Source: The Science Channel — Jul 13, 2009 | The Science Channel
Artificial Intelligence: Josh Zepps looks into robots that can learn. Meet your future digital assistant, “Laura.” She has “intelligent” sensing components, including facial recognition and speech recognition. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil talks about advances in Artificial Intelligence and the challenges and dangers of robot intelligence. Rhett & Link fall in love with a robot.
Source: The McKinsey Quarterly — January 1, 2011 | Lars Föyen
The inventor, businessman, and author explains how the exponential growth of technologies will transform industries and pose new opportunities and hurdles for business and society.
Every executive recognizes the fast pace of technological development but grapples with the billion-dollar question: what happens next, and when? Ray Kurzweil has precise answers based on his thesis that information technology will continue to develop exponentially, leading to a not-so-distant future when… read more
Source: Maximum PC — June 21, 2011 | David Gerrold
In math, a singularity is a point where a function demonstrates extreme behavior. The Singularity, as defined by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, will occur with the technological creation of superintelligence.
Such a world may be impossible to predict because us poor present-day humans are unable to comprehend what superintelligent entities will want or how they’ll behave to achieve their goals. [...]
Source: Technology Review — October 19, 2011 | Ray Kurzweil
Last week, Paul Allen and a colleague challenged the prediction that computers will soon exceed human intelligence. Now Ray Kurzweil, the leading proponent of the “Singularity,” offers a rebuttal.
Although Paul Allen paraphrases my 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, in the title of his essay (cowritten with his colleague Mark Greaves), it appears that he has not actually read the book. His only citation is to an… read more
Source: New Scientist — November 9, 2012 | Laura Spinney
Several projects are trying to reverse-engineer the brain. In How to Create a Mind, futurist Ray Kurzweil champions their cause.
When it comes to the human brain, many scientists believe that we are incapable of understanding how it works because we lack the tools and intelligence to measure its mind-blowing complexity. Others are starting to question that notion, and to subtly redefine the task. In How to Create a… read more
Source: Fast Company — December 17, 2012 | Neal Ungerleider
The search giant welcomes a Singularity evangelist. He will work on unspecified machine-learning and language-processing projects.
Ray Kurzweil is best known these days as the world’s foremost Singularity evangelist and as a prophet of a whizbang, techno-utopian future. However, Kurzweil first came to tech fame as a machine-learning guru whose groundbreaking work on voice recognition and optical character recognition changed computing and laid the groundwork for everything from Siri to… read more
Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal — February 15, 2013 | Preeti Upadhyaya
Silicon Valley is known for inventing the future rather than predicting it. But this week, I did a deep dive into the business of futurism, speaking with several professional futurists about what they see on the horizon. Here are the top five takeaways from my conversations with experts in the art of navigating the unknown.
2) Rather than playing dress-up in history class, you’ll be able… read more
Source: Information Week — may 15, 2013 | David F. Carr
Text-to-voice technology has a long history. The famed technologist Ray Kurzweil created an early reading software product in 1976, which in 1996 led to the founding of Kurzweil Educational Systems, a leading maker of reading software for PCs and Macs.
However, the Kurzweil software costs as much as $1,500 a seat, while some of the other PC-based text-to-speech products cost $50 to $70, Chen said. “We charge… read more
Source: The Christian Science Monitor — June 28, 2001 | Stephen Humphries
You needn’t have taken a philosophy course to see A.I., the new Steven Spielberg movie, but you may wish you’d enrolled in Philosophy 101 by the time you exit the cinema. A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), is a futuristic story in which a robot resembling an 11-year-old boy embarks on a Pinocchio-like quest to become human. Mr. Spielberg’s movie posits the idea that machines can develop self-awareness, and even… read more
Source: InformationWeek — July 3, 2010 | Michael Greene
The noted futurist has released a movie, The Singularity Is Near, exploring how technology may reshape the fabric of our physical reality and life experiences.
Tech professionals have become somewhat inured to descriptions of the exponential rise in computing power in what is commonly described as Moore’s law. But when inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil strings together dozens of examples on logarithmic graphs to support his… read more