AZspot
Thursday 31 December 2009
Singularity Proponent Ray Kurzweil Reinvents the Book, Again ☀
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.
No, the software is not available currently for PCs, iPod Touch and iPhone. A simple internet search (and App Store search) doesn’t even bring up a product home page. And the article is bereft of original source linkage.
This is a fine example of why mainstream journalism is now in #epicfail mode. Serving up PR hype for vaporware, or at best, potentially useful software. Nothing but pure puffery and shameless shilling.
Tuesday 22 September 2009
Immortality only 20 years away ☀
Scientist Ray Kurzweil claims humans could become immortal in as little as 20 years’ time through nanotechnology and an increased understanding of how the body works.
Friday 29 May 2009
Lyons dismisses my accurate prediction (written in the mid to late 1980s) of a world web of computing and communications ubiquitously tying together people with each other and with vast information resources. He writes “But hold on a minute. Who didn’t think the Internet was going to catch on?” The answer is virtually everyone. I wrote this when the entire U.S. defense budget could only tie together a few thousand scientists with the Arpanet. My prediction was considered very radical at the time that I made it just as many of my predictions are regarded today. It is typical that when my predictions become true, people write that they were always obvious.
Ray Kurzweil ☀
Friday 27 February 2009
Meet Ray Kurzweil ☀
Kurzweil’s most ambitious plan for life after the Singularity, however, is also his most personal: Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation. It’s a bright, clear afternoon, and we can see the river that runs behind the trees outside his wide office windows. The portrait of his father looks down over him. In a soft voice, he explains how the resurrection will work. “We can find some of his DNA around his grave site - that’s a lot of information right there,” he says. “The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they’Il get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him.”
When I ask how exactly they’Il extract the knowledge from his brain, Kurzweil bristles, as if the answer should be obvious: “Just send nanobots into my brain and reconstruct my recollections and memories.” The machines will capture everything: the piggyback ride to a grocery store, the bedtime reading of Tom Swift, the moment he and his father rejoiced when the letter of acceptance from MIT arrived. To provide the nanobots with even more information, Kurzweil is safeguarding the boxes of his dad’s mementos, so the artificial intelligence has as much data as possibie from which to reconstruct him. Father 2.0 could take many forms, he says, from a virtual reality avatar to a fully functioning robot.
Wednesday 19 November 2008
Ultimately artificial intelligence is going to be able to do everything humans do… [It] will operate at the best human levels and do so tirelessly but… there’s in fact a larger number of jobs today than there was 100 years ago and they pay eight times as much in constant currency as a century ago and they’re more complex and actually more satisfying - and we’ve also invested a lot more in education as a result… So these trends are going to continue, work is going to become more and more intellectual. I’d say that already half the population contributes to creating information or intellectual content of one kind or another - none of these jobs existed 50 years ago.
Ray Kurzweil ☀
Tuesday 3 June 2008
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology ☀
Thursday 13 December 2007
Ultimate invention: Virtual displays using devices in our eyeglasses that beam images directly to the retina. Prototypes of these already exist. So my vision of computing and communicating in the future includes retina-mounted devices that can create stationary virtual displays even as we move our heads, and full-immersion visual-auditory virtual reality and augmented real reality. We’ll be online all the time with very high-bandwidth wireless communication. Computing and communication will be a self-organizing mesh of nodes, so if you need a million computers for a second, it will be available to you. We’ll live in a blend of real and virtual reality, and it won’t always be clear where one stops and the other begins.
Ray Kurzweil ☀
Wednesday 3 October 2007
An Interview with Newsweek's Steven Levy ☀
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UBIQUITY:
What is your next book going to be about?
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LEVY:
Well, I haven't really figured that one out yet. There's a couple ideas I'm exploring, since I haven't committed to any of them I'm really not ready to talk about them.
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UBIQUITY:
Why don't you do one on Ray Kurzweil and his group?
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LEVY:
Interesting. I mean, I've met him a few times and he's a fascinating guy. Well, maybe if Ray helps me live forever, I'll certainly get around to doing a book about him.
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