Source: The Smart Set — December 14, 2011 | Stefany Anne Goldberg
This much is true. We do not want to die. And some say everything we do comes down to this. We look to fame, to children, to heaven, hoping all the while to grasp just a bit of immortality. We look to religion and we look to the occult, invisible solutions built on clouds and trust. We look to more tangible solutions as well. If we had a
Source: BoingBoing — August 10, 2009 | David Pescovitz
“All-Star Pattern Seeker Trading Cards pay tribute to 23 giants of pattern recognition — pathfinders and ideanauts whose shadows loom large across three millennia of discovery.” — Imaginary Foundation
Source: Forbes — April 15, 2013 | Chris Conover
Ray Kurzweil plans to live forever. All power to him. Mr. Kurzweil’s contributions to mankind arguably have been so extraordinary that perhaps we owe it to him to provide him medical care in perpetuity.
Alternatively, perhaps he never plans to retire and/or has amassed a portfolio easily capable of supporting him in perpetuity unassisted by either Social Security or Medicare. In that case, no obvious public policy issues… read more
Source: TechCrunch — May 8, 2013 | Rip Empson
In other words, knowing that someone wrote “Analyst” as their job title on Facebook might not be of much help when making predictions about their ideal professional career. However, by considering complementary and related data, like their education, company and friend, SYMAN can infer that the person is in fact a “Systems Analyst” at Cloudera.
Comparing biographical, professional and educational data against the career path of… read more
Source: Newsweek — May 16, 2009 | Daniel Lyons
Ray Kurzweil’s wildest dream is to be turned into a cyborg — a flesh-and-blood human enhanced with tiny embedded computers, a man-machine hybrid with billions of microscopic nanobots coursing through his bloodstream.… read more
Source: The Futurist — February 15, 2013 | Ray Kurzweil
Can nonbiological brains have real minds of their own? In this article, drawn from his latest book, futurist/inventor Ray Kurzweil describes the future of intelligence — artificial and otherwise.
“The mammalian brain has a distinct aptitude not found in any other class of animal. We are capable of hierarchical thinking, of understanding a structure composed of diverse elements arranged in a pattern, representing that arrangement with a symbol,… read more
Source: The Seattle Times — January 20, 2013 | Drew DeSilver
Any book that promises on the cover to reveal “the secret of human thought” is setting the bar pretty high. But if anyone could be expected to pull it off, it’s inventor/futurist/Big Thinker Kurzweil, who’s been ruminating about the possibilities of human/computer convergence for more than 20 years now.
Kurzweil’s new book continues and expands on many of the themes he’s written about in earlier works… read more
Source: Fast Company: Co.Exist — November 30, 2011 | Neal Ungerleider
Computing and mathematics legend Stephen Wolfram is worried about bigger problems than climate change or overpopulation. He just joined the Lifeboat Institute, a think tank devoted to ways of protecting humanity from deadly nanoweapons and rogue artificial intelligences.
The Singularity is a concept, popularized by Ray Kurzweil, that posits human nature will be fundamentally transformed by technology sometime in the not-too-distant future. In books such as The Singularity… read more
Source: Wired — April 25, 2013 | Steven Levy
Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field, joined the search giant late last year. Nonetheless, the hiring raised some eyebrows, since Kurzweil is perhaps the most prominent proselytizer of “hard AI,” which argues that it is possible to create consciousness in an artificial being.
Add to this Google’s revelation that it is… read more
Source: MSNBC Cosmic Log — February 10, 2011 | Alan Boyle
The Singularity is back in the spotlight, thanks to a Time cover story focusing on inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil and his forecast that “the end of human civilization as we know it” will come in about 35 years — just as Kurzweil is nearing his 100th birthday.
Kurzweil is doing everything in his power to make sure he’s ready for the big event, which he calls the Singularity.… read more