Although sci-fi teems with cautionary tales of machines growing smarter than humans and taking over the world, on the basis of Her, I think Jonze yearns on some level for what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls “the singularity,” when machines will take on human characteristics and our minds will be expanded by machines.

Jonze began with what could have been a one-joke idea, and in the course of getting it on… read more

Welcome to the debut of The New York Times Bestseller List of Education titles.

This collection of eclectic and far-ranging titles is intended to get people talking and thinking about the many ways we discuss education, how we present sometimes arcane subjects, and how we think about teaching and learning at all ages and in many contexts.

The list was compiled by looking at every adult nonfiction… read more

This spring Hollywood will weigh in with Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp as an AI researcher targeted by violent extremists who think we’re crossing a Rubicon that will be a disaster for humanity.

A few years ago I read chunks of Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil argued that what sets our age apart from all previous ones is the accelerating pace of technological advance.

This… read more

As with the larger whole of his work, Jonze challenges our notions of consciousness and embodiment through the naive notion of fantasy, but this time he takes pains to tie down Theodore’s romance with a technologically plausible narrative that sees Ray Kurzweil’s singularity coming steadily nearer.

Despite the ever-prevalence of tech and disconnection between people, Her is a powerful work of emotionally driven cinema. [...]

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