Ray Kurzweil


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."
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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.
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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.
Copyright MIT World -- special events and lectures

November 30, 2006
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Keynote "The Future of Intelligence, Artificial and Natural", Ray Kurzweil

Published on May 26, 2017

CeBIT Global Conferences - 22 March 2017: Keynote "The Future of Intelligence, Artificial and Natural" / The Future of Intelligence, Artificial and Natural, Ray Kurzweil
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Ray Kurzweil - Human-level AI is just 12 years away

Published on Nov 9, 2017

Recorded: November 3, 2017

In December 2012, Kurzweil was hired by Google in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing". He was personally hired by Google co-founder Larry Page. Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google".
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Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321

Sep 17, 2022

Ray Kurzweil is an author, inventor, and futurist.

Outline:

0:00 - Introduction
1:06 - Turing test
14:51 - Brain–computer interfaces
26:31 - Singularity
32:51 - Virtual reality
35:31 - Evolution of information processing
41:57 - Automation
51:57 - Nanotechnology
53:51 - Nuclear war
55:57 - Uploading minds
1:03:38 - How to think
1:10:08 - Digital afterlife
1:19:28 - Intelligent alien life
1:22:18 - Simulation hypothesis
1:26:31 - Mortality
1:34:10 - Meaning of life
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The Last 6 Decades of AI — and What Comes Next | Ray Kurzweil | TED

Jun 27, 2024

How will AI improve our lives in the years to come? From its inception six decades ago to its recent exponential growth, futurist Ray Kurzweil highlights AI’s transformative impact on various fields and explains his prediction for the singularity: the point at which human intelligence merges with machine intelligence.
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The Man Who Predicted AGI Decades Ago w/ Ray Kurzweil | EP
Oct 24, 2024
In this episode, Ray and Peter discuss 2025 predictions, Job loss in the coming years, and Ray’s thoughts on nanotech taking over the world. Recorded on Oct 18th, 2024Views are my thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Ray Kurzweil is a world-class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions. He has been a leading developer in artificial intelligence for 61 years – longer than any other living person. He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Ray received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievement in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates. He has written five best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near and How To Create A Mind, both New York Times bestsellers, and Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. His new book, The Singularity Is Nearer was released on June 25th and debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. He is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google.

0:00 - The Future of AI: A Conversation
2:56 - Kurzweil Talks Exponential Future in Podcast
6:47 - The Transformative Technological Singularity Approaches
12:44 - AGI Predictions Prove Conservative
15:20 - The Future of AI: Hope or Fear?
18:00 - The Disruptive Power of AI
24:47 - Revolutionizing Diagnostics and Therapeutics: Fountain Life
27:06 - The Future of Jobs with Robots
31:16 - The Rise of Digital Superintelligence
35:56 - The Power of Nanotechnology Unleashed
40:25 - AI's Impact on Nobel Prizes
42:51 - The Race to Longevity Escape Velocity
49:47 - New Technology: Avatar Zoom Meetings
52:23 - Google's Breakthrough for Cancer Treatment
55:06 - AI Revolutionizing Health and Gut Health Startup Offers Exclusive Discount
57:30 - The Future of Humanity: AI Evolution
58:37 - The Future of Customizable Bodies
59:41 - Preparing Teens for the Future
1:01:13 - The Future of Artificial Intelligence
1:03:35 - The Future of Artificial Intelligence
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