Designing the future based on a feeling: To develop the film’s AI entity, Jonze says that he and his team strove less for “scientific” authenticity and focused instead on what worked for the film’s relationship and for what they would want to see in the technology.

The process did start with research. Jonze mentions reading some of the leading thinkers on the evolution of computer consciousness — Kurzweil… read more

Her is the first film Jonze has written himself, and it’s stunning. Set in a future Los Angeles, there was much chatter about artificial intelligence afterward in the Q&A, which Larry Ellison moderated.

Jonze mentioned Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who works at Google and who Mike Mills also cited when I interviewed him last week for Nowness, about a film he made about the future for SFMOMA. [...]

After robotics software and now hardware, the third piece of Google’s puzzle seems to be the artificial-intelligence work of Ray Kurzweil, a recent company hire.

Kurzweil is known for talking up the notion of a technological singularity, a point in human history during which artificial-intelligence systems will suddenly surpass human abilities.

According to Kurzweil, the singularity will take place around 2045. When Amazon unveiled its flying delivery drones earlier this month, Kurzweil’s response… read more

In an article for CNN, inventor, futurist and author of five books, including one of Glenn Beck’s favorites, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Ray Kurzweil provided five staggering predictions as to what we could expect in the 2020s and 2030s, including among others major advancements in medicine and 3D printing.

Kurzweil developed the theory of the “Singularity” whereby he predicts that human intelligence and artificial intelligence… read more

Google has hired artificial intelligence and speech recognition guru Ray Kurzweil as director of engineering.

The accuracy of speech recognition is on a course of continuous improvement. Much attention is directed to go beyond speech recognition to understand the intent of the spoken word.

Speech recognition interfaces to backend services will improve the user experience to the point that voice will become the predominant computer-human interaction.… read more

Delivering packages by drone might be impossible in a city like Washington D.C. which has many no-fly zones. But technology entrepreneur and futurist Ray Kurzweil notes that “technology has always been a double edged sword.”

“Fire kept us warm and cooked our food but also was used to burn down our villages,” says Kurzweil.

Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies who sees Bezos as an unconventional… read more

Now Google bosses have turned their sights on a much more complex subject – the human body. The tech giant has recently embarked on a series of high profile hires for its new venture Calico, a company which wants to extend human life by up to 100 years.

It comes after the company hired Ray Kurzweil as engineering director, the 65-year-old credited with inventing speech recognition technology who… read more

Most of us accept that our lives are limited. Not Ray Kurzweil. A renowned computer scientist and inventor, Kurzweil, 65, decided decades ago that mortality wasn’t for him. He didn’t have to die, and he wasn’t going to, if he could help it. Fortunately, he believes he can help it, and he’s been working feverishly at the task of staying alive ever since.

“How long do you think you… read more

Towards another big bang? With the advances in AI, brain-to-brain interface, our ability to reverse aging and actually halting death, it is likely that our life expectancy will go northward by another 30 -50 years. This may be a logical outcome as long duration space travel becomes a real possibility in the future.

Futurist, Ray Kurzweil, predicts that in another 2 decades by the year 2045, mankind will… read more

This was the main thrust of a recent conference in Budapest, organised by the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley-based learning institution, founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, and sponsored by Google, Nokia, the X Prize Foundation, Genentech and others.

By 2020, Ray Kurzweil predicts that we’ll start to see 3D printing of clothing. This will create a new market for “open source” apparel that can be downloaded and printed at incredibly… read more