In an era that feels starved for leadership, we’ve found men and women who will inspire you — some famous, others little known, all of them energizing their followers and making the world better.

43. Peter Diamandis | Age 52, CEO, X Prize Foundation

Apart from the 14 other companies he has founded, Diamandis presides over X Prize Foundation, which hosts $10 million competitions to… read more

Ray Kurzweil predicts that the AI dating depicted in the Oscar-nominated film Her might be possible by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and Google’s director of engineering makes the claim in a review of Spike Jonze’s much-praised sci-fi romance. In a post on his website, Kurzweil delivered a generally positive verdict on the film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man called Theodore who falls in love with… read more

When Ray Kurzweil published The Age Of Spiritual Machines in 1999, he predicted a new era of thinking machines that will meet and then exceed human intelligence.

Today, it appears we are entering a new industrial revolution. In The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil illustrated the point in a cartoon with some posters on the wall showing what computers can’t do and others on the floor representing limits that… read more

If Spike Jonze‘s Her left you yearning for a virtual Scarlett Johansson of your very own, we have some good news. According to futurist Ray Kurzweil, who spends a lot of time pondering such things, a Samantha-like AI could be available as early as 2029.

Other aspects of the movie, like the foul-mouthed video game character, could be available even sooner, around 2020. [...]

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more qualified to discuss the technology that permeates through the movie than the renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil.

In a blog post, the author, who joined Google in 2012, discusses the feasibility of Her‘s AI, concluding that companions with a similar capacity to Samantha could become reality within 15 years. [...]

However, technology is moving faster than we might imagine. But Her is different; it depicts mutual love between man and machine that, for some reason, feels multi-faceted, amorous and profound. Just like the real thing.

Voice synthesis and voice recognition will improve markedly; conversing with computers will feel normal. According to Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, backing up our minds to disk or to the cloud will… read more

According to Ray Kurzweil, within the next few decades the accelerating pace of technological development could create intelligent machines and alter our relationship with technology.

In science fiction the future is often depicted as a dystopian future where robots become self-aware and take over the world. Usually there’s a handful of people fighting for the survival of the human race. [...]

Within five to eight years, search engines will start to appear much more human-like, according to Google Inc. engineering chief Ray Kurzweil.

They will respond to long and complex questions, understand the meaning of the documents that they are searching, and be on the look-out for information they think might be useful to people. [...]

Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil is one of the most accomplished men of our time. Google is trying to bring about technological singularity, creating a true AI smart enough to improve its own source code.

Machines can progress to far-future, science fiction levels of intelligence within our lifetimes. Kurzweil predicts this will happen by 2040.

That’s something Kurzweil’s group is already working on, and if you have… read more