It’s extremely interesting to see Kurzweil’s predictions about how computers will, within the next 50 years be more powerful than a human brain.

Relate:  These 50 pages are easy to relate to because they show trends that I have already noticed, such as the adoption of the cell phone and of the Internet.  I can also relate to several other graphs inside of this,  such as the halfving of technology price and the doubling of power