If you know electronic synthesized music, you know the work of Ray Kurzweil. But the MIT futurist and transhumanist has many more inventions to his name than electronic keyboards. He’s also developed a cult following for his prediction of the merging of humans and computers, which he describes in his book The Singularity Is Near. And in a forthcoming book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human… read more

In his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts 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 email to LiveScience.

Singularity, for those mere mortals who are unaware, is the theoretical emergence of a super-intelligence through technological means. First proposed… read more

Kurzweil Applied Intelligent Systems was founded in 1982, with the goal of creating a voice-activated word processor. The grail has been very large vocabulary, speaker independence, and continuous speech. One thing that makes it possible today is Moore’s Law. It’s only been in the last six months that we’ve had PCs that can support the processing requirements of continuous speech. The next step now is to integrate natural-language understanding with… read more