Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

gravicembalo cal piano e forte
("harpsichord with soft and loud"), his invention was not an 
immediate success. Further refinements, including Stein's Viennese action and Zumpe's English action, 
helped to establish the "piano" as the preeminent keyboard instrument. It reached maturity with the 
development of the complete cast-iron frame, patented in 1825 by Alpheus Babcock, and has seen only 
subtle refinements since then. The false pretender was the electric piano of the early 1980s. It offered 
substantially greater functionality. Compared to the single (piano) sound of the acoustic piano, the electronic 
variant offered dozens of instrument sounds, sequencers that allowed the user to play an entire orchestra at 
once, automated accompaniment, education program to teach keyboard skills, and many other features. 
The only feature it was missing was a good-quality piano sound. 
This crucial flaw and the resulting failure of the first generation of electronic pianos led to the 
widespread conclusion that the piano would never be replaced by electronics. But the "victory" of the 
acoustic piano will not be permanent. With their far greater range of features and price-performance, digital 
pianos already exceed sales of acoustic pianos in homes. Many observers feel that the quality of the "piano" 
sound on digital pianos now equals or exceeds that of the upright acoustic piano. With the exception of 
concert and luxury grand pianos (a small part of the market), the sale of acoustic pianos is in decline. 
From Goat Skins to Downloads 
So where in the technology life cycle is the book? Among its precursors were Mesopotamian clay tablets 
and Egyptian papyrus scrolls. In the second century B.C., the Ptolemies of Egypt created a great library of 
scrolls at Alexandria and outlawed the export of papyrus to discourage competition. 
What were perhaps the first books were created by Eumenes II, ruler of ancient Greek Perganum, using 
pages of vellum made from the skins of goats and sheep, which were sewn together between wooden 
covers. This technique enabled Eumenes to compile a library equal to that of Alexandria. Around the same 
time, the Chinese has also developed a crude form of book made from bamboo strips. 
The development and maturation of books has involved three great advances. Printing, first 
experimented with by the Chinese in the eight century A.D. using raised wood blocks, allowed books to be 
reproduced in much larger quantities, expanding their audience beyond government and religious leaders. 
Of even greater significance was the advent of movable type, which the Chinese and Koreans experimented 

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with by the eleventh century, but the complexity of Asian characters prevented these early attempts from 
being fully successful. Johannes Gutenberg working in the fifteenth century, benefited from the relative 
simplicity of the Roman character set. He produced his Bible, the first large-scale work printed entirely with 
movable type, in 1455. 
While there has been a continual stream of evolutionary improvements in the mechanical and 
electromechanical process of printing, the technology of bookmaking did not see another qualitative leap 
until the availability of computer typesetting, which did away with movable type about two decades ago. 
Typography is now regarded as a part of digital image processing. 
With books a fully mature technology, the false pretenders arrived about twenty years ago with the first 
wave of "electronic books." As is usually the case, these false pretenders offered dramatic qualitative and 
quantitative benefits. CD-ROM- or flash memory-based electronic books can provide the equivalent of 
thousands of books with powerful computer-based search and knowledge navigation features. With Web- or 
CD-ROM- and DVD-based encyclopedias, I can perform rapid word searches using extensive logic rules, 
something is just not possible with the thirty-three-volume "book" version I possess. Electronic books can 
provide pictures that are animated and that respond to our input. Pages are not necessarily ordered 
sequentially but can be explored along more intuitive connections. 
As with the phonograph record and the piano, this first generation of false pretenders was (and still is) 
missing an essential quality of the original, which in this case is the superb visual characteristics of paper 
and ink. Paper does not flicker, whereas the typical computer screen is displaying sixty or more fields per 
second. This is a problem because of an evolutionary adaptation of the primate visual system. We are able 
to see only a very small portion of the visual field with high resolution. This portion, imaged by the fovea in 
the retina, is focused on an area about the size of a single word at twenty-two inches away. Outside of the 
fovea, we have very little resolution but exquisite sensitivity to changes in brightness, an ability that allowed 
our primate forebears to quickly detect a predator that might be attacking. The constant flicker of a video 
graphics array (VGA) computer screen is detected by our eyes as motion and causes constant movement of 
the fovea. This substantially slows down reading speeds. which is one reason that reading on a screen is 
less pleasant than reading a printed book. This particular issue has been solved with flat-panel displays, 
which do not flicker. 
Other crucial issues include contrast—a good-quality book has an ink-to-paper contrast of about 120:1; 
typical screens are perhaps half of that—and resolution. Print and illustrations in a book represent a 
resolution of about 600 to 1000 dots per inch (dpi), while computer screens are about one tenth of that. 
The size and weight of computerized devices are approaching those of books, but the devices are still 
heavier than a paperback book. Paper books also do not run out of battery power. 
Most important, there is the matter of the available software, by which I mean the enormous installed 
base of printed books. Fifty thousand new print books are published each year in the United States, and 
millions of books are already in circulation. There are major efforts under way to scan and digitize print 
materials, but it will be a long time before the electronic databases have a comparable wealth of material. 
The biggest obstacle here is the understandable hesitation of publishers to make the electronic versions of 
their books available, given the devastating effect that illegal file sharing has had on the music-recording 
industry. 
Solutions are emerging to each of these limitations. New, inexpensive display technologies have 
contrast, resolution, lack of flicker, and viewing and comparable to high-quality paper documents. Fuel-cell 
power for portable electronics is being introduced, which will keep electronic devices powered for hundreds 
of hours between fuel-cartridge changes. Portable electronic devices are already comparable to the size and 
weight of a book. The primary issue is going to be finding secure means of making electronic information 
available. This is a fundamental concern for every level of our economy. Everything—including physical 
products, once nanotechnology-based manufacturing becomes a reality in about twenty years—is becoming 
information. 

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