Forbes | Ray Kurzweil on the future of innovation at Singularity University

October 12, 2011

Forbes — October 12, 2011 | Ted Greenwald

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Ray Kurzweil, radical futurist and prophet of innovation, holds up a smartphone. “This device is a billion times more valuable per constant dollar than the computer I used as a student at MIT in the late ’60s,” he says. “In 25 years, it will be the size of a blood cell. And it will be a billion times more powerful.”

The famously far-thinking inventor and author — critics would say too-far thinking — is addressing 37 executives from around the world who have assembled at the NASA Ames campus in Mountain View, California. Teleconferencing from Boston on October 2, 2011, Kurzweil appears onscreen like Oz the Great and Powerful in high def. His urgent message: Technology progresses at an exponential rate. Humans, having evolved to hunt game and avoid predators, are designed to think linearly. […]