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

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

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

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

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

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