Alexander Zaitchik in The New Republic:
In the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke was the face of futurism. A deep-sea explorer, inventor, and science-fiction author, Clarke dazzled Anglophone audiences with visions of global computer and satellite networks, space travel, and artificial intelligence. Against his boundless technological optimism, the Cold War could appear but a blip. This sleight of exuberance drove interest in his Wellsian articles and essays, collected in 1962’s Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible. The adages that anchor that book—“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—appeared just as a 14-year old prodigy named Ray Kurzweil was teaching himself to build computers in his family home in Queens, New York. Six decades later, Kurzweil still quotes Profiles of the Future in his lectures and writing. And when it comes to understanding Kurzweil’s signature idea—the merging of human and artificial intelligence that he calls the Singularity—it’s useful to look at the screenplay Clarke wrote with Stanley Kubrick a few years later.
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