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

Tying together multiple profiles and networks to serve up information about a person, a place or a thing creates challenges for search engines. It’s like stringing or graphing together an underlying net below the surface of the Web to connect all things throughout the world. It is based on the relationship between entities or links.

Google created the Knowledge Graph, which will become the backbone for… read more

A future of frictionless, continuous shopping fits with Google’s vision for a world where we no longer need to search for anything, since we ourselves are perpetually monitored, with the relevant product or information sent to us based on perceived need. “Autonomous search,” they call it.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, even wants to give us a “cybernetic friend” that could satisfy our… read more

If you’ve ever seen any of The Terminator films, you’re familiar with Skynet, the self-aware computing system at odds with humanity. But, even though a perception persists that machines can increasingly solve complex problems and process large amounts of data on their own, machine learning experts say humans still play a very important role.

Human intervention is critical at multiple layers, from choosing the algorithms to apply to… read more

No disrespect to the man who let there be electric light, but Ray Kurzweil is Thomas Alva Edison on steroids. That might not be evident on a visitor’s first trip to his Kurzweil Technologies, a sleek yet modest office in Wellesley Hills, which is rather ordinary looking for the headquarters of a futurist who’s striving to live forever.

Still, the 62-year-old inventor is aware of the Edison comparisons, and… read more