“A new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews,” according to Reuters. “It will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.

“The $99 app is the result of a four decades long relationship between the National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, a… read more

In The Wall Street Journal, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers revived a debate with futurist Ray Kurzweil about the jobless future.

In his debate with me, Kurzweil said: “Automation always eliminates more jobs than it creates if you only look at the circumstances narrowly surrounding the automation. That’s what the Luddites saw in the early 19th century in the textile industry in England. The new jobs came from… read more

Futurist Ray Kurzweil notes that solar power has been doubling every two years for the past 30 years, as costs have been dropping. He says solar energy is only six doublings — or less than 14 years — away from meeting 100 percent of today’s energy needs.

Energy usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. But, by Kurzweil’s estimates, inexpensive renewable sources will provide more… read more

Futurist Ray Kurzweil notes that solar power has been doubling every two years for the past 30 years, as costs have been dropping. He says solar energy is only six doublings — or less than 14 years — away from meeting 100 percent of today’s energy needs.

Energy usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. But, by Kurzweil’s estimates, inexpensive renewable sources will provide more… read more

Google introduced Calico to the world with the bold ambition of curing death. CEO Larry Page, Google Ventures head honcho Bill Maris, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who Google hired as its director of engineering, have all expressed a deep interest in radical life extension and the Singularity.

Larry Page had told Time, “One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add… read more

Singularity University gets its name from the theory of singularity — written about by its co-founder Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist — the inevitable moment when machines will surpass human intelligence

Its faculty is unparalleled. One of the partners, Ray Kurzweil, is a computer scientist, futurist, chief engineer at Google and author of a book on artificial intelligence called The Singularity Is Near. [...]

This progression is known as Moore’s law. For more than 100 years, the processing power of computers had doubled every 18 months.

Computers and the information technology that they enable are absorbing other fields. So we are seeing exponential advances in sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, medicine, 3D printing, and so on.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil says: “As any technology becomes an information technology, it starts advancing exponentially.” That… read more

Joe Lynch: Do you believe we’ll reach the point of living indefinitely in our lifetimes?

Steve Aoki: Luckily I got to interview Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is the man pushing the concept of technological singularity. He believes we’ll reach it in our lifetime. He introduces the album. The first track is called “Transcendence.”

I interviewed Ray Kurzweil, took one of the voice bites from our interview, and I… read more

Ray Kurzweil, a leading proponent of the search for a sentient computer system notes, “IBM’s Watson is not quite at human levels in its ability to understand human language.

“If it were, we would be at the Turing test level now. Yet it was able to defeat the best humans in the game show Jeopardy! This is because of the inherent speed and reliability of memory that computers… read more

First articulated by British philosopher Max More in 1990, transhumanists generally advocate a post human condition where humanity is replaced by the next stage in evolution — a human machine hybrid.

Some, like futurist writer Ray Kurzweil, imagine uploading human consciousness into a machine so we can live forever within computer systems as networks of information. [...]