Source: The Grid — October 24, 2012 | Jesse Ship
Smug, nerdy, and in full I-told-ya-so form, inventor Ray Kurzweil expounded to an audience of hipsters, futurists, and mad scientists at the Danforth Music Hall last Thursday night. Kurzweil talked about the future of artificial intelligence and a few topics from his upcoming book, How to Create a Mind. Some of the highlights included:
» What really separates the men from the monkeys: According… read more
Source: MTV Hive — February 7, 2013 | Kory Grow
Halfway into the synth-poppy title track for Ra Ra Riot‘s new album, Beta Love, frontman Wes Miles sings, “In this city of robot hearts, ours were made to be.”
No mere fantastical hiccup, that line — and the song’s programming speak title — stem from Miles’ and his bandmates’ interest in science and science fiction, namely the works of sci-fi author William Gibson and inventor-futurist Ray… read more
Source: Quartz — March 18, 2013 | Scott Smith
In 1963, in the depths of the Cold War, all of the futurists in the world could probably assemble in a largish conference room and still have space for an overhead projector. Half a century later, it would take a small stadium to hold all of the people who use the title in some form.
The world of futures is a broad church today populated by… read more
Source: The Daily Gleaner — December 9, 2011 | Tara Chislett
When it comes to the future, we need to change the way we think about innovation, says internationally renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil.
Speaking to a crowd of more than 500 people at the Fredericton Convention Centre — including more than 200 students from District 18 high schools and the University of New Brunswick — Kurzweil delivered the keynote address at the city’s first goFred X conference Thursday afternoon.… read more
Source: PBS Need to Know — February 16, 2011 | Lauren Feeney
Author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil famously and accurately predicted that a computer would beat a man at chess by 1998, that technologies that help spread information would accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that a worldwide communications network would emerge in the mid 1990s (i.e. the Internet).
Most of Kurzweil’s prognostications are derived from his law of accelerating returns — the idea that information technologies progress… 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: University of Advancing Technology — February 19, 2009 | Robert Marshall
The Leonardo da Vinci Society for the Study of Thinking has named Ray Kurzweil, renowned technology futurist, inventor and entrepreneur, as its 2009 inductee. Mr. Kurzweil will appear on campus at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) to receive the honor at the Da Vinci Society’s annual luncheon and colloquium.
The Da Vinci Society was founded in 2005 by UAT President Dominic Pistillo to honor the world’s leading… read more
Source: CNET — November 12, 2012 | Andrew Nusca
The inventor and author speaks onstage at the Techonomy conference in Tucson about his new book on human thought and the themes that stem from it.
Inventor, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil took to the stage here at the Techonomy conference in Tucson to offer his thoughts on a future where humanity is enhanced by technology.
Kurzweil spoke to Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick about his… read more
Source: Las Vegas Sun — January 26, 2013 | Eli Segall
If you worry that the Internet, computers and other electronics play an outsized role in daily life, futurist Ray Kurzweil has one message for you: This is only the beginning.
Kurzweil, who will speak Sunday night at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Audi Speaker Series, predicts a high-tech society that makes today’s lifestyle look straight out of the Stone Age.… read more
Source: Wired — Mar 24, 2008 | Gary Wolf
Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.… read more
