A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.

After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie… read more

Nearly six years ago, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that, within 20 years, solar power technology would advance to the point where it would be able to supply all of the world’s energy needs.

His optimistic forecast wasn’t too far-fetched considering that the amount of energy Earth receives in just one hour would be enough to power humans’ lives for an entire year. [...]

Jonze said he found some inspiration from the writings of the futurist thinker (and director of engineering at Google) Ray Kurzweil.

But he bats away attempts to read into his film any overt messages about technology’s increasing claim on our time and personal lives.

“All the ideas about technology in our lives are certainly interesting, but that’s not where my heart was in making this.

“That sort… read more

“Change is the new constant” is a saying you hear a lot at technology conferences. “But change is not constant,” said inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil at a conference I attended last week.

The world is changing more and more rapidly, fueled by information technology. Unlike some of us given to mouthing such statements, the recipient of the National Medal of Technology had his argument teed up. [...]

The Wall Street Journal will again convene leading chief information and technology officers for the second annual meeting of its CIO Network. The meeting will take place February 3-4 in San Diego to decide action plans for addressing the most pressing technology and innovation challenges facing corporations today.

During the opening session, Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google Inc. and chairman, founder, and CEO of Kurzweil Technologies,… read more

Now the 40 year-old actor has made it four with a well-deserved nomination as Best Actor in a Motion Picture Comedy for his performance in Spike Jonze’s science fiction romance Her.

The film imagines the imminent advent of artificial intelligence and “emotional machines,” the so-called “singularity,” first postulated by futurist Ray Kurzweil and that many technology experts consider to be an inevitable coming development.

It’s a technological prospect… read more

Few of us can conceive of the pace with which technological power is developing.

Ray Kurzweil (author, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google) predicts that by 2025 we’ll have a computer which has the processing power of the human brain, and by 2045 it’ll have the processing power of six billion brains — i.e., everyone on the planet. [...]

Google also has been acquiring talented roboticists in similar fashion. It picked up machine learning expert Professor Geoffrey Hinton, who coinvented the backpropagation and contrastive divergence training algorithms for neural networks.

Ray Kurzweil is among Google’s recent robotics-aimed additions. Ray Kurzweil, a famed proponent of a coming converged of artificial intelligence and humanity, was hired as a “Director of Engineering” at Google. [...]

This week saw the beginning of the marketing campaign for 2014’s Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp as a seemingly megalomaniacal AI researcher. In the first teaser trailer, Depp narrates one of the more widely-held fears.

“Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. In a short time, its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world.… read more

From one perspective, the future looks bright at the American Visionary Art Museum, where the exhibition “Human, Soul and Machine: The Coming Singularity” explores man’s tenuous relationship with technology.

According to the futurist author and inventor Ray Kurzweil — who is featured in a 79-minute documentary that loops continuously as part of the show and who will be honored with the museum’s Grand Visionary Award next… read more