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
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Will My PC Be Smarter Than I Am?
November 9, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
Once we learn how to map the brain and make computers fast enough to simulate it, all bets are off.… read more
Why Sleep?
January 21, 2002 by Terrence Sejnowski
The 5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge motto: “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” Terrence Sejnowski asks: why sleep?… read more
How Can We Possibly Tell If It’s Conscious?
April 18, 2002 by Ray Kurzweil
At the Tucson 2002: Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, Ray Kurzweil addressed the question of how to tell if something is conscious. He proposed two thought experiments.… read more
Deep Fritz Draws: Are Humans Getting Smarter, or Are Computers Getting Stupider?
October 20, 2002 by Ray Kurzweil
The Deep Fritz computer chess software only achieved a draw in its recent chess tournament with Vladimir Kramnik because it has available only about 1.3% as much brute force computation as the earlier Deep Blue’s specialized hardware. Despite that, it plays chess at about the same level because of its superior pattern recognition-based pruning algorithm. In six years, a program like Deep Fritz will again achieve Deep Blue’s ability to analyze 200 million board positions per second. Deep Fritz-like chess programs running on ordinary personal computers will routinely defeat all humans later in this decade.… 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
What the Future Will Bring
June 15, 2005 by Ray Kurzweil
“Follow your passion,” Ray Kurzweil advised graduates in a commencement address on May 21 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, one of the nation’s earliest technological universities. “Creating knowledge is what will be most exciting in life. To create knowledge you have to have passion, so find a challenge that you can be passionate about and you can find the ideas to overcome that challenge.” Kurzweil also described the three great coming revolutions-genetics, nanotechnology and robotics-and their implications for our lives ahead.… read more
Human Cloning is the Least of It
February 21, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
In this message posted to the WIRED Future List, Raymond Kurzweil asserts that cloning–replicating animals, organs, and cells–has profound implications for health and well-being of both humans and animals, including a possible solution for world hunger. He also sees no problem with human cloning.… read more
The Story of the 21st Century
May 31, 2001 by Rebecca Zacks
Raymond Kurzweil created a hubbub with his idea that we will soon be able to “download” ourselves into machines and live forever. Find out what else he’s got up his futuristic sleeve.… 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
Man-Computer Symbiosis
December 11, 2001 by J.C.R. Licklider
Written in 1960, this essay foresaw the growing dependence upon computers for more and more intelligent functions, and an age of human/computer interdependence in which the distinction between the two becomes increasingly blurred.… read more
Rethinking Operating Systems
February 11, 2002 by Bob Frankston
We know hardware has become exponentially faster, cheaper and smaller since the advent of the operating system, yet the interface hasn’t changed much. In this draft of an essay, Bob Frankston proposes a rethink of the assumptions that went into user interface design thirty years ago.… read more
Kurzweil responds to Edge challenge, advises Bush
January 26, 2003 by Ray Kurzweil
In a hypothetical letter to President Bush, Ray Kurzweil advised him to accelerate FDA review of defensive solutions for bioengineered pathogens, fund a crash program for developing promising new methodologies for human somatic cell engineering, and perfect hydrogen fuel cells, which could have major implications for the economy, the environment, and the geopolitics of oil.… read more