Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who spoke at the Smith Center in January, has predicted the imminent next stage of evolution — what he calls “the singularity.”

Here, humans will organically bond with their machines, and those machine/humans will become self-evolving, allowing us to transcend “the biological limitations of our brains.” 2029 being the year when he thinks this will begin.

And cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said the human… read more

Futurist, artificial intelligence expert and inventor Ray Kurzweil will join Google as its director of engineering. Kurzweil’s profile is such that it was he — and not his new employer — who announced the new gig, and on his own website to boot.

Kurzweil also says he feels Google is his kind of place to work, and not just for the free food. Just what Kurzweil’s arrival… read more

“The restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) Ray Kurzweil comes to Cal Performances’ Wheeler Auditorium on Saturday, April 13 at 8:00 p.m. He has been nicknamed the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison” by Forbes for making cutting-edge technological advances including the first flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano.

In addition to his… read more

Rather than reflect on the ups and downs of the past 11 years, let me simply lay out some of my most vivid memories from my perch at Bio-IT World: 

Best Keynote: Lander in 2002? Ray Kurzweil? Stephen Wolfram? Venter, Collins, Berners-Lee? I can’t pick. But I would give special commendation to BioTeam cofounder Chris Dagdigian’s annual unofficial fourth keynote, “Trends from the Trenches.” [...]