Futurist inventor Ray Kurzweil blurs the boundaries between man and machine. Futurist forecasting has long been the object of strange fascination. Specific doomsday predictions — whether derived from the Mayan calendar or calculated by Christian radio host Harold Camping — have earned widespread media coverage, prompting no small amount of ridicule and what almost seemed like disappointment the day after.

As the Amazing Criswell dramatically intoned at the beginning… read more

When an IBM computer program called Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, wise folk opined that since chess was just a game of logic, this was neither significant nor surprising. Mastering the subtleties of human language, including similes, puns and humor, would remain far beyond the reach of a computer.

Last year another IBM program, Watson, triumphed at just these challenges by winning… read more

Famed AI researcher and incorrigable singularity forecaster Ray Kurzweil recently shed some more light on what his new job at Google will entail. It seems that he does, indeed, plan to build a prodigious artificial intelligence, which he hopes will understand the world to a much more sophisticated degree than anything built before, or at least that will act as if it does.

Kurzweil’s AI will be designed to analyze… read more

Can nonbiological brains have real minds of their own? In this article, drawn from his latest book, futurist/inventor Ray Kurzweil describes the future of intelligence — artificial and otherwise.

“The mammalian brain has a distinct aptitude not found in any other class of animal. We are capable of hierarchical thinking, of understanding a structure composed of diverse elements arranged in a pattern, representing that arrangement with a symbol,… read more

In an interview last year with Motherboard’s Derek Mead, professor Kevin Warwick described an experiment in which he and a team of scientists created a very simple, two-dimensional, living brain of about 100,000 neurons and connected it to robots (a human brain, by contrast, approaches 100 billion).

It’s just a matter of time, he suggests, before scientists can build one in 3-D that’s much bigger. He also thinks… read more

What happens when non-biological implants in our bodies — along the lines of cochlear implants to improve hearing in the deaf — include brain-related devices that might enhance our memories? Will we still be “us”? Will we be more of a cyborg than we were if, say, we had another type of implant? And for those who believe we would not be, at what point do we… read more