May the Smartest Machine Win: Warfare in the 21st Century
August 6, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
How technology is changing the ways in which wars are fought, written for “The Futurecast,” a monthly column in the Library Journal.… read more
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Bill Clinton Calls Many Political Leaders Out of Touch with the Acceleration of Technology at Fortune Summit
August 3, 2001 by Amara D. Angelica
Bill Clinton calls many political leaders out of touch with the acceleration of technology, recommends Non Zero by Robert Wright and The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil.… read more
The End Of Time: A Talk With Julian Barbour
August 3, 2001 by Julian Barbour
In this talk with the Edge’s John Brockman, Julian Barbour takes on the absolute framework of time. And if time truly doesn’t exist, could we, hypothetically, live forever?… 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
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
How Fast, How Small and How Powerful? Moore’s Law and the Ultimate Laptop
August 2, 2001 by Seth Lloyd
A laptop that looks like a thermonuclear explosion inside of a liter bottle of coca cola? Or a black hole? Read Seth Lloyd’s follow up to a Nature article that pushes Moore’s Law to the limit.… read more
Consciousness is a Big Suitcase
August 2, 2001 by Marvin Minsky
Is consciousness reducible to a set of mechanisms in the brain acting in concert? In this discussion with the Edge’s John Brockman, Marvin Minsky peers into the suitcase of the mind.… read more
The Singularity Is Near – Ray Kurzweil at Extro5 (Video)
July 30, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil presents his law of accelerating returns at EXTRO-5.… read more
Postscript Re: Ray Kurzweil
July 30, 2001 by Jaron Lanier
This postscript to his One Half of a Manifesto is a further discussion and criticism of exponential trends. Do these trends exist as predictive models, or are we playing connect-the-dots based upon an arbitrary selection of milestones and paradigm shifts?… read more
Excerpts from “One Half of a Manifesto”
July 30, 2001 by Jaron Lanier
Does the optimism of technologists blur the question of quantitative improvements in hardware versus a lack of qualititative improvements in software? Do they point the way towards an eschatological cataclysm in which doom is imminent?… read more
Seeing Through the Window
July 27, 2001 by Neil Gershenfeld
What form will new human/computer interfaces take? Neil Gershenfeld discusses the past, present and future of how we interact with computers.… read more
Discovery Today Discussion of Machine Consciousness
July 26, 2001 by Discovery Today, Hugo de Garis
Hugo de Garis, brain builder, feels the weight of a future conflict between humans and the artificially intelligent beings they have created. Sir Roger Penrose is skeptical, and Robert Llewellyn is curious. See a discussion between the three.… read more
Excerpts from The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies
July 26, 2001 by Damien Broderick
Damien Broderick takes us to the edge of a technological Singularity, where the Internet reaches critical mass of interconnectivity and “wakes up,” and mountain ranges may mysteriously appear out of nowhere. Then again, is the rampant techno-optimism surrounding the imminent Singularity just exponential bogosity?… read more
How have advances in electronic communications changed power relationships? The toppling of a government provides one not-so-subtle example. Ray Kurzweil talks about those advances in this forward to The Eternal E-Customer, a book that looks at the principles companies must adopt to meet the needs and desires of this new kind of customer.… read more