By all accounts, Ray Kurzweil is a genius, a “restless genius,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Forbes called him the “ultimate thinking machine,” while PBS picked him as one of 16 “Revolutionaries Who Made America” — a list that included legends like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

You know those names every time you flick on a light or jump into a car, but despite… read more

Google’s understanding of the non-privacy of e-mail applies not only to Gmail users who send e-mail, but also e-mail users on other services that send to Gmail.

Its approach to e-mail is, of course, only the tip of its non-privacy iceberg. The company has made it very clear that it intends to know what users want before they do, as its director of engineering Ray Kurzweil… read more

There are other scientists, like Ray Kurzweil, founder of Singularity University, who believe human immortality will come not from our biology, but from our technology.

Singularity University, in partnership with groups like Google, are trying to push and accelerate the boundaries of artificial intelligence. The group believes that eventually machines will not only gain intelligence, but rocket far beyond what humans are capable of being. They… read more

Writer and lecturer Eran Katz holds the record for memory exercises. In his new book, he explains how simple techniques can make us all memory whizzes.

Doesn’t technological progress make all those techniques superfluous? Is there still any significance to memorization? Are you familiar with the argument of futurist Ray Kurzweil? He claims we no longer have any need for memory based on memorization. But in the… read more

Today our technology improves at the speed of Moore’s Law, and those who study that exponential growth, like Ray Kurzweil, contend that we will not only map the brain in our lifetime, but are only a decade away from doing so.

Such ambitious claims are certain to give a neuroscientist the same knee jerk reaction that life scientists had when similar early claims were made about sequencing… read more

A number of experts believe that Moore’s law is just a special case of a more profound principle stated by Theodore Wright in a 1936 paper, “Facts Affecting Costs of Airplanes.” Ray Kurzweil more recently restated Wright’s Law, as it came to be known, as “The Law of Accelerating Returns.”

They assert that “practice makes perfect” and there are “economies of production.” The power and economics… read more

Google has long focused its engineering resources on artificial intelligence. In December 2012, the company hired AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil to work on getting computers to converse more intelligently with humans, and the company is also using large-scale neural networks, which mimic how the human brain functions.

Ultimately, Google’s AI moon shot is for its brain to pass the Turing test, proof that a machine has… read more

This modern era is no different, of course, if anything, faith in technology has made the impossible seem possible. That faith is beginning to lend legitimacy to physical immortalists, a still-fringe but growing cast of characters who view death as a curable disease.

Anti-aging researchers at Harvard and other top medical institutions are making strides every day on new drugs and interventions from compounds such as… read more

Some experts believe aging ultimately will be conquered by engineers and computer scientists rather than biomedical researchers.

Ray Kurzweil, an American computer scientist and inventor whose work has led to the development of everything from checkout scanners at supermarkets to text-reading machines for the blind, says that what might seem outlandish today eventually will become possible because technological change is exponential rather than linear, meaning that… read more

Ray Kurzweil is another case in point. In books such as The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil is forever predicting that we will merge with machines and be able to upload our “complete” consciousness into machines. This idea is emerging as the next big challenge in robotics but it could equally be viewed as a basic feature of human cultural existence.

I’m “uploading”… read more