Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Prologue: The Power of Ideas 
1.
My mother is a talented artist specializing in watercolor paintings. My father was a noted musician, conductor 
of the Bell Symphony, founder and former chairman of the Queensborough College Music Department. 
2.
The Tom Swift Jr. series, which was launched in 1954 by Grosset and Dunlap and written by a series of 
authors under the pseudonym Victor Appleton, continued until 1971. The teenage Tom Swift, along with his 
pal Bud Barclay, raced around the universe exploring strange places, conquering bad guys, and using exotic 
gadgets such as house-sized spacecraft, a space station, a flying lab, a cycloplane, an electric hydrolung, a 
diving seacopter, and a repellatron (which repelled things; underwater, for example, it would repel water, thus 
forming a bubble in which the boys could live). 
The first nine books in the series are 
Tom Swift and His Flying Lab
(1954), 
Tom Swift and His Jetmarine
(1954), 
Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship 
(1954), 
Tom Swift and His Giant Robot 
(1954), 
Tom Swift and His 
Atomic Earth Blaster 
(1954), 
Tom Swift and His Outpost in Space 
(1955), 
Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter 
(1956), 
Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire 
(1956), 
and Tom Swift on the Phantom Satellite 
(1956). 
3.
The program was called Select. Students filled out a three-hundred-item questionnaire. The computer software, 
which contained a database of about two million pieces of information on three thousand colleges, selected six 
to fifteen schools that matched the student's interests, background, and academic standing. We processed about 
ten thousand students on our own and then sold the program to the publishing company Harcourt, Brace, and 
World. 
4.
The Age of Intelligent Machines
, published in 1990 by MIT Press, was named Best Computer Science Book by 
the Association of American Publishers. The book explores the development of artificial intelligence and 
predicts a range of philosophic, social, and economic impacts of intelligent machines. The narrative is 
complemented by twenty-three articles on AI from thinkers such as Sherry Turkle, Douglas Hofstadter, 
Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, and George Gilder. For the entire text of the book, see 
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/aim. 
5.
Key measures of capability (such as price-performance, bandwidth, and capacity) increase by multiples (that 
is, the measures are multiplied by a factor for each increment of time) rather than being added to linearly. 
6.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, 
Gödel; Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid 
(New York: Basic Books, 1979).