Source: Belfast Telegraph — January 16, 2014 | Rhodri Marsden
Few of us can conceive of the pace with which technological power is developing.
Ray Kurzweil (author, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google) predicts that, by 2025, we’ll have a computer which has the processing power of the human brain.
Society will also have to work out how it’s going to handle the hyper-connectivity of a multisensory internet. [...]
Source: Businessweek — Feb. 23, 1998 | Paul C. Judge
Kurzweil Applied Intelligent Systems was founded in 1982, with the goal of creating a voice-activated word processor. The grail has been very large vocabulary, speaker independence, and continuous speech. One thing that makes it possible today is Moore’s Law. It’s only been in the last six months that we’ve had PCs that can support the processing requirements of continuous speech. The next step now is to integrate natural-language understanding with… read more
Source: FutureBlogger — November 6, 2008 | Alvis Brigis
At Singularity Summit 2008, Future of Gadgets editor John Heylin asked Ray Kurzweil: Do you feel the Singularity has become its own religious movement inside the science community?
Kurzweil began his response by acknowledging that though there are some people who seek the rapture according to their own preferences, that “the idea of the Singularity did not start from religion.” Instead the concept sprang from “over 30 years… read more
Source: PC Magazine — October 13, 2010 | Michael J. Miller
Two of the best-known venture capital investors spoke at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference this afternoon, with both Steve Jurveston of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures very positive on cleantech investments, but taking very different views on the specifics.
Jurveston talked about how he thought entrepreneurship drives all major changes on the planet. He said two-thirds of Dow Jones Industrial Average companies were founded during a… read more
Source: EnlightenNext — September 2005 | Craig Hamilton
The allure of eternal life has been tugging at the human imagination since we first began to contemplate our finitude. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known literary work on earth to the Taoist cult of immortality to Ponce de Leon’s quest for the elixir of unending youth, the desire to free ourselves from the Grim Reaper’s grasp has proven as persistent as the force it aspires to counter.… read more
The Six Epochs of Life mural was commissioned by Martine and Bina Rothblatt in the summer of 2008 to be painted on a bare concrete wall at Estate Marbina Abenaki’s Terasem Center of Critical Consciousness.
The primary wish that the Rothblatts had for the mural was that it illustrate the Six Epochs of Life described in chapter one of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near.
Use the viewer below to pan… read more
Source: PBS Newshour — July 9, 2012
Will we one day be able to live forever? Interesting question, especially for a page where I usually take your financial, rather than science, questions. But what is the goal of economics if not the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Substitute “happy, healthy, never-ending life” for “greatest good” and you can see where we’re going with this.
According to inventor/author Ray Kurzweil, eternal life is now… read more
Source: WBUR Radio Boston — November 29, 2012 | Meghna Chakrabarti and Anthony Brooks
Think how far and how fast technology has advanced. Just a century and a half ago, the fastest way we could communicate with each other was by Pony Express. Then came the telegraph, telephones and computers, all revolutionizing the way we live, work and play — in just a few decades.
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil says soon we’ll be able to introduce tiny computers into our blood… read more
Source: Singularity Hub — January 20, 2013 | Peter Murray
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If you watch Doug Wolens’ latest documentary, The Singularity, the quote from Arthur C. Clarke is the first thing you see.
It aptly prepares you for the 75 minutes that follow over which a truly impressive cast of scientists, futurists and philosophers discuss the uncertainty of what the future holds for humanity and, for some, argue why Ray… read more