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The Physical Constants as Biosignature: An anthropic retrodiction of the Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis

February 28, 2006 by James N. Gardner

Two recent discoveries have imparted a renewed sense of urgency to investigations of the anthropic qualities of our cosmos: the value of dark energy density is exceedingly small but not quite zero; and the number of different solutions permitted by M-theory is, in Susskind’s words, “astronomical, measured not in millions or billions but in googles or googleplexes.”… read more

Topics: Quantum | Singularity/Futures

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Not Your Father’s Internet

February 21, 2001 by Bill Gates

Bill Gates envisions the next-generation Internet as a single, unified interface to information instantly available to you anywhere, any time.… read more

Topics: Singularity/Futures

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Wild Cards: The Nature of Big Future Surprises

March 7, 2001 by John Petersen

In the coming years, the world could experience a series of massively transformative events, or “wild cards,” brought on by radical developments in areas such as AI and nanotechnology. Futurist John Petersen suggests strategies for dealing with them proactively.… read more

Topics: Social Networking/Web/Education | Survival/Defense

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The 21st Century: a Confluence of Accelerating Revolutions

May 15, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil

In this keynote given at the 8th Annual Foresight Conference, Raymond Kurzweil discusses exponential trends in various technologies, and the double-edged sword accelerating technologies represent.… read more

Topics: Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Quantum | Social Networking/Web/Education

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Foreword to ‘Dark Ages II’ (book by Bryan Bergeron)

July 26, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil

Our civilization’s knowledge legacy is at great risk, growing exponentially with the exploding size of our knowledge bases. And that doesn’t count the trillions of bytes of information stored in our brains, which eventually will be captured in the future. How long do we want our lives and thoughts to last?… read more

Topics: Social Networking/Web/Education

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The Age of Knowledge

August 6, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil

An illustration of the second industrial revolution written for “The Futurecast,” a monthly column in the Library Journal… read more

Topics: Innovation/Entrepreneurship

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What is time, and what is the right language to describe change, in a closed system like the universe, which contains all of its observers?

January 21, 2002 by Lee Smolin

Since the observers are inside the universe itself, we must formulate a “background-independent” quantum theory of gravity and cosmology , as well as the notions of time and change, to apply to a system with no fixed background, which contains all its possible observers–perhaps even one in which the laws themselves evolve as the universe does. Lee Smolin responds to Edge publisher/editor John Brockman’s request to futurists to pose “hard-edge” questions that “render visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefine who and what we are.”… read more

Topics: Quantum | Singularity/Futures

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Clottocytes: Artificial Mechanical Platelets

April 12, 2002 by Robert A. Freitas Jr.

Nanorobotic artificial mechanical platelets (“clottocytes”) may allow for complete hemostasis in as little as one second – 100 to 1000 times faster than the natural system and 10,000 times more effective in terms of bloodstream concentration. They could also work internally. Using acoustic pulses, a blood vessel break could be rapidly communicated to neighboring clottocytes, immediately triggering a progressive controlled mesh-release cascade.… read more

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science

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National Inventor Hall of Fame Acceptance Remarks

September 22, 2002 by Ray Kurzweil

The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) inducted Ray Kurzweil on Sept. 21, 2002. Sponsored by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Hewlett-Packard, the ceremony recognized Kurzweil for the Kurzweil Reading Machine and a lifetime of invention, including the first “omni-font” optical character recognition (OCR), the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first full text-to-speech synthesizer, the first realistic-sounding electronic music synthesizer, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.… read more

Topics: Innovation/Entrepreneurship

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Lunch with Mikhail Gorbachev

April 19, 2005 by Ray Kurzweil

With only 53,000 engineering graduates a year compared to Russia’s 200,000, the U.S. needs to “communicate the importance of science in today’s world,” Mikhail Gorbachev told Ray Kurzweil in a luncheon discussion that ranged from blogs to nuclear disarmament and longevity.… read more

Topics: Singularity/Futures

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Nano-Guns, Nano-Germs, and Nano-Steel

March 29, 2006 by Mike Treder

Within our lifetimes, we are likely to witness battles on a scale never before seen. Powered by molecular manufacturing, near-future wars may threaten our freedom, our way of life, and even our survival. Superior military technology allowed the Spanish to conquer the Incan empire in 1532. Could today’s most powerful civilization, the United States, be just as easily conquered by a nano-enabled attacker?… read more

Topics: Survival/Defense

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Global Cyberspace and Personal Memespace

February 21, 2001 by Bruce Damer

Virtual worlds populated by avatars of real people interacting with each other, bots, agents, and exotic life forms: is this the future face of cyberspace?… read more

Topics: Social Networking/Web/Education | VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics

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Life Extension and Overpopulation

April 9, 2001 by Max More

The prospect of life extension raises fears of overpopulation. Extropian Max More argues we should focus on reducing births, not on raising or maintaining death, since population growth and pollution are slowing down (from growing wealth) and in the future we can create new habitats in space.… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Social Networking/Web/Education

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Man and Machine Become One

May 29, 2001 by Otis Port

Raymond Kurzweil spoke with BUSINESS WEEK Senior Writer Otis Port about nanotechnology, which may enable engineers to construct microscopic computers and robots, or nanobots, atom by atom. These machines could dramatically affect the future of human intelligence.… read more

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The Emergent Self

August 3, 2001 by Francesco Varela

The late Francesco Varela postulates that organisms have to be understood as a mesh of virtual selves–a bricolage of various identities. How virtual is the reality we live in, and do various realities emerge from cognitive and biological systems?… read more

Topics: VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics

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