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Technological singularity will turn us into super humans some time in the next 12 years, according to a Google expert. This might sound like science fiction, but Google's Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil has made 147 predictions since the 1990s and has an 86 per cent success rate. Kurzweil says when we live in a cybernetic society we will have computers in our brains and machines will be smarter than human beings. He claims this is already happening with technology - especially with our addiction to our phones - and says the next step is to wire this technology into...

Deep inside Bridgewater Associates LP, the world’s largest hedge-fund firm, software engineers are at work on a secret project that founder Ray Dalio has sometimes called “The Book of the Future.” The goal is technology that would automate most of the firm’s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalio’s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical openness—and a place that can endure without him. At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host...

[This is from a famous scifi writer. He argues that rather than being scared of the danger of artificial intelligence in the future and trying to have government regulate it, more competition, not restricting competition, is best!] Official Statement to the TNC Convention 02016 by David BrinIt is, of course, wise and beneficial to peer ahead for potential dangers and problems — one of the central tasks of high-end science fiction. Alas, detecting that a danger lurks is easier than prescribing solutions that can prevent it. Take the plausibility of malignant AI, remarked-upon recently by luminaries ranging from Stephen Hawking...

[If you're into science fiction or into a lot of the new scientific breakthroughs, you'll probably find this interesting!]On Viewing 2001: The First Transhumanist FilmBy Edward Hudgins I recently saw 2001: A Space Odyssey again on the big screen. That's the best way to see this visually stunning cinematic poem, like I saw it during its premiere run in 1968. The film's star, Keir Dullea, attended that recent screening and afterward offered thoughts on director Stanley Kubrick's awe-inspiring opus. He and many others have discussed the visions offered in the film. Some have come to pass: video phone calls and...

That's the prediction of Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google (GOOG), who spoke Wednesday at the Exponential Finance conference in New York. Kurzweil predicts that humans will become hybrids in the 2030s. That means our brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, where there will be thousands of computers, and those computers will augment our existing intelligence. He said the brain will connect via nanobots -- tiny robots made from DNA strands. "Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking," he said. The bigger and more complex the cloud, the more advanced...

Ethereum, the brainchild of wunderkind software developer Vitalik Buterin, who was just 19 when he came up with the idea, is the most buzzed-about project right now in the cryptocurrency community. It has attracted an all-star team of computer scientists and raised $18.4 million in a crowdfunding campaign—the third most successful of all time. And now, according to the official Ethereum blog, it's on the verge of being rolled out to the public. Ethereum's developers use a rolling ticker tape of bold tag lines to describe what they're creating, including a “Social Operating System for Planet Earth,” and “the Upcoming...

Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening...

During the last few years, the semiconductor industry has been having a harder and harder time miniaturizing transistors with the latest problem being Intel’s delayed roll-out of its new 14 nm process. The best way to confirm this slowdown in progress of computing power is to try to run your current programs on a 6-year-old computer. You will likely have few problems since computers have not sped up greatly during the past 6 years. If you had tried this experiment a decade ago you would have found a 6-year-old computer to be close to useless as Intel and others were...

That’s the conclusion reached by one researcher from the University of North Carolina: black holes can’t exist in our Universe — not mathematically, anyway. “I’m still not over the shock,” said Laura Mersini-Houghton, associate physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.” In a news article spotlighted by UNC the scenario suggested by Mersini-Houghton is briefly explained. Basically, when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity after blasting its outer layers into space —...

By 2040, cabs will be driven by Google robots, shops will become showrooms for online outlets and call centres will be staffed by intelligent droids. That’s the scenario depicted in recent research which suggests robots could be taking over our lives and jobs in less than 30 years. The competition for work caused by a rise in the robots population will see us heading to surgeons for ‘additional processing power for our brains’, they claim. We may also be requesting bionic implants for our hands that will make us able to perform tasks as fast as any machine.

For the past few weeks, protests have been building against a private bus system used by Google and others in Silicon Valley. The action took a menacing turn yesterday when one Google worker was followed home.Google and other Silicon Valley tech companies have attracted the protesters' ire because sky-high tech salaries have led to sky-high real estate prices in San Francisco, pricing out poorer residents. They're also in the cross-hairs for their role in assisting NSA surveillance. The private bus system (which used public bus stops) was seen as another kick in teeth by, in the words of Kevin Roose,...

Scientists Create Terminator 2-Like Material That Heals Itself ... (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Technological Singularity) In Terminator 2, the T-1000 android was blown nearly in two, only to mend itself by pulling its mercury-like substance back together. Scientists have long been working on creating a polymer to do the same thing, but previous research always required an external factor (like temperature or pressure) to work. Scientists at the CIDETEC Center for Electrochemical Technologies in Spain succeeded where other scientists have failed: they've invented a plastic polymer that will heal itself all on its own....

Neuroscientists Say Dimitry Itskov's Plan Is Not RealisticA Russian multimillionaire said he would like to see the technology to allow humans to outlive their bodies made into a reality – to the point where “people” with artificial computer-driven brains and hologram bodies would exist in a mere 32 years. Dmitry Itskov was at Lincoln Center Saturday for his Global Future 2045 conference. Itskov, who looks younger than his 32 years, has an aggressive timetable in which he’d like to see milestones toward that goal met: — By 2020 – a mere seven years away — robots we can control remotely...

Can the City That Never Sleeps become the City That Never Dies? A Russian multimillionaire thinks so. Dmitry Itskov gathered some of humanity’s best brains—and a few robots—in New York City on Saturday to discuss how humans can get their minds to outlive their bodies. Itskov, who looks younger than his 32 years, has an aggressive timetable in which he’d like to see milestones toward that goal met: By 2020, robots we can control remotely with our brains.By 2025, a scenario familiar to watchers of sci-fi cartoon show “Futurama:” the capability to transplant the brain into a life-support system, which...

This article was posted on 04/01/2013 Russian billionaire’s plan for immortality by 2045 includes turning us into cyborgs Technology may be advancing, but it doesn’t change the fact that the human body is limited. Eventually, human beings die.  Maybe immortality sounds like science fiction, especially when thinking about cyborgs, avatars, and robots, but for one Russian man, living forever in a machine’s body is the future, and it’s not so far away. After Dmitry Itskov made a fortune as founder of a web publishing company, New Media Stars, he began thinking about the meaning of life and consciousness. Last February, Itskov gathered...

If Dmitry Itskov's 2045 initiative plays out as planned, humans will have the option of living forever with the help of machines in only 33 years. It may sound ridiculous, but the 31-year-old Russian mogul is dead serious about neuroscience, android robotics, and cybernetic immortality. He has already pulled together a team of leading Russian scientists intent on creating fully functional holographic human avatars that house artificial brains which contain a person's complete consciousness - in other words, a humanoid robot. Together, they've laid out an ambitious course of action that would see the team transplant a human brain...

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied...

Moscow, May 6, Interfax - A Russian scientific movement for developing a cyborg in a bid to make humans immortal beings runs against Christian teachings, a theologian has argued. "According to the Christian doctrine, the soul is a substance that separates from the body after death but does not cease to exist," Alexey Osipov, a professor at Moscow Spiritual Schools, told Interfax-Religion in comments on the Russia-2045 movement. "And we are not authorized to separate the soul from the body and place this soul where we like to." Moreover, the human being is "a unity of body and soul, and...

Campaigners call for ban on "killer robots" LONDON (Reuters) - Machines with the ability to attack targets without any human intervention must be banned before they are developed for use on the battlefield, campaigners against "killer robots" urged on Tuesday. The weapons, which could be ready for use within the next 20 years, would breach a moral and ethical boundary that should never be crossed, said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, of the "Campaign To Stop Killer Robots". "If war is reduced to weapons attacking without human beings in control, it is going to be civilians who are going to bear...

South Korea unveils robotic prison guards, promises futuristic cavity searches To round out their drug-sniffing clone dog army, South Korean authorities are now experimenting with robotic prison guards. Lest you think these cyber-wardens will be equipped with gatling guns in the style of Robocop's ED-209, know that this alarm-equipped bot has more in common with the Death Star's delivery droids. Of course, the robots' responsibilities may expand as the technology improves. Explains Reuters of these security machines' potential uses: The robot has been designed to patrol a prison autonomously, but an IPad will allow manual control as well. The next...