Ray Kurzweil
Co-Founder & Chancellor, Singularity University and Director of Engineering, Google
Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (born 1948) is an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields as diverse as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.
He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written six books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.
Technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil says our brains, as complex as they are, are constrained by an upper limit of 300 million “pattern recognizers.” But our future, cloud-based “virtual brains” will have no such constraints.
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In our most recent discussion with Ray, he discusses the ability of natural language machines, such as IBM’s Jeopardy!-slaying computer named Watson, to overleap our own cognitive abilities. The result, he says, will be a computerized personal assistant to help us throughout the day.
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Your computer will be an assistant that helps you through the day, will answer your questions before you ask them or even before you realize you have a question
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Ray Kurzweil is the author of the book How to Create a Mind. The first question we have for him is “why create a mind?”
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Being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment – that’s the cutting edge of human intelligence.
The basic technologies to enable us to look inside the brain and see its functioning are growing exponentially. And they’re at a point now where we can actually see individual interneural connections forming and firing.
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I’m not actually predicting that until 2029 that we will match human intelligence, but computers will nonetheless do things that humans can’t do.
We won’t be able to solve the major problems that we have without more intelligence.
I think you have a very different perspective on the future when you consider the exponential growth of information technology.
My prediction is, in a few decades, we will come to accept entities that are not biological as conscious.
There’s a million apps out there, and if you look through all of them they’re doing remarkable things.
Intelligence actually involves things like being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment, maybe in a poem or in a musical piece.
I did do an analysis of the 147 predictions I did for 2009 in my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which I wrote in the mid to late 1990’s […]
All too often we get plans which have this common assumption that the future’s going to be just like today.
We live in one unified world.
Ray Kurzweil is the author of the recent book How to Create a Mind. The first question we have for him is “why create a mind?”
Ray Kurzweil has developed six epochs for stages in the evolution of information.
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In 10 years we’ll have three dimensional virtual realities that will seem just like real reality, beamed straight from eyeglasses into our retinas.
At what point does a robot become so lifelike that it becomes a human? And vice-versa, at what point does a human with robotic enhancements no longer become a human?
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If you can survive for 34 more years, you have a good shot at living forever, says futurist Ray Kurzweil. Here are his three favorite dietary supplements that will make […]
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Once humans and machines merge—in 2045, according to Kurzweil—reproduction will no longer be a biological necessity. So why and how will we continue to have sex?
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With the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, students no longer need to be spoon-fed facts, but they do need to develop a thirst for knowledge and the ability to learn […]
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With Time magazine’s recent cover story on futurist Ray Kurzweil, his theories about the singularity have entered the mainstream. Now hear them straight from the source.
The coming biotechnology revolution will allow us, in the next 15 to 20 years, to reprogram our genes to resist both aging and disease. By mid-century, we may all be […]
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Futurist Ray Kurzweil discusses how robotic red blood cells will aid in ending disease as we know it.
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The true promise of nanotechnology, says Ray Kurzweil, is that “we’ll be able to create just about anything we need in the physical world from information files with very inexpensive […]
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Ray Kurzweil says set high standards and try to meet them, plus be your own worst critic
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Futurist Ray Kurzweil on preparing for the Singularity.
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Futurist Ray Kurzweil assesses the current state of virtual reality before predicting how everything will change in the coming decades.
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