Source: GigaOM — March 20, 2013 | Ki Mae Heussner
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
Source: Slate — December 20, 2013 | Will Oremus
Ray Kurzweil is convinced the technological singularity is nigh. So is Johnny Depp’s character, it seems, in a Hollywood flick that’s due out in April.
This may be the singularity’s mainstream moment. Kurzweil is its preeminent latter-day apostle, and he was recently hired as an engineer by Google to work on hastening its arrival by teaching computers to understand English. Now we’ve got Captain Jack Sparrow explaining it in a… read more
Source: Daily Mail — December 21, 2013
The same day three other clips for the film were released, highlighting the futurist angle of the film, which appears to have been modeled after the thoughts of singularity theorist Ray Kurzweil.
Freeman in one of the accompanying trailers states: “For two million years human beings have evolved more than any other species in existence.
“But what if all our knowledge and all our achievements could be… read more
Source: Express — December 21, 2013 | Nicole Morley
The exciting trailer for new sci-fi flick Transcendence has been released. Playing scientist Will Caster in the movie, Depp’s character is desperate to reach immortality.
Caster attempts to transfer his knowledge, memories and emotions into an advanced computer programme to live on as artificial intelligence.
After the radiation claims Caster’s body, he survives as a virtual person — but his colleagues soon discover that they’re playing a… read more
Source: The New York Times — February 5, 2012 | Stuart Elliott
Best Buy: A year after a silly Super Bowl spot with Justin Bieber and Ozzy Osbourne, Best Buy celebrated real achievement with a commercial honoring technological innovators like Philippe Kahn, who declares, “I created the camera phone,” and Kevin Systrom, a founder of the photo-sharing app Instagram. [...]
Source: Wired: Game Life — March 8, 2012 | Chris Baker
A new tech demo featuring sophisticated performance-capture technology made by the game developer Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Indigo Prophecy) was inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near.
The clip, which David Cage, the head of Quantic Dream, unveiled on Wednesday at a Game Developers Conference presentation, shows an android named Kara becoming self-aware as she is being assembled, and desperately insisting that her sentience is a… read more
Source: The New York Times — March 9, 2013 | Evgeny Morozov
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
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: MediaPost — March 21, 2013 | Laurie Sullivan
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
Source: The Huffington Post — November 12, 2012 | Adrienne Burke
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