George Gilder counters Kurzweil's 2029 human-level AI prediction by arguing that despite exponential computational growth (which Gilder acknowledges), the Singularity has already happened computationally but has 'scarcely impinged' on human nature itself—computation and human consciousness are separate paths.

Gilder objects that Kurzweil's vision implies a singular 'Singularity of Truth' in the cloud, as if intelligence becomes one vast collective unified entity; but human minds are connectomes (estimated at 2 zettabytes to map by MIT researcher Sebastian Song) containing the contents of the entire global internet, suggesting intelligence is distributed and independent across billions of minds.

Ray Kurzweil is currently a principal researcher in AI and AI Visionary at Google.

George Gilder raises a distinction between 'intelligence' (processing information) and 'abstraction' (conceiving, designing, theorizing new things); machines can be made to process information faster and better than humans, but the question remains whether machines can invent, conceptualize, or abstract beyond human capabilities.

Ray Kurzweil and George Gilder both received awards for entrepreneurial Excellence at the White House during the Reagan Administration, and have been close friends ever since, occasionally contending over various issues.

Ray Kurzweil invented the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omnifont optical character recognition machine, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the Kurzweil music synthesizer (capable of recreating the effects of a grand piano so accurately it was tested against a real grand piano).

Ray Kurzweil is a highly accomplished writer, having written bestselling books including 'The Singularity is Near' and 'How to Create a Mind' (both New York Times bestsellers), and also wrote a novel called 'Danielle' which won young adult reading awards.