Another Formula for Intelligence: The Neural Net Paradigm
August 6, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
The neural net approach to artificial intelligence explained, written for “The Futurecast,” a monthly column in the Library Journal.… read more
Most Recently Added Most commentedBy Title | A-ZBy Author | Z-A
Are We Becoming an Endangered Species? Technology and Ethics in the Twenty First Century
November 20, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
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
Arguments for a Green AND Gray Future
May 1, 2002 by Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil and Gregory Stock, Director, UCLA Program on Medicine,
Technology and Society, debated “BioFuture vs. MachineFuture” at the Foresight Senior Associate Gathering, April 27, 2002. This is Ray Kurzweil’s presentation.… read more
Dear PC: R.I.P.
February 21, 2001 by Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the post-PC future includes nanobots and fully immersive virtual reality.… 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
Essay collection | The Ray Kurzweil Reader
July 10, 2003 by Ray Kurzweil
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
Essay for E-School News
October 2, 2003 by Ray Kurzweil
Speaking at the 18th Annual Conference on “Technology and Persons with Disabilities” at California State University Northridge in March 2003, Ray Kurzweil described how key developments in science and technology will affect society, alter education and other fields, and benefit everyone, especially those with disabilities. This article is based on that address.… read more
Exponential Growth an Illusion?: Response to Ilkka Tuomi
September 13, 2003 by Ray Kurzweil
)
Ray Kurzweil responds to Ilkka Tuomi’s essays, “The Lives and Death of Moore’s Law” and “Kurzweil, Moore, and Accelerating Change,” in which Tuomi challenges Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns” and the exponential growth of semiconductor technology.… 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
Foreword to Virtual Humans
October 20, 2003 by Ray Kurzweil
By the end of this decade, we will have full-immersion visual-auditory environments, populated by realistic-looking virtual humans. These technologies are evolving today at an accelerating pace, as reflected in the book Virtual Humans. By the 2030s, virtual reality will be totally realistic and compelling and we will spend most of our time in virtual environments. By the 2040s, even people of biological origin are likely to have the vast majority of their thinking processes taking place in nonbiological substrates. We will all become virtual humans.… read more
How Can We Possibly Tell If It’s Conscious?
February 7, 2002 by Ray Kurzweil
Abstract of talk to be delivered at the “Toward a Science of Consciousness” Conference, April 10, 2002. Sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.… 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
How my predictions are faring — an update by Ray Kurzweil
October 1, 2010 by Ray Kurzweil
How My Predictions Are Faring | Overview
In this essay I review the accuracy of my predictions going back a quarter of a century. Included herein is a discussion of my predictions from The Age of Intelligent Machines (which I wrote in the 1980s), all 147 predictions for 2009 in The Age of Spiritual Machines (which I wrote in the 1990s), plus others.
Perhaps my most important predictions are… read more