In the first half, George Knapp welcomed futurist Ray Kurzweil for a discussion on the merging of man and machine as well as his research into reverse engineering the human brain to understand precisely how it works. According to Kurzweil’s estimate, the brain consists of 300 million “pattern recognizers” which assign these trends into hierarchies.

This hierarchy ranges from simple patterns like shapes and sounds, at the low… read more

Everyone should read the books of Ray Kurzweil, who has recently become an Engineering Director at Google. Kurzweil’s book makes it clear that: Within our lifetimes, human beings will no longer be human beings; there are multiple accelerating rates of change in several different disciplines; The three main disciplines contributing to the singularity are nanotech, AI, and biotech; All are transforming our understanding of the human body and,… read more

The New York Times reports that the Obama administration plans to spearhead a scientific effort over the next decade that aims to build a comprehensive map of activity in the human brain. The effort will reportedly involve scientists from federal agencies and private foundations that will work together to advance our understanding of perception, actions, and consciousness.

The Times says that the project seeks to accomplish the same level of… read more

For 50 years now Moore’s Law has been (to oversimplify) doubling computing power every two years. People like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge look at that astonishing history of nonstop exponential growth and predict a technological singularity within our lifetimes.

Kurzweil claims that whenever technology hits a limit, “a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.” That’s not much more than a convenient… read more

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

Spent an hour chatting with futurist Ray Kurzweil about some of his predictions for the coming decades, and here are three of his biggest “pie in the sky” ideas, as he likes to call them.

Turn off Caveman genes: We will be able manage metabolism by turning off genes. “We’re not depending on the next big hunt for our daily nourishment anymore.”

Play… read more

Ray Kurzweil, Google Inc.’s director of engineering, took the stage at NASA’s research park at Moffett Field and the crowd fell silent. They’d been waiting all week at Singularity University’s FutureMed conference in Mountain View to hear the storied futurist-inventor-author speak. Finally, the slight, bespectacled Kurzweil launched in, telling the history of Silicon Valley’s role in the exponential advance of innovation in his heavy New York… read more

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

Google Translate has many languages to work with and plenty of computer horsepower behind it. Thinking about its methods reminds me that Ray Kurzweil has now gone to work for Google. Kurzweil is an Edisonian figure who came up with the first flatbed scanner and the first machine that could read text aloud. He has created music synthesizers and made huge strides in PC speech recognition, the… read more

Transcript | Ray Kurzweil: Sometimes people think that emotion and art are sort of sideshows to human intelligence and the real essence of intelligence is thinking logically. If that were true, computers are already smarter than we are because they’re much better at logical thinking than we are. It’s actually things like being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment; maybe in a poem or in… read more