The Silicon Rapture: Close Encounters with Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity

Will our children be 'uploaded' into digital immortality in the next 30 years? Could a rogue artificial intelligence burst into near-omniscience and take over the world?

According to some academics and Silicon Valley visionaries-among them artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer and Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil-the answer is: maybe.

On the heels of the apocalyptic AI film Transcendence, and Stephen Hawking's May 2014 op-ed warning of the dangers of AI, this first release by Nonvella Publishing follows author Adam Pez into the big, weird questions of the Singularity: a predicted and possibly inevitable future when humanity and AI fuse into an entity of godlike proportions.

What is Singularity University, and what is the Machine Intelligence Research Institute? Should we applaud the time and money both are pouring into their respective projects, or should we proclaim "war to the death" against intelligent machines, as Samuel Butler urged us 150 years ago?

In this captivating read Pez introduces the history (and potential future) of AI, meets with the inventor of RoboCup, and sifts visionaries from crackpots on his quest to understand the meaning and likelihood of a 'silicon rapture.'