The World Future Society’s upcoming conference, “WorldFuture 2010: Sustainable Futures, Strategies, and Technologies,” will be held July 8–10, 2010, at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts. The meeting will offer a wealth of sessions on technology, health, governance, values, education, societal trends, business, environment, and more. Conference discussions, workshops, and informal conversations will enable you and other participants to exchange ideas, increase your knowledge about the future, and share insights.

The computer is going to make its way into our bodies and brains, says inventor Ray Kurzweil. At WorldFuture 2010, Kurzweil, winner of the National Technology Medal and bestselling author, will discuss the research in his new book How the Mind Works and How to Build One. “We will soon have the capacity to understand, model and simulate the human brain and thus reverse engineer the human cortex.” Around 2030, predicts Kurzweil, humankind will create a computer capable of creativity and contemplation, an artificial intelligence indistinguishable from what we today call human intelligence.

According to inventor Stephen Thaler, a highly proficient synthetic consciousness exists today, and has been quietly thinking, creating, and churning out products for more than 30 years. Thaler’s program, The Creativity Machine, has invented new-and-improved everything from toothbrushes to warheads. At WorldFuture 2010, he’ll discuss the sociological, philosophical and spiritual implications of this enormous breakthrough.

“The possibility of a human disaster arising from the use of robots capable of lethal force is obvious,” wrote Yale bioethicist and AI expert Wendell Wallach in his 2009 book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. “Looming over our choices is the rather melodramatic possibility that we are in the process of inventing the human species, as we have known it, out of existence,” he warns. At WorldFuture 2010, Wallach will lay out how we, as a society, will navigate the promise and perils of technologies emerging from today’s artificial intelligence research.