In the real world, we have our own version of Judgement Day called the Singularity and many can’t wait for it to come. Like in The Terminator it is the moment when computers take over, but rather than killing us off the machines enhance us.

Some have called the Singularity a nerd rapture. Its prophet is Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s foremost experts on artificial intelligence and the new Director of… read more

In his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005), futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that computers will be as smart as humans by 2029, and that by 2045, “computers will be billions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence,” Kurzweil wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience.

Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid… read more

It’s not an accredited university, and it doesn’t actually teach the singuarity, the supposed superintelligence that will result when man merges with machine, due (according to prolific inventor and author Ray Kurzweil) sometime around 2045. Still, the official welcome at Singularity University’s (SU) opening executive-programme class this fresh December afternoon in Nasa’s Ames research campus, at Moffett Federal Airfield, California, is delivered, appropriately, by a 60cm-tall NAO… read more

In the Terminator series, John Connor and his mother fight to prevent Judgement Day, the moment when the computer system Skynet becomes self aware, decides humans are a threat and moves to wipe us out.

In the real world, we have our own version of Judgement Day called the Singularity and many can’t wait for it to come. Like in the Terminator, it is the moment when computers take over, but… read more

The New York Times Sunday Book Review | How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, may be best known as a polymath inventor and futurist, but he’s really a cyborg sent back from the year 2029 to save humanity from the nature-nurture debate.

His mission is not to provide a final score… read more

Shares of Google closed at $845.72 in New York today, up almost 2 percent. It’s been a pretty big week for the company. Google Now, a voice-activated search assistant, launched on iPhone this week. And the wearable computer Google Glass has been getting a lot of press.

Pretty much everything Google’s doing is changing the way we think about and get our information. What’s all that… read more

Google’s rush to Google Glass makes perfect sense, if you consider that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are 40, and 39 years old, respectively. With every day they have more and more in common with 60 year-olds than with 20 year-olds. Google Glass is an exercise in future-comforting their old age.

And so is the hiring of Ray Kurzweil, it’s to ensure that Google’s founders get a front… read more

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

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

8. Artificial Intelligence: We’ve all seen the Terminator movies, so we know how this works: one day artificial intelligence will be smarter than humans, and when that happens the AI will quickly realise that the best way to protect the planet is to get rid of the meatbags.

According to futurist Ray Kurzweil, the singularity — the moment machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence — is due around 2045. If… read more