Source: Foreign Policy — November 30, 2009
From the brains behind Iran’s Green Revolution to the economic Cassandra who actually did have a crystal ball, they had the big ideas that shaped our world in 2009. Read on to see the 100 minds that mattered most in the year that was.
71. Ray Kurzweil — for advancing the technology of eternal life.
FUTURIST | NORTH ANDOVER, MASS.
By 2045, the differences… read more
Source: The Huffington Post — March 21, 2013 | Oren Frank
If we zoom out, one can argue that although information and knowledge are more accessible than ever before, it did not stop almost half of Americans from voting for a party that was founded in the 19th century and has made little progress since.
Robber barons use Bloomberg and Bombardiers instead of snail mail and horses, and for 50 years we fly Boeings below the speed… read more
Source: New York Times — May 23, 2009 | John Markoff
Several years ago the artificial-intelligence pioneer Raymond Kurzweil took the idea one step further in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.” He sought to expand Moore’s Law to encompass more than just processing power and to simultaneously predict with great precision the arrival of post-human evolution, which he said would occur in 2045.… read more
Source: The Washington Post — December 2, 2011 | Vivek Wadhwa
Do people stop being creative as they reach middle age? Henry Ford introduced the Model T when he was 45. Sam Walton built Walmart in his mid-40s.
Some of the most creative people of the century were also not young. Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near in his 50s; Alfred Hitchcock directed Vertigo when he was 59; Frank Lloyd Wright built his architectural masterpiece, Fallingwater, when he was 68.… 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
Source: CNNMoney — October 25, 2012
Futurist, inventor, author: In 1978, Xerox became interested in Kurzweil Computer Products and made an investment in my company. In 1979 they expressed interest in acquiring it. They were interested in the scanning and character-recognition technology. Xerox was in the printer business, and they had a lot of machines: copiers, printers that took computerized information and put it out onto paper.
We had a technology that could… read more
Source: Rough Type — February 16, 2009 | Nicholas Carr
“HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.” The Singularity — the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal — has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke. In a profile in the current issue of Rolling Stone (not available online), Kurzweil describes how, in the… read more
Source: Scientific American — April 21, 2000
On March 14, 2000, in Washington, D.C., President Bill Clinton bestowed the 1999 National Medal of Technology on five distinguished recipients. Since 1985, when the first Medal was awarded, these ceremonies have recognized individuals, teams and corporations who as technological innovators have made lasting contributions to the enhancement of America’s economic competitiveness and standard of living.… read more
Source: The State Press — October 29, 2012 | Caleb Varoga
According to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, the singularity is “an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today — the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.”
Kurzweil describes singularity as an exciting and progressive movement, but while there’s nothing to fear… read more
