Ray Kurzweil, noted inventor, software developer and futurist, will present his work on “the law of accelerating returns” and debate its merits with biologist Michael Denton and innovation theorist Ilkka Tuomi at Accelerating Change ’03.

Twenty-four prominent thinkers will offer their insights from across a broad spectrum of cutting edge disciplines, such as biological computing, nanotech, cosmology, and futurism.

John Koza (Genetic Programming IV: Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence, 2003) will present the latest evidence for self-organizing machine intelligence and the increasing number of areas where it matches or out-competes biological intelligence.

Other speakers include nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler; Complexity theorist James N. Gardner, author of Biocosm; Robert Wright, author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal; and Howard Bloom, author of Global Brain and The Lucifer Principle.

Accelerating Change ’03, organized by the Institute for Accelerating Change (IAC), will be held at Stanford University, September 12-14.

IAC has announced that until August 27, KurzweilAI.net readers can save $50 by entering discount code “ACC2003-Kurzweil” in the conference registration form.