Source: USA Today — February 9, 2011 | Sam Meddis
When the IBM computer called “Watson” faces off against past “Jeopardy” champs on Monday (February 14,2011), no one will be watching more intently than inventor Ray Kurzweil, a leading authority on the future of artificial intelligence. Based on his calculations of the accelerating rate of growth of computing power, Kurzweil in the 1980s predicted that a computer would defeat a… read more
NAMM | At the 2012 NAMM Show on January 19, 2012, NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants), President and CEO Joe Lamond presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Ray Kurzweil, “an American author, inventor and futurist in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.”
Lamond also presented NAMM’s Music for Life Award to Stevie Wonder, honoring him for his “brilliant… read more
Source: Discovery News — Decemeber 17, 2012 | DNews editors
Ray Kurzweil is more than an inventor. Sure, he gave us the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
But Kurzweil is more than that. He is keenly focused on… read more
Source: Bionic.ly — February 27, 2013 | Stephen Davies
6. Ray Kurzweil | While not specifically focused on digital health, the author, futurist and proponent of the technological singularity, Kurzweil’s writings have impacted and inspired those working in digital health. “My perspective on digital health is not simply to use information technology to collect and organize information, but rather to understand and reprogram the information processes underlying biology,” told the HEALTH Critical blog. [...]
Source: Forbes — April 15, 2013 | Chris Conover
Ray Kurzweil plans to live forever. All power to him. Mr. Kurzweil’s contributions to mankind arguably have been so extraordinary that perhaps we owe it to him to provide him medical care in perpetuity.
Alternatively, perhaps he never plans to retire and/or has amassed a portfolio easily capable of supporting him in perpetuity unassisted by either Social Security or Medicare. In that case, no obvious public policy issues… read more
Source: Time — February 10, 2011 | Lev Grossman
On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I’ve Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano.
The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America —… read more
Source: The Verge — February 18, 2013 | T.C. Sottek
The New York Times reports that the Obama administration plans to spearhead a scientific effort over the next decade that aims to build a comprehensive map of activity in the human brain. The effort will reportedly involve scientists from federal agencies and private foundations that will work together to advance our understanding of perception, actions, and consciousness.
The Times says that the project seeks to accomplish the same level of… read more
Source: The Boston Globe — December 8, 2012 | Kate Tuttle
If you met a non-biological intelligent entity, one that demonstrated convincingly human-like emotional responses (it could laugh and cry, tell a joke, and argue), would you accept it as a conscious being, more or less equivalent to a person? Ray Kurzweil says he would, and much of his latest book focuses on trying to persuade readers to abandon long-held beliefs about the unique value of the human… read more
Source: LiveScience — May 6, 2013 | Tia Ghose
In his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005), futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that computers will be as smart as humans by 2029, and that by 2045, “computers will be billions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence,” Kurzweil wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience.
Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid… read more
Source: Discovery Institute Evolution News — October 17, 2012
Some evolutionists do not particularly care about the past as much as the evolutionary development of the human brain extending into the future.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, currently promoting his new book How to Create a Mind, believes that someday we will be able to reverse-engineer the brain, uncovering its secrets. Kurzweil acknowledges the evolutionary gap between humans and all other animals, but rather than trying… read more
