Source: The New York Times — December 27, 2010 | Ray Kurzweil
Thirty years ago, I realized that timing was the key to success as an inventor. Most inventions fail because the timing is wrong — the innovation needs to make sense for the world that will exist when the project is finished.
Consider how quickly the world changes; just a few years ago, most people didn’t use social networks, wikis or blogs. As an engineer, I gathered a lot of… read more
Source: Scientific American — December 5, 2011 | Gary Stix
Ray Kurzweil and other so-called transhumanists have promised that in coming decades we will be able to transfer a digital copy of the trillions of connections among nerve cells in our brains into a computer. We would essentially reincarnate ourselves as non-biological beings that persist for eternity inside a laptop, on the endless links of the Internet or as avatars inside a television set. After achieving the ultimate copy and… read more
Source: PRWeb — February 22, 2012
The first Global Future Congress 2045 (GF2045) was held on Feb.17-20 in Moscow, where 56 world leading physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and philosophers met to discuss breakthroughs in life extension technologies and draft a resolution to the United Nations setting the radical lengthening of human lifespan and the creation of avatars as a priority for the preservation of humankind.
About 500 people attended the three-day… read more
Source: We Blog the World — July 31, 2012
Singularity University held an event in conjunction with Women@TheFrontier at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley last week.
The program: “Designing the Future 2012″ brought together some of today’s female game-changers who are designing the future and disrupting the status quo.
Women@TheFrontier’s Susan Fonseka-Klein and KristinaMaria T-Gutierrez introduced inspirational women who had one heart warming story after another to share.
NASA’s Yvonne Cagle also paid a sentimental tribute to astronaut Sally Ride who passed away on July… read more
Source: The Verge — March 20, 2013 | Nathan Ingraham
It’s been a few months since noted author, futurist and AI guru Ray Kurzweil joined Google, and Singularity Hub has interviewed him to catch up on how his machine learning projects are going thus far.
While Kurzweil said his projects haven’t progressed too far at this point, he did reveal some details on how he ended up at Google in the first place.
Following the release of How To Create… read more
Source: Voice of America — Jun 24, 2009 | Erin Brummett
Welcome to T2A Chat as we meet one of the world’s leading inventors, Ray Kurzweil. He was principal developer of 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. Ray joins us from Boston, Massachusetts.… read more
Source: h+ magazine — December 30, 2009 | Surfdaddy Orca, R.U. Sirius
A 3-way conversation with the brilliant and controversial inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil needs little or no introduction to most h+ readers. Principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, 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, Ray… read more
Source: Wired — October 2002 | Ray Kurzweil
As one of the world’s leading roboticists, Rodney Brooks (Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Chairman of the successful iRobot Corporation) is also the consummate teacher.
He has a penchant for clear explanation and in his latest book, Flesh and Machines, How Robots Will Change Us, Brooks lucidly explores a wide range of themes related to his life with robots.
These range from personal anecdotes (e.g., his first encounter with another legendary robot builder, Hans Moravec, who was then living in his Stanford laboratory and musing about exotic topics ranging from sky hooks to tree-like robots), historical vignettes (e.g., Marvin Minsky’s unsuccessful attempt to solve the computer “vision” problem in a single Summer in 1966), algorithmic insights (e.g., how his Genghis robot achieved “animal-like behavior” from a few dozen simple programs operating in parallel), philosophical musings (e.g., what is the true nature of consciousness, “apart from our own personal experience of what it is like to be us?”), and ethical dilemmas (e.g., when will we need to stop treating robots like slaves).
The book ranges far and wide, but maintains a unity around the author’s passion for creating what he calls “situated creatures,” which we can eventually regard as our teachers and companions.… read more
Source: Technology Review — October 12, 2011 | Paul Allen & Mark Greaves
Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point.
Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they’ll possess… read more
Source: Flip the Media — March 13, 2012 | Joe Pavey
On Monday afternoon author and inventor Ray Kurzweil took the stage at SXSW for an interview session with frequent Time magazine contributor Lev Grossman.
Kurzweil, somewhat of a controversial figure in the tech community, was there to discuss his radically optimistic views on technology, human consciousness, and evolution.
The session began with Kurzweil delivering a short slide presentation about his predictions on how technology will impact… read more