Google futurist Ray Kurzweil is working to improve its search function to the point where humans could type in a sentence, and the computer could understand the query on an emotional level.

And earlier this month, Yahoo acquired Aviate, a company that organizes and searches for phone apps based on what it thinks you’ll be looking for at a certain time. [...]

Kurzweil believes a conscious machine capable of understanding complex natural language will be developed within the next 16 years.

”I’ve had a consistent date of 2029 for that vision,” he told Wired, ”and that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence. It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion.”

Google’s chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, envisions a ”cybernetic friend” based on deep learning… read more

Ray Kurzweil has been quick to point out the remarkable growth that’s possible with solar technology. According to Kurzweil’s calculations, we can expect to be energy independent within the next 20 years.

In his 2012 book Abundance — endorsed by Kurzweil — entrepreneur Peter Diamandis makes the most eloquent case for why the sun is such an important player in any future scenarios of energy self-sufficiency. [...]

Few of us can conceive of the pace with which technological power is developing.

Ray Kurzweil (author, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google) predicts that, by 2025, we’ll have a computer which has the processing power of the human brain.

Society will also have to work out how it’s going to handle the hyper-connectivity of a multisensory internet. [...]

After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie about people. With that, the film took shape. [...]

Popularized by science fiction author Vernor Vinge as well as inventor and now Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil, the singularity is a theoretical point in future history when artificial intelligences exceed the power of the human mind, become self-aware and dramatically change the balance of power on the planet while simultaneously transforming the very nature of humanity itself.

Google recently doubled down on the idea of using… read more

A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.

After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie… read more

With the acceleration of change, the uncertainty that once characterized the far future is coming to characterize the near future.

Some futurists, including Ray Kurzweil, are convinced that, by the year 2020, the rate of change will be so great that human minds will be incapable of encompassing or understanding it. It is true that this accelerating change dynamic continues to influence the telecommunications market in ways that… read more

Kurzweil just released in Spain How to Create a Mind (Lola Books, 2013). A work setting out his theory of the brain that explains how we could recreate its secrets with the help of a computer.

His words are a window into a future in which the boundaries between life and death and our brains (which will be more powerful with the help of a computer) will blur.… read more

Inspired by the idea of the singularity — the term coined by futurist Ray Kurzweil to describe the merger of humans and sentient machines — Transcendence stakes out a middle ground between utopian and apocalyptic visions of the decades ahead.

“I wanted to get away from the cliched notion of a sentient machine taking over the world,” Pfister said. “Is it benevolent or malevolent? I want the audience… read more