Browsing my usual haunts, I notice they are websites where I can read text. Everybody else is watching videos. Text is so Boomer.

     I have to get over my belief that text = language. Text is a subset of language. In China, people speak dozens of different languages but they can all read the same text. Chinese text uses ideograms, not phonics.

     AI tells me that China enjoys a 97% literacy rate compared to 99% for the USA. To be literate in Chinese one must know 2,000 characters, compared to 26 letters in English.

     With AI in the loop, nobody needs text. Or rather, they can let AI absorb the text and give an oral summary.

     The other day I was musing about the anthropological history of human speech–fossil evidence of the evolution of lung and larynx and tongue and the location of the hyoid bone and the musculature requirements for vocalization. But how about birds? Instead of a larynx they use a syrinx, which acts more like a loudspeaker’s diaphragm, able to reproduce any sound.

     I suppose it’s just another example of the idiosyncrasy of human language. Birds can reproduce the sounds of human language and have their own complex audio communications systems, but over the last 100 million years they’ve never developed a symbolic version.

     Dogs can understand the Neanderthal version of language. A dog named Chaser holds the canine record of 1,022 names of objects recognized.

     Yeah, I talked about that in my Workshop piece, “The Singularity.”

     Maybe I should try again to read THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER (2024). I haven’t seen much of anything by Ray Kurzweil since he was swallowed by Google a dozen years ago. He published a tedious sci-fi novel in 2019.

     NEARER is mostly about patting himself on the back for all the accurate predictions in THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR (2005). It does not look ahead.

     Well, that’s what I remember. Maybe I should try it again now that AI is such a huge alteration in the mediasphere. Looks like AI is expanding even faster than Kurzweil predicted.

     I don’t know who the new predictors are. Kurzweil is 78 years old now and is battling diabetes and heart disease. AI Overview tells me he continues “active media appearances and writing, predicting widespread biotechnology breakthroughs over the next decade.” This sentence has a link to a page from November 2020 which contains a video about health transformation, except it’s a black box, VIDEO NOT FOUND.

     It seems likely that Kurzweil has run out of gas. His Wiki page shows various awards he’s won since joining Google but hardly any evidence of publications or media appearances. The Kurzweil Newsletter hasn’t published an issue since January 2025.