Shares of Google closed at $845.72 in New York today, up almost 2 percent. It’s been a pretty big week for the company. Google Now, a voice-activated search assistant, launched on iPhone this week. And the wearable computer Google Glass has been getting a lot of press.

Pretty much everything Google’s doing is changing the way we think about and get our information. What’s all that… read more

The federal government wants to spend $100 million to unravel the complex  of the human brain. But there’s someone else who’s been thinking a lot about the brain: The legendary inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil has done pioneering work in optical character readers, flatbed scanners, electronic keyboards for musicians, and beyond. He has thought a lot about the ways technology and human beings are becoming more intertwined… read more

We currently fight heart disease with drugs that reduce cholesterol buildup; but with new technologies predicted for the 2020s, we will simply grow new veins or hearts where necessary. In fact, nearly all of our organs, bones, muscles, hair, and skin can be replaced as these new procedures become available.

Ray Kurzweil, in his best-selling book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, confirmed that we… read more

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert andGoogle’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves.

“I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus. [...]

A future of frictionless, continuous shopping fits with Google’s vision for a world where we no longer need to search for anything, since we ourselves are perpetually monitored, with the relevant product or information sent to us based on perceived need. “Autonomous search,” they call it.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, even wants to give us a “cybernetic friend” that could satisfy our… read more

When Google announced in January that Ray Kurzweil would be joining the company, a lot of people wondered why the phenomenally accomplished entrepreneur and futurist would want to work for a large company he didn’t start.

Kurzweil’s answer: No one but Google could provide the kind of computing and engineering resources he needed to fulfill his life’s work. Ever since age 14, the 65-year-old inventor of everything from music synthesizers to… read more

Ray Kurzweil foresees a disease-free world where no one ages and artificial brains make machines human-like — and he is not one to get things wrong. He is a pioneer, exploring a hinterland that lies just beyond the horizon of current possibilities; a twilight zone between science fact and fiction, between predictions rooted in existing technology and the wildest lunatic speculation.

Ray Kurzweil is an American… read more