The Economics of Innovation
August 6, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
An examination of the changing nature of wealth, written for “The Futurecast,” a monthly column in the Library Journal.… read more
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What does it mean to have an educated mind in the 21st century?
January 21, 2002 by Roger Schank
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.” Roger Schank asks: what is an educated mind in the 21st Century?… read more
Microbivores: Artificial Mechanical Phagocytes
April 11, 2002 by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
Nanorobotic “microbivores” traveling in the bloodstream could be 1000 times faster-acting than white blood cells and eradicate 1000 times more bacteria, offering a complete antimicrobial therapy without increasing the risk of sepsis or septic shock (as in traditional antibiotic regimens) and without release of biologically active effluents. They could also quickly rid the blood of nonbacterial pathogens such as viruses, fungus cells, or parasites.… 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
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
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
It’s a Small, Small, Small, Small World
April 5, 2001 by Ralph C. Merkle
This introduction to nanotechnology by one of its pioneers is an extended version of the article published in the Feb/Mar 1997 issue of MIT Technology Review. It provides greater technical detail.… read more
Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards
May 29, 2001 by Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom defines a new category of risks that could threaten humanity and intelligent life with extinction: existential risks. The future could be a dangerous place indeed.… 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
Beyond 2001: HAL’s Legacy for the Enterprise Generation
August 10, 2001 by Frank Schirrmacher
Bill Joy and Robert Freitas debate the perils of a technology that, in the words of the author, is so far in the future that even the word infancy would be premature. But does science fiction indeed shape the future?… read more
The Central Metaphor of Everything?
December 4, 2001 by Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier’s Edge article takes a skeptical look at Moore’s Law and its application to trends outside of computer hardware. Will computers become smarter than us in twenty years? Is the computational metaphor actually impeding progress?… read more
Bob Moog, Interviewed by Electronicmusic.com
January 29, 2002 by Paul Clark, Robert Moog
Electronicmusic.com talks with synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog about how he radically changed the way music is made, and the tools he used to do it.… read more
A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition
June 4, 2002 by David Chalmers
Computation is central to the foundations of modern cognitive science, but its role is controversial. Questions about computation abound: What is it for a physical system to implement a computation? Is computation sufficient for thought? What is the role of computation in a theory of cognition? What is the relation between different sorts of computational theory, such as connectionism and symbolic computation? This article develops a systematic framework that addresses all of these questions. A careful analysis of computation and its relation to cognition suggests that the ambitions of artificial intelligence and the centrality of computation in cognitive science are justified.… read more
The Cyclic Universe
January 22, 2003 by Paul J. Steinhardt
Is the universe expanding indefinitely–the Big Bang model–or does it go through cycles of expansion and contraction? Paul Steinhardt, who is Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University and on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, suggests a cyclic model that could successfully compete with the Big Bang model.… read more