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Editor’s Note: The following is a brief letter from Ray Kurzweil, cofounder and member of the board at Singularity Group, Singularity Hub’s parent company, in response to the Future of Life Institute’s recent letter, “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.” The FLI letter addresses the risks of accelerating progress in AI and the ensuing race to commercialize the technology and calls for a pause in the development of algorithms more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, the large language model behind the company’s ChatGPT Plus and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. The FLI letter has thousands of signatories—including deep learning pioneer, Yoshua...

Aformer Google engineer has made a stark realization that humans will achieve immortality in eight years - and 86 percent of his 147 predictions have been correct. Ray Kurzweil spoke with the YouTube channel Adagio, discussing the expansion in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he believes will lead to age-reversing 'nanobots.' These tiny robots will repair damaged cells and tissues that deteriorate as the body ages and make us immune to diseases like cancer. The predictions that such a feat is achievable by 2030 have been met with excitement and skepticism, as curing all deadly diseases seems far out of...

I just won a bet I made in 2002 with physicist Michio Kaku. I bet him $1,000 that “by 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized solid work in cosmology (yay Jim Peebles!) and astronomy, was Kaku’s last chance to win before 2020. Kaku and I made the bet under the auspices of Long Bets, a “public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.” Long...

It's tough to make predictions especially about the future Science fiction has predicted many of today’s realities from cell phones to tablets. Many things that are today part of History like walking on the moon, organ transplants, and space stations were once flights of fancy. Futurists build current events on a foundation of History to provide a launching pad for visions of what is to come. One of the most widely recognized Futurists is Alvin Toffler whose seminal works include Future Shock and The Third Wave. He is also the one who told us, “Change is not merely necessary to...

Ray Kurzweil, Google's chief futurist, laid out what he thinks the next few decades will look like in an interview with Playboy. Kurzweil is one of the biggest believers in The Singularity, the moment when humans — with the aid of technology —will supposedly live forever. He's chosen the year 2045 because, according to his calculations, "The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today." But even before 2045, Kurzweil thinks we could begin the deathless process. "I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when...

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...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is offering money to researchers looking at identifying and controlling timing mechanisms in cells, including those of the human body. The blue sky gazing loon-collective notes that no single "master switch" has been found to control genes' activities. But it hopes that the "Biochronicity" programme will find a way to understand and predict "temporal features of biological systems". The four-year programme will start by identifying "episequences and validation in experimental biological systems". After two years, DARPA hopes to move to Phase II, which aims to conduct Live Fire Tests. Should the research prove...

Ray Kurzweil, the prominent inventor and futurist, can't wait to get nanobots into his brain. In his view, these devices will be equipped with a variety of sensors and stimulators and will communicate wirelessly with computers outside of the body. In addition to providing unprecedented insight into brain function at the cellular level, brain-penetrating nanobots would provide the ultimate virtual reality experience. In an interview with GOOD magazine, Kurzweil says: "By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain, that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries, will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want...

Ray Kurzweil is a world renown scientist who was curious enough to do research on the amazing benefits of alkaline water. He confirms everything healthalkaline.com says about ionized water. Read more about Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil drinks 10 glasses of Alkaline Water a day and believes it will help him live a long and healthy life. In this Q and A he answers your questions about Alkaline Water based on his own research and knowledge. Question: I have read on the Internet that it is not possible to create alkaline or acid water from pure water and that water that is...

Ray Kurzweil will be the first guest on theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku's new ("Science Fantastic") radio show, which debuts on about 90 commercial radio stations nationwide Saturday April 15 at 5:00 - 8:00 p.m., Eastern, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m. Pacific. The show is syndicated on Talk Radio Network. Kaku, the co-founder of string field theory, holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at the City Univ. of New York and is the author of two international best-sellers, Hyperspace and Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, and Parallel Worlds. The interview covers the Singularity, merger with intelligent...

Inventor, writer and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been a pioneer in speech and character recognition, reading technology, music synthesis, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He has founded nine businesses in those fields, including Kurzweil Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., and he's won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Technology. In his recent book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Adult, 2005), Kurzweil, 57, predicts that ultimately, human intelligence and computer intelligence will fuse and become indistinguishable. He recently told Computerworld how and when that might come about.Your idea to reverse-engineer the human brain seems pretty...

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist, has stumbled on a discovery of earth-shattering importance. It is the arrival of "singularity," and according to him it will happen in 2045. "Gradually," he writes at the beginning of "The Singularity Is Near," "I've become aware of a transforming event looming in the first half of the 21st century … the impending Singularity in our future is increasingly transforming every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality." Singularity, Kurzweil says, is a development "representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability" and a "radical upgrading of our bodies' physical...

SINGULARITY: UBIQUITY INTERVIEWS RAY KURZWEIL [Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers and futurists. His latest book is the just-published "The Singularity Is Near."] UBIQUITY: How is the new book doing? KURZWEIL: Very well -- it's in its fourth printing, and has been number one both in science and in philosophy on Amazon. UBIQUITY:: It's an amazing, magisterial piece of work. KURZWEIL: Thanks, I appreciate that. UBIQUITY:: Why don't you talk a little bit about the notion of "singularity"? Set the premise for us. KURZWEIL: Sure. It's actually a complicated premise, but there are several key ideas....

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted. Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent said engineer Ray Kurzweil. He said machines and humans would eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health. "It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil said. "But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us." Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better,...

The rate of technological progress is about to shift into high gear, some futurists say. Are you ready to take advantage of the business opportunities? If Ray Kurzweil is right, the business landscape - indeed, the entire human race - is about to be transformed beyond all recognition. Kurzweil is a renowned computer scientist and inventor (he built the first flatbed scanner). And no less a figure than Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has called Kurzweil the greatest thinker on artificial intelligence alive today. So when he talks, it's worth paying attention. Here's the question Kurzweil is asking these days: What...

Immortality is within our grasp . . . In Fantastic Voyage, high-tech visionary Ray Kurzweil teams up with life-extension expert Terry Grossman, M.D., to consider the awesome benefits to human health and longevity promised by the leading edge of medical science--and what you can do today to take full advantage of these startling advances. Citing extensive research findings that sound as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you should be in good health and good spirits when the more extreme...

The Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a one-day event free to the public, to be held Saturday, May 13, 2006 at Stanford Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California. The event will bring together leading futurists and others to examine the implications of the "Singularity" -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades -- to address the profound implications of this radical and controversial scenario. "The Singularity will be a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its...

Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency -- establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises. In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today's best minds. Potential transformations of human...

At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and the most thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic...

In his new book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means to Be Human, (Random House, 2005), author Joel Garreau describes research so cutting edge it seems mind-boggling: • A telekinetic monkey at Duke University in North Carolina uses its mind to move a robotic arm 600 miles (a thousand kilometers) away in Cambridge, Massachusetts. • At a Pentagon R-and-D facility in Virginia, program managers aim to create the ultimate warriors—soldiers that can fight without sleeping, tell their bodies to stop bleeding, and regrow lost hands and limbs. Garreau notes that regular...