Futurist and Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil’s theory about the exponential growth of technology contains an insight that should be of enduring interest to early adopters seeking an edge.

Kurzweil explains that the exponential progress of most areas of technology happens because a long period of development of basic functions is followed by rapid growth in which higher level functions are built on top, leading to even higher… read more

TED | TED Brain Trust: The following members of the TED community serve as a valued source of advice on issues of importance to TED’s future.

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A shopping trip in the not-so-distant future promises to be a virtual reality version of a fully stocked store projected in 3D from eyeglasses to your retina.

“The cell phone is the gateway to everything. In 10 years it will be embedded in your belt,” said futurist Ray Kurzweil.

That was one of many predictions served up to chief marketing officers from 40 major retailers at a… read more

CNN | CNN original series Morgan Spurlock Inside Man, hosted and produced by the Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, launched its second season on CNN on April 13, 2014.

The second episode, “Futurism,” featured Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD. The program, which was recently honored with an award for “best limited series” by the International Documentary Association, premiered in 2013 on CNN.

Each week, Spurlock will immerse… read more

In case you missed it, CNN’s Inside Man documentary series ran a segment on April 20, 2014 titled “The Future.” And the “future” topic for this show was nothing less than extreme life extension.

The big takeaway from this program was you don’t need to be an immortality seeker to both enjoy it and benefit from it. It covered the gamut from a complete longevity workup followed by… read more

Microsoft is preparing an answer to Apple’s Siri and Google Now called Cortana that may appear on Windows phones as early as next year.

So the question becomes: Is Cortana just a code name, or is Microsoft going all in on an AI assistant that looks and acts like Halo’s Cortana? Heck, Ray Kurzweil has Ramona. Why not? [...]

Computers will soon be able to learn from experience, tell jokes and even flirt, according to Ray Kurzweil, the company’s artificial intelligence expert.

The 66-year-old entrepreneur and futureologist, who predicted the rise of the internet and that a world chess champion would one day be beaten by a computer, has said machines will outsmart their makers by 2029.

In an interview with The Observer, he said, “My… read more

“Money is a very interesting philosophical idea in that we have all of humanity agreeing on this system,” said Ray Kurzweil. “So even though we may radically disagree on some things — like let’s say the U.S. government and Al Qaeda — they both respect money. So it’s remarkable how we have this universal respect for this very esoteric virtual construct.”

Mr. Kurzweil is not sure how easy… read more

Igloo Animations | This audio is taken from documentary film Transcendent Man. Igloo cut the audio to explain what the technological singularity is, in one minute.

Igloo Animations creates multimedia content. Established by director Trevor Courtney, Igloo is an award-winning animation studio and created Gimme the Short Version, which makes complex topics easy to digest, presents information clearly and simply and informs with bite-size visual chunks.

related… read more

New Scientist | Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Bono have all done it. Soon robots will have a chance to deliver their own TED talks. That’s the latest challenge to the field of artificial intelligence, announced yesterday by the non-profit X Prize Foundation.

“We will need to take some number of months to figure this out,” Diamandis adds. “We have some great experts like Ray Kurzweil and Sebastian… read more