Nanotechnology: What Will It Mean?
April 27, 2001 by Ralph C. Merkle
Ralph C. Merkle weighs in on the debate about the future of nanotechnology, considering its possible uses and abuses.… read more
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National Gallery for America’s Young Inventors: Brochure Statement
September 22, 2002
On Sept. 21, 2002, Ray Kurzweil presented an award to Ezra Rapoport at the National Gallery for America’s Young Inventors ceremony. Rapoport, an 18-year-old inventor and part-time employee of KurzweilAI.net, was recognized for his invention of a speech-compression method that transmits speech clearly and reliably over phone lines using only 3 Kbps, allowing for 20 conversations over a single phone line.… read more
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
Natural Born Cyborgs
August 3, 2001 by Andy Clark
For Andy Clark, the ancient fortress of skin and skull has been breached: as we understand more and more how the brain works, the brains we craft in the future will be extensions of our own. Mindware upgrades and other cognitive upheavals coming soon…… read more
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
On genes, memes, bemes, and conscious things
July 4, 2010 by Martine Rothblatt
As human memory, personality, values, and other attributes are increasingly being captured in cybernetic form, they are becoming virtual entities of their own. These “bemes” — units of beingness — are analogous to memes (culturally transmissible ideas) and genes, but go far beyond them. Common sets of bemes will lead to a new “Beme Neural Architecture” (BNA), analogous to DNA. But while DNA expresses matter in a limited way, substrate-independent… read more
On the Search for the Neural Correlate of Consciousness
June 26, 2002 by David Chalmers
There’s a variety of proposed neural systems associated with conscious experience, but no way to directly observe or measure consciousness. Chalmers suggests though that there may be a “consciousness module” — a functional area responsible for the integration of information in the brain, with high-bandwidth communication between its parts.… read more
Online Chat with Ray Kurzweil and European Schoolnet
November 9, 2005 by Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil introduced 300 secondary-school students across Europe to robotics and AI in an interactive Internet chat set up by Xplora, the European gateway to science education.… read more
Openness and the Metaverse Singularity
November 7, 2007 by Jamais Cascio
The four worlds of the Metaverse Roadmap could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. But they also represent potential dangers. An “open-access Singularity” may be the answer. The people who have embraced the possibility of a singularity should be working at least as hard on making possible a global inclusion of interests as they do on making the singularity itself happen, says Jamais Cascio.… read more
Our Bodies, Our Technologies: Ray Kurzweil’s Cambridge Forum Lecture (Abridged)
March 16, 2006 by Ray Kurzweil
In the 2020s, we’ll see nanobots, blood-cell-sized devices that can go inside the body and brain to perform therapeutic functions. But what happens when we have billions of nanobots inside the capillaries of our brains, non-invasively, widely distributed, expanding human intelligence, or providing full-immersion virtual reality?… read more
Parallel universes, the Matrix, and superintelligence
June 26, 2003 by Michio Kaku
Physicists are converging on a “theory of everything,” probing the 11th dimension, developing computers for the next generation of robots, and speculating about civilizations millions of years ahead of ours, says Dr. Michio Kaku, author of the best-sellers Hyperspace and Visions and co-founder of String Field Theory, in this interview by KurzweilAI.net Editor Amara D. Angelica.… read more
Pattern survival versus gene survival
February 11, 2011 by Randal A. Koene
I decided to write this article after I found that many colleagues and participants whom I spoke with at the recent Humanity+ (ref. R.A. Koene, 2010b) and Transvision (ref. R.A. Koene, 2010a) conferences were struggling with personal and strategic decisions when they considered what sort of future to strive for.
We are hampered by a historical dearth of attention to the very fundamentals that could support… read more
Personal Fabrication
October 31, 2003 by Neil Gershenfeld
The next big thing in computers will be personal fabrication: allowing anyone to make fully functioning systems — with print semiconductors for logic, inks for displays, three-dimensional mechanical structures, motors, sensors, and actuators. Post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming. For a few thousand dollars, a little tabletop milling machine can measure its position down to microns, so you can fabricate the structures of modern technology, such as circuit boards.… read more