BOOK REVIEW

The Singularity Is Nearer

Published NOV 26 2025

REVIEW

Above: Ray Kurzweil at SXSW 2024's "The Singularity Is Nearer" session in Austin, Texas on Mar. 10, 2024. Image credit: Diego Donamaria/SXSW Conference & Festivals/Getty Images

The Spin

Techno-optimist narrative

Kurzweil’s "The Singularity Is Nearer" isn’t speculation — it’s a roadmap backed by decades of predictive success. With a track record unmatched in tech forecasting, Kurzweil shows how exponential growth in AI, biotech, and nanotech will end disease, aging, and scarcity — not by replacing us, but by amplifying our intelligence to solve humanity’s greatest challenges, including the very risks posed by AI. Brain-cloud integration and digital immortality mark humanity’s evolutionary leap — and Kurzweil makes a compelling, evidence-backed case that it’s already underway.

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Techno-skeptic narrative

Kurzweil’s "The Singularity Is Nearer" conveys a vision of the future that reduces humanity to an engineering problem, collapsing ethics, politics, and personhood into code. His sleek forecasts ignore the real barriers to progress — from institutional inertia to deep-rooted inequality — and assume that faster tech automatically means better lives. By treating human consciousness as something to be enhanced rather than understood, he offers a future that’s frictionless, bloodless, and ultimately inhuman.

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Cynical narrative

Kurzweil’s "The Singularity Is Nearer" is a classic example of the Ptolemy Principle — assuming we stand at the center of history’s grandest transformation. He overlooks hard physical limits like quantum and thermodynamic barriers, the nonlinearity of history, and the exponential rise of ethical risks such as AI safety and loss of human control. While Kurzweil is undeniably a brilliant thinker, his confident forecasts overlook the unpredictability of progress and the profound risks ahead — revealing more about human hubris than about the future itself.

by Michael Shermer

Narrative D

Kurzweil’s "The Singularity Is Nearer" is driven by an almost desperate fixation on defeating death. His vision of nanobots curing aging and uploading consciousness promises immortality, but this obsession — fueled by a quasi-religious faith in technology’s redemptive power — blinds him to broader social realities and scientific limits. He casually dismisses economic stagnation and ethical risks, assuming exponential tech progress will solve all problems. While inspiring, his near-fanatical hope for eternal life risks veering into naive techno-utopianism.

Cybernews