Computing and mathematics legend Stephen Wolfram is worried about bigger problems than climate change or overpopulation. He just joined the Lifeboat Institute, a think tank devoted to ways of protecting humanity from deadly nanoweapons and rogue artificial intelligences.

The Singularity is a concept, popularized by Ray Kurzweil, that posits human nature will be fundamentally transformed by technology sometime in the not-too-distant future. In books such as The Singularity… read more

According to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, the singularity is “an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today — the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.”

Kurzweil describes singularity as an exciting and progressive movement, but while there’s nothing to fear… read more

The visionary and author tells PC Expo-goers to expect mind-shattering, exponential development in computing and other tech fields and includes advice for Alan Greenspan. Ray Kurzweil’s recent book The Age of Spiritual Machines looked far into the future, when electronic devices may think, act, and even feel emotions the way humans do. And true to form, the technologist and renowned visionary cut a wide swath across history in a Thursday… read more

“HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.”  The Singularity — the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal — has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke. In a profile in the current issue of Rolling Stone (not available online), Kurzweil describes how, in the… read more

American inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil submits that humans are on the brink of transcending their biology. He reminds his readers that in his 1998 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, he was already envisioning the nature of human life “past the point when machine and human cognition blurred.”

With great emphasis, he notes in his latest book that when experts from various disciplines estimate where we will be… read more