In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectually challenging things … for a machine to do.” One month later, Google released an AI program that did exactly what he’d deemed impossible.
It’s easy to chuckle at Poggio, but the pace of technological change nowadays leaves many of us dizzy—and according to Ray Kurzweil’s we ain’t seen nothing yet. This book builds on Kurzweil’s 2005 title, which argued that accelerating advances in computer science
