Ray Kurzweil

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Co-founder of Singularity University

kurzweilai.net

Ray Kurzweil on Wikipedia

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Ray Kurzweil on Singularity 1 on 1

Published on Oct 12, 2012

singularityweblog.com/ray-kurzweil-on-singularity-1-on-1

Ray Kurzweil's impact on my life in general but especially on what I have been doing for the past 3 or 4 years is hard to exaggerate. It is a simple fact that, if I haven't read his seminal book The Singularity is Near, I would be neither blogging nor podcasting about exponential technologies, not to mention going to Singularity University. And so it was with great excitement and some trepidation that I went to interview Dr. Kurzweil in his office in Boston.

Part of my trepidation came from some technical concerns: I wish I could buy a better camera. I wish I could hire a team of audio and video professionals so that I can focus on the interview itself. I wish I did a better job with the set up. I wish I had noticed that Ray's lavalier mic has slipped out of its holder... The list is exponential. Still, if there is one thing that I've learned since I started podcasting is that we do get better. But it takes time. Meanwhile, my consolation is that eventually I will have to do another interview with Ray Kurweil just so I get it right that time. For now, however, I hope that the content will make up for the technical deficiencies.

During our conversation with Dr. Kurzweil we cover a wide variety of topics such as: how and why at age 5 Ray decided to become an inventor; his unique background of being born to Jewish parents but brought up in a Unitarian Church; his early interest in issues such as religious tolerance, poverty, social inequality and justice; 3D printing, open source, patents, progress and intellectual property rights; Watson, AI, the Turing Test and human rights for AI, the technological singularity and criticism thereof; his upcoming book How To Create A Mind and the Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind; the evolutionary advantages of intelligence; the benefits of reverse-engineering the human brain for the creation of AI and whether the latter would be interested in pondering and solving humanity's greatest problems.

My favorite quote that I will take away from this interview with Ray Kurzweil is:

"Don't be too concerned about what's practical. Follow your passion and be who you would like to be."

[Airicist]

Ray Kurzweil: Get ready for hybrid thinking

Published on Jun 2, 2014

Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become. Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power in the cloud.

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Ray Kurzweil : Earthware Symposium : October 2000

Published on Nov 4, 2014

Ray Kurzweil discusses what the future may bring. Interesting to watch this now and imagine how much technology was not available yet: No Google as we know it in 2000, No Windows XP yet, No iPod yet - it would be released a year later. The Intel Pentium 4 was about to be released, a typical desktop would likely still be running Windows 98 with an 450MHz Processor.

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Your Robot Assistant Will Be Able to Do Things No Human Can Do

Published on May 11, 2015

Ray Kurzweil has made some strong statements and bold predictions here at Big Think. Among them is the fusion between digital technology and the human body in an event called 'the singularity', allowing an essentially cloud-based consciousness to arise (though hopefully a less aggressive one than the Borg's).

This is a sponsored post. Big Think is happy to partner with Singularity University’s Exponential Finance conference, happening June 2nd and 3rd of 2015 in NYC, because they’re as inspired as we are by new ideas and human potential. Exponential Finance provides insight into new technologies that leaders need to understand in order to make the most of the accelerating change happening across business sectors.

So that's where we're headed. Our search engines will actually also know us very well. We will let them listen in on conversations; verbal, written. They'll watch everything we're reading and writing and saying and hearing, and then they'll be like an assistant. It'll say, "Oh, you know, you were talking about how you can get the supplement phosphatidylcholine into the cells yesterday in that conversation with Joe. You know, there's research that came out 13 minutes ago that speaks to that."

It'll 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, and you'll just get used to this information popping up that you wanted and you'll be frustrated if you're thinking about something and it doesn't immediately pop up without you even having to ask for it. I'm not actually predicting that until 2029 that we will match human intelligence, but we can nonetheless do things that humans can't do. I mean, Watson, if it read one page, as I said, wouldn't be as strong as you or I, but it was able to read hundreds of millions of pages and it's ability to read each page is going to increase. So that's where we're headed. But then a comment on that is it's not an alien invasion of these intelligent machines to displace us. We will use them to make ourselves smarter, which is what we do today.

[Airicist]

Ray Kurzweil - Google Intelligence

Published on Apr 12, 2015

For decades Ray Kurzweil has explored how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities. In his latest book, How To Create A Mind, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create intelligent machines. In the near term, Ray's project at Google is developing artificial intelligence based on biologically inspired models of the neocortex to enhance functions such as search, answering questions, interacting with the user, and language translation. The goal is to understand natural language to communicate with the user as well as to understand the meaning of web documents and books. In the long term, Ray believes it is only by extending our minds with our intelligent technology that we can overcome humanity's grand challenges.

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Ray Kurzweil - What Things are Conscious?

Published on Oct 16, 2015

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Book "The Age of Intelligent Machines Hardcover", Ray Kurzweil, 1990 on Amazon

"The Age of Intelligent Machines" on Wikipedia

Article "The Age of Intelligent Machines"

by Ray Kurzweil
November 10, 2015

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Ray Kurzweil - The Future of Medicine

Published on Nov 12, 2015

Filmed on November 12, 2015.

[Airicist]

Ray Kurzweil debates David Gelernter on machine consciousness

Published on Oct 30, 2013

Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)

About the Speaker(s): David Gelernter is also contributing editor at the Weekly Standard and member of the National Council of the Arts. He's the author of books, technical articles, essays, art criticism, and fiction. "Breaking out of the box" (NY Times Magazine, '97) forecast and described the advent of less"ugly computers. He wrote the non"fiction book, Drawing Life: Surviving The Unabomber (Free Press, 1997) and the novels, 1939 and Machine Beauty. He's written for Commentary, ArtNews, The Washington Post and many other periodicals.
He earned a B.A.from Yale University in 1976, and a Ph.D.from The State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982. He joined the Yale faculty in 1982.

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni"font optical character recognition (OCR), the first print"to"speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat"bed scanner, 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.
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