Source: PBS Newshour — July 10, 2012
Author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been a key voice in our occasional series on the future of technology. The latest installment on the advent of immortality debuted here on Making Sen$e July 9.
As with economist Paul Krugman, our extended interview with Kurzweil included many fascinating bits that didn’t make the final cut. So we continue Tuesday with one of them — a closer look at what Kurzweil… read more
Source: NPR The Diane Rehm Show — November 27, 2012 | Diane Rehm
Inventor, futurist and author Ray Kurzweil has long predicted humans will one day be able to transcend the limitations of their biology. In a new book, Kurzweil explains why that day is coming sooner than we might think.
He argues that the expansion of the brain’s neocortex was the last biological evolution man needed to make. That’s because it is inevitably leading to “truly intelligent machines,”… read more
Source: Las Vegas Weekly — January 23, 2013 | Mark Adams
I know you were recently snatched up by Google. What are you working on at the moment?
I’ll be working on enabling computers to understand natural language. When you write a news article or a blog post you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating semantic meaning. It’s remarkable how search works, but it could be even more powerful if it understood the key… read more
Source: The Georgia Straight — May 2, 2013 | Adrian Mack
It might sound silly to you or I, but Ray Kurzweil prays for machine intelligence. Kurzweil is popularly known as one of the high priests of transhumanism, or the belief that technology will eventually supersede human biology. He shows up in Google and the World Brain to explain the so-called singularity, or that moment in time — in 2045, if Kurzweil is right — when machines finally outpace human intelligence. After… read more
Source: Newsweek — May 16, 2009 | Daniel Lyons
Ray Kurzweil’s wildest dream is to be turned into a cyborg — a flesh-and-blood human enhanced with tiny embedded computers, a man-machine hybrid with billions of microscopic nanobots coursing through his bloodstream.… read more
Source: Singularity Hub — August 19, 2010 | Aaron Saenz
10 years? 20 years? 100 years? Never? There are about as many predictions for when artificial intelligence will match human intellect as there are AI researchers.
More, really, when you figure in all the people who simply read about AI research and decide to make their own decisions (I’m in that boat myself). Processing power has been increasing exponentially for years, and few doubt that it… read more
Source: Tengri News — May 23, 2011
Kazakhstan Prime Minister Karim Massimov posted in tweeted that he watched Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man. “I saw the film, The Transcendent Man. It changed my vision of the future,” the Prime Minister posted.
Transcendent Man is a documentary about innovations and revolutionary ideas based on Ray Kurzweil’s bestseller called The Singularity is Near. The movie is about the life, career and ideas of Kurzweil, who is well-known in… read more
Source: Singularity Hub — December 30, 2011 | Aaron Saenz
There are many futurists and techno-optimists in the world, but there is only one Jason Silva. The former host of Current TV, and fledgling documentary filmmaker is a force of personality and energy that is storming through the Singularity community. He recently spoke at this year’s Singularity Summit in New York, and is popping up all over the media world with appearances in the Economist, Smart… read more
Source: PC Magazine — March 12, 2012 | Dan Costa
As you would expect, this kind of optimism draws a lot of fire from more pessimistic, perhaps more realistic, critics. On Monday at SXSW, Kurzweil took on the skeptics with an array of historical charts, future forecasts, and the simple belief that “you can start world-changing revolution with just the power of your ideas and everyday tools.”
The cornerstone to many of Kurzweil’s predictions is the… read more
Source: Kirkus Reviews — September 15, 2012
A pioneering developer of optical character recognition and text-to-speech software explores the possibility of creating a synthetic neocortex that could surpass the human mind.
Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, 2005, etc.) bases his prediction on modern insights into how the brain has evolved a hierarchical pattern-recognition structure. We perceive the bare outline of events and reconstruct memories in an ordered sequence, and… read more