Robots Rising, Riding the Wave

The Guardian - 2.22.14 by Carole Cadwalladr

Ray Kurzweil popularised the Teminator-like moment he called the 'singularity', when artificial intelligence overtakes human thinking. But now the man who hopes to be immortal is involved in the very same quest – on behalf of the tech behemoth.

Solent News/Rex

It's hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?

With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive "long enough" to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he's 66 and he believes that "some of the baby-boomers will make it through"). Or with the fact that he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.

But then everyone's allowed their theories. It's just that Kurzweil's theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he's been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.

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Take a Look at Your Future

CNN - 12.10.13 by Ray Kurzweil

By 2030 solar energy will have the capacity to meet all of our energy needs. The production of food and clean water will also be revolutionized.

(CNN) -- By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.
Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair.

We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.

All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s. We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to.

We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers.

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Google Plus Kurzweil Equals AI

Wired - 4.25.13 by Steven Levy

I’ve had a consistent date of 2029 for that vision. And that doesn’t just mean logical intelligence. It means emotional intelligence, being funny, getting the joke, being sexy, being loving, understanding human emotion. That’s actually the most complex thing we do. That is what separates computers and humans today. I believe that gap will close by 2029.

Google has always been an artificial intelligence company, so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading scientists in the field, joined the search giant late last year. Nonetheless, the hiring raised some eyebrows, since Kurzweil is perhaps the most prominent proselytizer of “hard AI,” which argues that it is possible to create consciousness in an artificial being. Add to this Google’s revelation that it is using techniques of deep learning to produce an artificial brain, and a subsequent hiring of the godfather of computer neural nets Geoffrey Hinton, and it would seem that Google is becoming the most daring developer of AI, a fact that some may consider thrilling and others deeply unsettling. Or both.

On Tuesday, Kurzweil moderated a live Google hangout tied to a release of the upcoming Will Smith film, After Earth, presumably tying the film’s futuristic concept to actual futurists. The discussion touched on the necessity of space travel and the imminent resolution of the world’s energy problems with solar power. After the hangout, Kurzweil got on the phone with me to explore a few issues in more detail.

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Some Reasons for Optimism in 2013

big think - 1.1.13 by Daniel Honan

"We are more intelligent today than we used to be," Kurzweil says: "I've managed work groups for 45 years and I can have a group now of three people in two weeks do what used to take 50, 100 people years to do."

Will you be better off this year than your were in the past? To the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, the answer is a resounding yes. "We are far more productive and healthy and better off in every way than we were in the past," Kurzweil, the author of the new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, told Big Think in a recent interview. Below are Kurzweil's top 5 reasons for optimism in 2013.

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Modern-Day Nostradamus - Kurzweil is Right 86%

bigthink - 12.13.12 by Dominic Basulto

It's that time of the year again when techno pundits are once again breathlessly telling us all about the technology and innovation trends that will be big in 2013. That's great, but many of those predictions will be hopelessly wrong by the end of March. That's why it's so fascinating that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading thinkers when it comes to the future of technology, has had such a strong track record in making predictions about technology for nearly two decades. In fact, of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990's, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be "essentially correct" (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate. So how does he do it?



The fact is, Ray has a system and this system is called the Law of Accelerating Returns. In his new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil points out that "every fundamental measure of information technology follows predictable and exponential trajectories." The most famous of these trajectories, of course, has been the price/performance path of computing power over more than 100 years. Thanks to paradigms such as Moore's Law, which reduces computing power to a problem of how many transistors you can cram on a chip, anyone can intuitively understand why computers are getting exponentially faster and cheaper over time.

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Is Kurzweil Right and is the Singularity Near?

reason.com - November 13, 2012 by Matthew Feeney

High-functioning artificial intelligence is the stuff of science fiction: the malicious HAL in 2001, the malevolent machines in Battlestar Galactica and The Matrix, the Butlerian Jihad in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando describes the Matrioshka brain, an artificial mind that requires the energy of a star to function.

But the idea won't necessarily be science fiction forever, and we may have to take the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) seriously sooner than many expect. The ongoing acceleration in technology has prompted serious discussions of AI, including the possibility that the “Singularity”—the creation of a greater-than-human intelligence—might occur. In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that we can expect the Singularity by 2045 and that superintelligences will eventually colonize vast swathes of galaxies. In his latest book, How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil argues that reverse-engineering a human brain is the best route to creating high functioning AI.

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Opie and Anthony Interview Ray Kurzweil

Informative and hilarious. (A bit of rough language in the first few minutes, NSFW.)



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2045: Dateline Immortality

Time - 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal (by Lev Grossman)

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. (See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

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The Next 25 Years (Ray Kurzweil)

NYT - 12.28.2010 by Ray Kurzweil)

Thirty years ago, I realized that timing was the key to success as an inventor. Most inventions fail because the timing is wrong — the innovation needs to make sense for the world that will exist when the project is finished.

Consider how quickly the world changes; just a few years ago, most people didn’t use social networks, wikis or blogs. As an engineer, I gathered a lot of data to try to make sense of technology trends, and found a significant exception to the notion that “you can’t predict the future.”

If you plot the basic measures of the price to performance and capacity of information technologies (for example, computer instructions per second per constant dollar, bits of memory per dollar, or the total number of bits being moved around over the Internet), they follow remarkably smooth — and foreseeable — trajectories. This observation goes well beyond Moore’s Law (which says you can place twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every two years); in the case of computation, it goes back to the 1890 American census, long before Gordon Moore was even born.

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Kurzweil on the Ethics of Human Enhancement

I'm often bemused at the resistance some seem to have with the promise of human enhancement via technology. We are already enhancing our abilities, overcoming our frailties and extending our healthspans. What's a pair of glasses but a technological means of enhancing ourselves? So what are people so bent out of shape about?

Part of the resistance to the idea comes from religion, to be sure. Religious leaders are afraid that enhanced human beings won't need them so much anymore and that their coffers will run dry. They're right.

Anyway, in my travels around the datawebs I came across this thoughtful treatment of the issue at Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. Check it out here.

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UPI commentary on Kurzweil and Singularity

UPI - 6.4.10 by Arnaud de Borchgrave

WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- He speaks nine languages, taught himself Icelandic in a week and invented his own language he calls Manti. The 31-year-old autistic savant does complex celestial computations in seconds, sees hundreds of numbers on a blackboard once and can recite them in the correct sequence minutes later.

Daniel Tammet possesses synesthesia. Not only does he see numbers but also feels them. He is one in hundreds of millions, as he demonstrated on ABC's "20/20" this week. But when the "singularity" arrives -- that moment in history when the supercomputer capable of trillions of moves per second will have reached parity with the human brain, capable of feelings, from bereavement to passionate to anger -- countless millions of people will be like Tammet.

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Meet Mr. Singularity - Ray Kurzweil

The Boston Phoenix - 5.3.10 (by Chris Faraone)

EVERYTHING UNDER THE SON: Kurzweil dreams up many of his seemingly fantastical inventions at his office in Wellesley Hills. Here, he stands in front of a portrait of his father, Fredric, whom Kurzweil hopes to someday reanimate.


No disrespect to the man who let there be electric light, but Ray Kurzweil is Thomas Alva Edison on steroids.

That might not be evident on a visitor’s first trip to his Kurzweil Technologies, a sleek yet modest office in Wellesley Hills, which is rather ordinary looking for the headquarters of a futurist who’s striving to live forever.

Still, the 62-year-old inventor is aware of the Edison comparisons, and flirts with them himself. In the second-floor lobby of this building overlooking I-95 South is an early 20th century Ediphone — essentially the world’s first tape recorder (as well as a hulking piece of office furniture).

“Edison’s a model of the way I like to work,” says Kurzweil, a lean and tan tech kingpin, who, in his spare time, collaborates with Google co-founder Larry Page on finding feasible ways to convert the whole planet to solar power. “He’s the best example of a saying I like to repeat: ‘Failure is just success deferred.’ Edison didn’t give up [on the light bulb] after a thousand filaments didn’t work, or after a thousand failures. He learned that persistence pays off. People actually declare their own failures — they give up at some point. But if you have the right goal — if you persist with it, and the goal is worth pursuing — then generally you can succeed.”

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Kurzweil defends his predictive accuracy

Accelerating Future - 1.18.10 (Response by Ray Kurzweil to Michael Anissimov)

Today, I received an email from Ray Kurzweil responding to my January 5th post titled “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions”, where I said that I found a list of seven of his “1999 predictions for 2009″ that I thought were false. Below is the letter in its entirety. I have read the letter and am thinking about it. I will conduct further research on all the claims and produce a response with my new thoughts shortly.

—–

January 17, 2010

Dear Michael,

I want to respond to your Blog post “Reviewing Kurzweil Predictions from 1999 for 2009.”

This starts out “Michael Anissimov notes that Ray Kurzweil had several predictions from 1999 for 2009 and those predictions are in general wrong.”

You also write “Ray Kurzweil’s Failed 2009 Predictions. In May 2008, a poster on ImmInst (the life extension grassroots organization I co-founded in 2002) pointed out that it looked like Kurzweil’s 1999 predictions for the year 2009 would fail. Now that 2009 is over, we can see that he was mostly correct.”

Your review is biased, incorrect, and misleading in many different ways.

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An interview with the master (Kurzweil)

H+ - 12.30.09

Photo credit: Guru Khalsa.

A 3-way conversation with the brilliant and controversial inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil needs little or no introduction to most h+ readers. Principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, 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, Ray has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. The magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States and called him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” His Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. is an umbrella company for at least eight separate enterprises.

Ray‘s writing career rivals his inventions and entrepreneurship. His seminal book, The Singularity is Near, presents the Singularity as an overall exponential (doubling) growth trend in technological development, “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” With his upcoming films, Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near: A True Story about the Future, he is becoming an actor, screenplay writer, and director as well.

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Finally! A book-like e-reader from Kurzweil

Wired - 12.29.09 (By Priya Ganapati and Charlie Sorrel)

Ray Kurzweil, a prolific inventor who is best known for his prediction that machine intelligence will surpass that of humans around 2045, still has a few things to offer carbon-based life forms. Kurzweil has introduced new e-reader software, called Blio, that approaches e-reading from a completely different angle than the current E Ink-based devices like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony Reader.

Blio is not a device. Rather, it is a “platform” that could run on any device, but would be most obviously at home on a tablet. The software is free and available currently for PCs, iPod Touch and iPhone.

“Everyone who has seen it acknowledges that it is head and shoulders above others,” says Kurzweil. “We have high-quality graphics and animated features. Other e-readers are very primitive.”

Blio is set to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week.

E-readers have become a hot consumer electronics product. About 5 million e-reader devices are expected to be sold by the end of the year. Meanwhile, electronic books for the Kindle outsold physical books on Amazon for the first time this Christmas, said Amazon, one of the largest online book retailers.

Kurzweil — who is better known for his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near — has worked extensively in areas such as optical character recognition, speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. His company Kurzweil Technologies has a joint venture with the National Federation of the Blind called knfb Reading Technology to create reading products for people with disabilities. knfb Reading is the company that has created Blio.

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Kurzweil counts down to 2020 (no, not 2012, 2020)

NYDailyNews.com - 12.13.09 (by Ray Kurzweil)

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting.

Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of Americans. Specifically what can we expect? Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand.

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