Microsoft’s experiment in China with chatbot known as Xiaoice was a success. Folks chat with Xiaoice when they have been dumped in a relationship, are experiencing depression or been laid off.

As a virtual platform, people can chat for extended lengths of time with her. Users feel she has excellent listening skills, a great sense of humor and so called ability to love you unconditionally.

That machines may… read more

Bill Gates thinks Uber has the best shot at dominating the autonomous vehicle industry. I’ve become little obsessed with exponentially accelerating technology of late. I spent a week at Singularity University, fully indoctrinated into the cult of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.

As long as Uber is around, flush with cash and hugely ambitious, autonomous vehicles will continue their doubling trend, ultimately becoming better than driver vehicles and much… read more

about | What is Genius online? Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. Your interactive guide to human culture.

Genius layers answers to questions over the text itself, enabling you to answer them as you read.

Whenever you’re interested in a passage, you can click it to read an annotation that explains in plain language what you’re reading and why it’s important.

How… read more

about | What is Genius online? Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. Your interactive guide to human culture.

Genius layers answers to questions over the text itself, enabling you to answer them as you read. Whenever you’re interested in a passage, you can click it to read an annotation that explains in plain language what you’re reading and why it’s important.

How… read more

Humanity is in a technological identity crisis and Google’s Ray Kurzweil is intent on designing our future. Can we humans become more human?

On the other hand, will subtle thinking, like sleep, be built into the immortal android race being prepared by Google’s head of research, Mr. Kurzweil?

“Humans will continue to be creative,” is Kurzweil’s simple answer to the question what will humans do when the androids… read more

In a recent talk, Ray Kurzweil showed the complexity of measuring machine consciousness.

“We can’t just ask an entity: Are you conscious?” he said. “Because we can ask entities in video games today, and they’ll say: Yes, I’m conscious and I’m angry at you.

“But we don’t believe them because they don’t have the subtle cues that we associate with really having that subjective state. My prediction is that… read more

Rather than doubling the number of transistors on an integrated circuit every two years — the rate of progress since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made his famous prediction Moore’s law 50 years ago — the period has stretched out to two and a half years.

That will have a deep effect on technology. It implies the chip industry’s extra computing power, over the next decade, will be only half what it would… read more

Honestly, no one knows the answers definitely yet, but here are the best tactics so far. Inventors like Google’s Ray Kurzweil believe it can be done with machines and mind uploading.

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Foundation Chief Scientist and Transhumanist Party anti-aging advisor, Aubrey de Grey, PhD believes it can be done with biology and medicine.

Others believe big data can find out the very best ways to achieve… read more

The singularity is a hypothesized time in the future, approximately 2045, when the capabilities of non-living electronic machines will supersede human capabilities.

Undismissable contemporary thinkers like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Ray Kurzweil warn us that it will change everything. Hawking likens it to receiving a message from aliens announcing their arrival in “a few decades,” saying this is “more or less” what’s happening with artificial intelligence software.

Talk of the singularity ripples with… read more

Gordon Woo, PhD is a Cambridge mathematician and MIT theoretical physicist who now works for the consultancy Risk Management Solutions, analyzing catastrophic risks.

Journalist Michael Grunwald talked to Woo about what he’s learned about old age — its consequences, what kinds of people are most likely to achieve it, what kinds of medical advances are likely to prolong it.

And what it means for public and private finances… read more