How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil: #56 on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books list for the week of November 22, 2012.

The Mayans might have predicted that the end of the world is only a month away from now, but Ray Kurzweil would say the end of the world as we know it will come sometime in the middle of 2040.

At that time, Kurzweil believes technology and artificial intelligence (or accelerated intelligence as he would call it) will be so advanced that humans will augment their own minds and… read more

Futurist Ray Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world’s problems.

In How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we… read more

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is Ray Kurzweil’s latest book. You may know of him as the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.

Kurzweil is a “futurist” and has a reputation as being one of the greatest thinkers of our age, as well as being one of the greatest hucksters of the age, depending on whom you ask.… read more

What happens when non-biological implants in our bodies — along the lines of cochlear implants to improve hearing in the deaf — include brain-related devices that might enhance our memories? Will we still be “us”? Will we be more of a cyborg than we were if, say, we had another type of implant? And for those who believe we would not be, at what point do we… read more

Are you still you if devices improve your memory, attention span, and other cognitive skills?

You are in the future with technologies more advanced than today’s. While you are sleeping, some group scans your brain and picks up every salient detail. Perhaps they do this with blood cell sized scanning machines traveling in the capillaries of your brain or with some other suitable noninvasive technology, but… read more

Our increasing knowledge of neuroscience may eventually allows us to replicate our brains online. Ronald Bailey reviews Jesse J. Prinz’s Beyond Human Nature and Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind.

Will our increased understanding of how our brains work allow us to transcend human nature? Yes indeed, say the authors of Beyond Human Nature and How to Create a Mind. In the first book, Jesse… read more

Singularity University, on the grounds of the NASA Research Center at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley, abounds in optimism, and, as Singularity’s Vice President of Innovation and Research, I have understandably caught the bug.

I have written about why I believe this will be the most innovative decade in human history, how we are headed for an era of abundant and affordable health care, and… read more

The ongoing acceleration in technology has prompted serious discussions of AI, including the possibility that the “Singularity” — the creation of a greater-than-human intelligence — might occur.

In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that we can expect the Singularity by 2045 and that superintelligences will eventually colonize vast swathes of galaxies.

In his latest book, How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil argues… read more

If you know electronic synthesized music, you know the work of Ray Kurzweil. But the MIT futurist and transhumanist has many more inventions to his name than electronic keyboards. He’s also developed a cult following for his prediction of the merging of humans and computers, which he describes in his book The Singularity Is Near. And in a forthcoming book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human… read more