How do you know when your new book is a success? When Google promptly offers you a plum job as soon as the book is on the stands.

That’s the pleasant turn of events that Ray Kurzweil, 64, is enjoying. His most recent book, his sixth, is How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. His new job at Google is director of engineering.… read more

Inferno grafts the artificial-plague motif onto the biology and ideology of population control and the heretical science of the “Transhumanist” movement. This updated variant of eugenics believes that humanity must take control of its own evolution.

Many SF authors, along with outlier scientists such as Ray Kurzweil, have long pondered such a utopian, or dystopian, future. But thanks to Inferno, the neo-Malthusians, the “Population Apocalypse Equation”, and even… 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

As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die? My plan is to stick around. We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy.

To clarify, you’re predicting your immortality. The problem is I can’t get on… read more

In 15 years, the famous inventor expects medical technology will add a year of life expectancy every year. Ray Kurzweil must encounter his share of interviewers whose first question is: What do you hope your obituary will say?

This is a trick question. Mr. Kurzweil famously hopes an obituary won’t be necessary. And in the event of his unexpected demise, he is widely reported to have signed… read more

The advent of wearable computers was one of Ray Kurzweil’s early predictions about the ever nearing Singularity, the moment when computer intelligence will surpass human intelligence and slowly slip out of our control.

At the time he said it, the prediction was as strange sounding as the idea we might all one day be wearing phone booths, and yet both have come to pass in… read more

Futurist inventor Ray Kurzweil blurs the boundaries between man and machine. Futurist forecasting has long been the object of strange fascination. Specific doomsday predictions — whether derived from the Mayan calendar or calculated by Christian radio host Harold Camping — have earned widespread media coverage, prompting no small amount of ridicule and what almost seemed like disappointment the day after.

As the Amazing Criswell dramatically intoned at the beginning… 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