Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

The Age of Intelligent 
Machines
in the mid-1980s, I was deeply concerned with the ability of then-emerging genetic engineering to enable 
those skilled in the art and with access to fairly widely available equipment to modify bacterial and viral pathogens to 
create new diseases.
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In destructive or merely careless hands these engineered pathogens could potentially combine a 
high degree of communicability, stealthiness, and destructiveness. 
Such efforts were not easy to carry out in the 1980s but were nonetheless feasible. We now know that bioweapons 
programs in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were doing exactly this.
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At the time I made a conscious decision to not 
talk about this specter in my book, feeling that I did not want to give the wrong people any destructive ideas. I didn't 

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want to turn on the radio one day and hear about a disaster, with the perpetrators saying that they got the idea from 
Ray Kurzweil. 
Partly as a result of this decision I faced some reasonable criticism that the book emphasized the benefits of future 
technology while ignoring its pitfalls. When I wrote 
The Age of Spiritual Machines
in 1997–1998, therefore, I 
attempted to account for both promise and peril.
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There had been sufficient public attention by that time (for example, 
the 1995 movie Outbreak, which portrays the terror and panic from the release of a new viral pathogen) that I felt 
comfortable to begin to address the issue publicly. 
In September 1998, having just completed the manuscript, I ran into Bill Joy, an esteemed and longtime colleague 
in the high-technology world, in a bar in Lake Tahoe. Although I had long admired Joy for his work in pioneering the 
leading software language for interactive Web systems (Java) and having cofounded Sun Microsystems, my focus at 
this brief get-together was not on Joy but rather on the third person sitting in our small booth, John Searle. Searle, the 
eminent philosopher from the University of California at Berkeley, had built a career of defending the deep mysteries 
of human consciousness from apparent attack by materialists such as Ray Kurzweil (a characterization I reject in the 
next chapter). 
Searle and I had just finished debating the issue of whether a machine could be conscious during the closing 
session of George Gilder's Telecosm conference. 
The session was entitled "Spiritual Machines" and was devoted to a discussion of the philosophical implications 
of my upcoming book. I had given Joy a preliminary manuscript and tried to bring him up to speed on the debate about 
consciousness that Searle and I were having. 
As it turned out, Joy was interested in a completely different issue, specifically the impending dangers to human 
civilization from three emerging technologies I had presented in the book: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics 
(GNR, as discussed earlier). My discussion of the downsides of future technology alarmed Joy, as he would later relate 
in his now-famous cover story for 
Wired
, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us."
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In the article Joy describes how he 
asked his friends in the scientific and technology community whether the projections I was making were credible and 
was dismayed to discover how close these capabilities were to realization. 
Joy's article focused entirely on the downside scenarios and created a firestorm. Here was one of the technology 
world's leading figures addressing new and dire emerging dangers from future technology. It was reminiscent of the 
attention that George Soros, the currency arbitrageur and archcapitalist, received when he made vaguely critical 
comments about the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, although the Joy controversy became far more intense.