A machine is likely to achieve the ability of a human brain in the coming years. Raymond Kurzweil, for example, has predicted that a $1,000 personal computer will match the computing speed and capacity of the human brain by around the year 2020. We'll explore the possibilities of machine intelligence and exotic new technologies for faster and more powerful computational machines, from cellular automata and DNA molecules to quantum computing. We'll also touch on the controversial area of downloading your mind into computer.

Why Language Is All Thumbs By Chip Walter
Toolmaking not only resulted in tools, but also the reconfiguration of our brains so they comprehended the world on the same terms as our toolmaking hands interacted with it. With mirror neurons, something entirely new entered the world: memes--a far more effective and speedy method for pooling knowledge and passing it around than the old genetic way. (Added March 15th 2008)

AI Meets the Metaverse: Teachable AI Agents Living in Virtual Worlds By Ben Goertzel
Online virtual worlds have the power to accelerate and catalyze the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). As AGIs involved in this metaverse become progressively more intelligent from their interaction with the social network of human beings and reach human-level intelligence (the Singularity), they will already be part of the human social network. If we build them right and teach them right, they will greet us with open arms. (Added October 18th 2007)

The Age of Virtuous Machines By J. Storrs Hall
In the "hard takeoff" scenario, a psychopathic AI suddenly emerges at a superhuman level, achieving universal dominance. Hall suggests an alternative: we've gotten better because we've become smarter, so AIs will evolve "unselfish genes" and hyperhuman morality. More honest, capable of deeper understanding, and free of our animal heritage and blindnesses, the children of our minds will grow better and wiser than us, and we will have a new friend and guide--if we work hard to earn the privilege of associating with them. (Added June 1st 2007)

Kinds of Minds By J. Storrs Hall
In Beyond AI, published today, J. Storrs Hall offers "a must-read for anyone interested in the future of the human-machine civilization," says Ray Kurzweil. In this first of three book excerpts, Hall suggests a classification of the different stages an AI might go through, from "hypohuman" (most existing AIs) to "hyperhuman" (similar to "superintelligence"). (Added May 30th 2007)

Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time By Ben Goertzel
The creation of a superhumanly intelligent AI system could be possible within 10 years, with an "AI Manhattan Project," says Ben Goertzel. (Added April 9th 2007)

The Third-Generation Web is Coming By Nova Spivack
Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents. (Added December 18th 2006)

From ENIAC to Everyone By Alexander Randall 5th
J. Presper Eckert reveals the inside story of the invention of ENIAC, the first practical, all-electronic computer, and debunks some myths in this forgotten interview. "It is shocking to have your life work reduced to a tenth of a square inch of silicon," he said. (Added February 23rd 2006)

Online Chat with Ray Kurzweil and European Schoolnet By Ray Kurzweil
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. (Added November 9th 2005)

Some Challenges And Grand Challenges For Computational Intelligence By Edward Feigenbaum
The Turing Test is a very ambitious Grand Challenge. The "Feigenbaum Test" is more manageable: focus on natural science, engineering, or medicine with conversation in the jargonized and stylized language of these disciplines. There are two other grand challenges in achieving Computational Intelligence: Build a large knowledge base by reading text, reducing knowledge engineering effort by one order of magnitude; and the "Grand Vision": distill from the WWW a huge knowledge base, using ontologies and building a system of "semantics scrapers" that will access the semantic markups, integrate them appropriately into the growing knowledge base, and set up the material for the scrutiny of an editorial process. (Added July 15th 2003)

The Intelligent Universe By Ray Kurzweil
Within 25 years, we'll reverse-engineer the brain and go on to develop superintelligence. Extrapolating the exponential growth of computational capacity (a factor of at least 1000 per decade), we'll expand inward to the fine forces, such as strings and quarks, and outward. Assuming we could overcome the speed of light limitation, within 300 years we would saturate the whole universe with our intelligence. (Added December 12th 2002)

The emotion universe By Marvin Minsky
Why have we made limited progress in AI? Because we haven't developed sophisticated models of thinking, we need better programming languages and architectures, and we haven't focused on common sense problems that every normal child can solve. (Added November 22nd 2002)

The Computational Universe By Seth Lloyd
The amount of information you could process if you were to use all the energy and matter of the universe is 10^90 bits and the number of elementary operations that it can have performed since the Big Bang is about 10^120 ops. Perhaps the universe is itself a computer and what it's doing is performing a computation. If so, that's why the universe is so complex and these numbers say how big that computation is. Also, that means Douglas Adams was right (the answer is "42"). (Added October 25th 2002)

Deep Fritz Draws: Are Humans Getting Smarter, or Are Computers Getting Stupider? 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. (Added October 21st 2002)

A myopic perspective on AI By Ray Kurzweil
In a recent Red Herring magazine article, writer Geoffrey James said "pundits can't stop hyping the business opportunities of artificial intelligence" and described AI as a "technological backwater." Ray Kurzweil challenges this view, citing "hundreds of examples of narrow AI deeply integrated into our information-based economy" and "many applications beginning to combine multiple methodologies," a step towards the eventual achievement of "strong AI" (human-level intelligence in a machine). (Added September 2nd 2002)

Essentials of General Intelligence: The direct path to AGI By Peter Voss
General intelligence comprises the essential, domain-independent skills necessary for acquiring a wide range of domain-specific knowledge -- the ability to learn anything. Achieving this with "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) requires a highly adaptive, general-purpose system that can autonomously acquire an extremely wide range of specific knowledge and skills and can improve its own cognitive ability through self-directed learning. This chapter in the forthcoming book, Real AI: New Approaches to Artificial General Intelligence, describes the requirements and conceptual design of a prototype AGI system. (Added August 22nd 2002)

What Shape are a German Shepherd's Ears? By Stephen M. Kosslyn
There is a gigantic project yet to be done that will root psychology in natural science and providing a better understanding of human nature. Once this is accomplished, you'll be able to go from phenomenology to information processing to the brain, down through the workings of the neurons, including the biochemistry, all the way to the biophysics and the way genes are up-regulated and down-regulated. (Added July 17th 2002)

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine By W. Daniel Hillis
Nobel prize winner physicist Richard Feynman played a critical role in developing the first parallel-processing computer and finding innovative uses for it in numerical computing and building neural networks as well as physical simulation with cellular-automata (such as turbulent fluid flow), working with Stephen Wolfram. (Added June 24th 2002)

Beyond Computation: A Talk with Rodney Brooks By John Brockman
Rodney Brooks is trying to build robots with properties of living systems. These include self-reproducing and self-assembling robots and one inspired by Bill Joy that wanders around the corridors, finds electrical outlets, and plugs itself in. His students' edgy projects include real-time MRI imagery, virtual colonoscopies, programs that create DNA for E. coli molecules that act as computers, and eventually, self-organizing smart biomaterials that grow into objects, such as a table. (Added June 7th 2002)

The Last Human By Gregory Stock
We are on the cusp of profound biological change, poised to transcend our current form and character on a journey to destinations of new imagination. The arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design. Progressive self-transformation could change our descendants into something sufficiently different from our present selves to not be human in the sense we use the term now. But the ultimate question of our era is whether the cutting edge of life is destined to shift from its present biological substrate — the carbon and other organic materials of our flesh — to that of silicon and its ilk, as proposed by leading artificial-intelligence theorists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. (Added June 5th 2002)

Technology in the 21st Century: an Imminent Intimate Merger By Ray Kurzweil
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. (Added May 14th 2002)

Response to Mitchell Kapor's "Why I Think I Will Win" By Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil responds to Mitch Kapor's arguments against the possibility that an AI that will pass a Turing Test in 2029 in this final counterpoint on the bet: an AI will pass a Turing Test by 2029. (Added April 9th 2002)

Why I Think I Will Win By Mitch Kapor
Will a computer pass the Turing Test (convincingly impersonate a human) by 2029? Mitchell Kapor has bet Ray Kurzweil that a computer can't because it lacks understanding of subtle human experiences and emotions. (Added April 9th 2002)

A Wager on the Turing Test: Why I Think I Will Win By Ray Kurzweil
Will Ray Kurzweil's predictions come true? He's putting his money where his mouth is. Here's why he thinks he will win a bet on the future of artificial intelligence. The wager: an AI that passes the Turing Test by 2029. (Added April 9th 2002)

A Wager on the Turing Test: The Rules By Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil
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. (Added April 9th 2002)

Review of Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney Brooks By Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil reviews Rodney Brooks' latest book on robotics for Wired Magazine. Brooks challenges Jaron Lanier's claim that AI is "based on an intellectual mistake" and Kurzweil's statements on reverse-engineering the brain and the date of the "Singularity." Kurzweil responds. (Added January 28th 2002)

Every Curriculum Tells a Story By Roger Schank
The traditional classroom lecture and course will be replaced by Internet-based curricula that tell stories, if Dr. Roger C. Schank, one of the world's leading AI researchers, has his way. The "story-centered curriculum" (SCC) tells a story in which the student "plays one or more roles that he or she might actually do in real life or need to know about, based on the student's career goals," he says. (Added January 22nd 2002)

How can a small number of genes build a complex mental machine? By Gary F. Marcus
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." Gary F. Marcus asks: how can genes build a mental machine? (Added January 21st 2002)

What's the neurobiology of doing good and being good? By Robert Sapolsky
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 Sapolsky asks: what's the neurobiology of doing and being good? (Added January 21st 2002)

What is the missing ingredient -- not genes, not upbringing -- that shapes the mind? By Steven Pinker
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." Steven Pinker's question: what shapes the mind? (Added January 21st 2002)

How are behaviors encoded in DNA? By John McCarthy
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." John McCarthy asks: how are behaviors encoded in DNA? (Added January 21st 2002)

What kind of system of 'coding' of semantic information does the brain use? By Daniel Dennett
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." Daniel Dennett asks: how does the brain code semantic information? (Added January 21st 2002)

If we are lucky, our pets may keep us as pets By Brad Templeton
The first super-intelligent beings may not be based on humans at all, but on apes. Since moral and legal considerations will limit experimentation with human brain uploading, scientists may first turn to apes, and they may quickly enhance themselves. Could they become our overlords, la Planet of the Apes? (Added January 18th 2002)

How Does the Brain Generate Computation? By Marc D. Hauser
In this Edge talk, Marc D. Hauser reflects on attempts to answer this question, from Noam Chomsky's insights to the dance of the honey bee. (Added December 19th 2001)

Who Owns Intelligence? By Howard Gardner
Before intelligence can be enhanced or artificially created, it has to be defined; this excerpt from Howard Gardner's Intelligence Reframed ponders the different ways in which intelligence is quantified and conceived. (Added September 24th 2001)

We Earth Neurons By Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett on knowledge sharing and the fate of the planet, in which he contrasts individuals and their brains with the trillions of neurons that compose them. The planet has grown its own nervous system: us. (Added September 18th 2001)

Consciousness By John Searle
Can consciousness be measured scientifically? What exactly is consciousness? John Searle approaches the scientific investigation of consciousness and its possible neurobiological roots from a philosophical perspective. (Added August 13th 2001)

When Will HAL Understand What We Are Saying? Computer Speech Recognition and Understanding By Ray Kurzweil
This chapter from HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality addresses the accomplishments--and challenges--of automatic speech recognition. What kind of paradigm shift in computing will give HAL the ability to understand human context, and therefore truly speak? (Added August 6th 2001)

Natural Born Cyborgs By Andy Clark
For Andy Clark, the ancient fortress of skin and skull has been breached: as we understand more and more how the brain works, the brains we craft in the future will be extensions of our own. Mindware upgrades and other cognitive upheavals coming soon... (Added August 3rd 2001)

Discovery Today Discussion of Machine Consciousness By Discovery Today and Hugo de Garis
Hugo de Garis, brain builder, feels the weight of a future conflict between humans and the artificially intelligent beings they have created. Sir Roger Penrose is skeptical, and Robert Llewellyn is curious. See a discussion between the three. (Added July 26th 2001)

Can Computers Decide? By Roger Schank
A look at how computers make decisions. By saying computers can't truly reason, are we being "fleshists?" (Added July 6th 2001)

The Invisible Brain By Robert Wright
How do societies evolve toward greater complexity in culture and technology? Robert Wright posits that there is an "invisible brain" at work. (Added July 2nd 2001)

A Second Wave of Network Technologies By Tomaso Poggio
MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences Professor Tomaso Poggio explores how the Internet can become "smarter"--how intelligent technologies will prevent us from drowning in an ocean of data. (Added June 21st 2001)

Consciousness Connects Our Brains to the Fundamental Level of the Universe By Stuart Hameroff
Neurons alone aren't sufficiently complex to explain consciousness and provide a computational model for thought, according to Stuart Hameroff. He wants to go smaller, into a universe of structures within neurons where quantum mechanics help formulate a physical theory of consciousness. (Added May 14th 2001)

Quantum Computing with Molecules By Isaac L. Chuang and Neil Gershenfeld
By taking advantage of nuclear magnetic resonance, scientists can coax the molecules in some ordinary liquids to serve as an extraordinary type of computer. (Added May 1st 2001)

When Machines Outsmart Humans By Nick Bostrom
Artificial intelligence is a possibility that should not be ignored in any serious thinking about the world in 2050. This article outlines the case for thinking that human-level machine intelligence might well be appear in that time frame. It then explains four immediate consequences of such a development, and argues that machine intelligence would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of the social, political, economic, commercial, technological, scientific and environmental issues that humanity will face in the next century. (Added April 30th 2001)

Minimally Conscious States By Douglas I. Katz
What exactly is the threshold of consciousness? One way to approach that core question is to explore "minimally conscious states," a condition of severely altered consciousness in which the person demonstrates minimal but definite behavioral evidence of self or environmental awareness. Neurologist Dr. Douglas I. Katz has developed a precise set of measures that might serve as a checklist in the development of conscious computers. (Added April 17th 2001)

Robots, Re-Evolving Mind By Hans Moravec
We are re-evolving artificial minds at ten million times the original speed of human evolution, exponentially growing robot complexity. Currently, a guppylike thousand MIPS and hundreds of megabytes of memory enable our robots to build dense, almost photorealistic 3D maps of their surroundings and navigate intelligently. Within three decades, fourth-generation universal robots with a humanlike 100 million MIPS will be able to abstract and generalize--perhaps replace us. (Added March 27th 2001)

Artificial Intelligence in the World Wide Web By David G. Stork
The Internet is a new metaphor for the human brain. It makes it possible for hundreds of millions of Web users to teach computers common-sense knowledge, similar to SETI@home's search for E.T., says Dr. David G. Stork, a leading AI researcher. This can even be accomplished just by playing games on the Net. (Added March 7th 2001)

What Is Artificial Intelligence? By John McCarthy
What exactly is "artificial intelligence" (AI)? Stanford University Professor of Computer Science Dr. John McCarthy, a pioneer in AI, answers this question in depth for beginners. (Added February 22nd 2001)

Ripples and Puddles By Hans Moravec
Roboticist Hans Moravec advocates a combination of reasoning Programs, neural modeling and perception programs in building intelligent machines. He visualizes a future generation of robots that think like primates, followed by a humanlike generation capable of reason. (Added February 22nd 2001)