A Scientist Says Humans Will Reach The Singularity Within 20 Years

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Futurists have long debated the arrival of the singularity, when human and artificial intelligence will merge, a concept borrowed from the world of quantum physics.
• American computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil has long argued that the singularity would likely occur around the middle of the 21st century, and with the rise of AI, his predictions are gaining more credence.In his book, The Singularity is Nearer, Kurzweil doubles down on those predictions and details how humanity’s intelligence will increase a millionfold via nanobots (among other things).You don’t exactly become a world-renowned futurist by making safe predictions. And while some of these past predictions haven’t exactly come to pass (Back to the Future Part II, specifically), these ideas help expand our thoughts on what exactly the future might look like.

And no one makes futuristic predictions quite like Ray Kurzweil.

An American computer scientist-turned-futurist, Kurzweil that humanity is headed toward what’s known as “the singularity,” when man and machine merge. In 1999, Kurzweil theorized that artificial general intelligence would be achieved once humanity could achieve a technology capable of a trillion calculations per second, which he pegged to occur in 2029.

Experts at the time scoffed at the idea, figuring it’d be at least a century or more, but with Kurzweil’s timeline only a few years off—and talk of AGI spreading—that decades-old prediction is beginning to loom large.