What’s the consensus on Ray Kurzweil’s position concerning future singularity? Is his premise and timeline fiction or reality, but not one that’s going to arrive anytime soon? Is it inevitable as Kurzweil suggests, or millennial day dreaming?

The first use of the term singularity in this context was made by Stanislav Ulam — in his 1958 obituary for John von Neumann. He… read more

Futurist Ray Kurzweil deals with questions about health and aging. He maintains that people in the future will become immortal and could be frozen in cryonics, anticipating an age of advances in medical research.

Within 30 years, machines will be smarter than humans and have power over society, says Kurzweil, renowned inventor and author. He sees an immensely bright future. He predicts:

• There will be more of

… read more

Google’s resident futurist and famed inventor Ray Kurzweil takes 100 pills a day to help him reach singularity, the point at which he believes exponential developments in technology will allow him to live forever.

He stopped by our office and talked to us about food science and supplemental nutrition. Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism. He is author… read more

A child in Africa with a mobile phone has access to more information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. The smart phone in your pocket is a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer all the students and professors shared at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965.

As author, futurist, and inventor Ray Kurzweil — who also happens to be my father… read more

The world’s most influential voices of 2015

The Global Thought Leaders index for 2015, a collective intelligence analysis that maps the global conversation on the internet and ranks its most influential voices, has just been released by The World Post and Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Index of the world’s most influential voices — those who shape the way we think, and how their… read more

I’m intrigued by Facebook M — the artificial intelligence human oversight product that will eventually be part of, or become, Facebook’s Messenger application. There are a lot of positive words being written about the program but M is not likely to be real AI for some time. Most confuse machine learning for artificial intelligence.

Machine learning counts as AI, but not all AI counts as machine learning. Machine learning is a… read more

In a recent interview, physicist Stephen Hawking, PhD, said he was deeply concerned for the future of humanity. The cause is artificial intelligence, the creation of intelligent machines able to out-think their creators. Artificial intelligence, as an extension of our intellectual ability, has many advantages.

Yet it has no moral sensitivity. It does not share the ethical limitations of its programmer.

Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, said, “It… read more

Futurist Ray Kurzweil and Rabbi Adin Even Israel Steinsaltz, the Aleph Society, spoke on stage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

They talked about evil and progress, then the audience went upstairs for cocktails. Steinsaltz is a writer on religious principles, Jewish theorist, and a popular university and radio commentator.

Kurzweil is a prolific inventor and writer, known for his predictions about technology, who brought his kids… read more

listen to the show | In this episode of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tech trends radio show Spark, hostess Nora Young interviews Ray Kurzweil on his principles for understanding the brain’s organization and functions, heralding new advances that could result in computers that mimic human abilities.

full transcript | You can think of the brain as an amazing feat of engineering. Researchers struggle to piece together just… read more

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, says we’re close to linking our brains with AI. Science fiction has a long tradition of pitting artificial intelligence (AI) against humanity in a struggle for dominance.

Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist and inventor, envisions a more cooperative future. He says the human brain will soon merge with computer networks to form a hybrid artificial intelligence. “In the 2030s we’re going to connect directly from the… read more