An explanation of rules behind the Turing Test, used to determine the winner of a long bet between Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor over whether artificial intelligence will be achieved by 2029.… read more
Bill Joy wrote a controversial article in Wired advocating “relinquishment” of research on self-replicating technologies, such as nanobots. In this rebuttal, originally published in Interactive Week, Ray Kurzweil argues that these developments are inevitable and advocates ethical guidelines and responsible oversight.… read more
The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, published from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven topic areas (such as “How to Build a Brain”), cover subjects… read more
As technology accelerates over the next few decades and machines achieve superintelligence, we will encounter a dramatic phase transition: the “Singularity.” Will it be a “wall” (a barrier as conceptually impenetrable as the event horizon of a black hole in space), an “AI-Singularity” ruled by super-intelligent AIs, or a gentler “surge” into a posthuman era of agelessness and super-intelligence? Will this meme be hijacked by religious “passive singularitarians” obsessed with a future rapture? Ray Kurzweil and Extropy Institute president Max More debate.… read more
Ray Kurzweil addresses questions presented at Are We Becoming an Endangered Species? Technology and Ethics in the 21st Century, a conference on technology and ethics sponsored by Washington National Cathedral. Other panelists are Anne Foerst, Bill Joy and Bill Mckibben.… read more
Machine consciousness is the subject of this dialog with Darwin Magazine.… read more
Ray Kurzweil ponders the issues of identity and consciousness in an age when we can make digital copies of ourselves.… read more
Raymond Kurzweil’s keynote address delivered at the 2000 ACM SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans.… read more
Cloning is an extremely important technology–not for cloning humans but for life extension: therapeutic cloning of one’s own organs, creating new tissues to replace defective tissues or organs, or replacing one’s organs and tissues with their “young” telomere-extended replacements without surgery. Cloning even offers a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat without animals.… read more
At the Foresight Institute “Exploring the Edges” Senior Associate Gathering, April 27, 2002, Ray Kurzweil presented the case of the emergence of biological and machine intelligence, answering the three major challenges: limited resources, inadequate software, and ethical concerns. Here are the presentation slides and audio.… read more
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
The androids and other intelligent machines in “A.I.” represent well-grounded science futurism, says AI pioneer Raymond Kurzweil.… read more