publication: the Financial Times
section: Life + Arts
column: Lunch with the Financial Times
about the column: A weekly interview w. leading cultural + business figures.

story title: Breakfast w. the Financial Times: Ray Kurzweil
story deck: Over a specially prepared breakfast, the inventor + futurist details his plans to live forever.
story: web link

Ray Kurzweil’s work at Google aims at moving search beyond keywords towards more complex ideas.

He offers this example. “I met this girl at a party last night. We only spoke a few words but I felt an instant bond with her. Is that realistic? What does the psychology literature say about this?

“Ultimately, and this is the long term project, it would be like asking a person who has reviewed the relevant literature and would intelligently give you the right citations and summarize them for you.”

Kurzweil is frustrated at how artificial intelligence is misrepresented in movies as a dangerous force divorced from humans, “an alien invasion of intelligent machines.” He sees AI as a tool that will enable billions of us “to enhance our capacity. They’ll go from being in our pockets to inside our bodies and brains.”

On virtual reality, Kurzweil said, “We could be having this brunch on a Mediterranean beach, and you’d feel the warm air in yoru face. It would be very realistic. That’s going to happen over the next couple of decades.” […]

image | left: art by James Ferguson

Predictions by Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, is a well-known futurist with a track record for accurate predictions.

Kurzweil said, “The year 2029 is the consistent date I’ve predicted, when an artificial intelligence will pass a valid Turing test  — achieving human levels of intelligence.

“I have also set the date 2045 for singularity — which is when humans will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold, by merging with the intelligence we have created.”

“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” Kurzweil said. Singularity is that point in time when all advances in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, will lead to machines smarter than human beings.

“That leads to computers having human intelligence, humans putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, that’s not just a future scenario,” Kurzweil said. “It’s partly here, and it’s going to accelerate.”

Kurzweil predicts that during the 2030s some tech will be invented that can go inside your brain and help your memory. He says it will be a future of unparalleled human-machine synthesis.

“Ultimately, it will affect everything. We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.”

To fear or not to fear?

Should humanity fear the singularity? Kurzweil doesn’t think so. In fact, he isn’t worried. What science fiction depicts as singularity — when AI enslaves humanity — is fiction, he says. “That’s not realistic,” Kurzweil said. He says singularity is an opportunity for humans to improve.

“What’s actually happening is machines are powering all of us,” Kurzweil said. “They’re making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies — but by the 2030s we will connect our neo-cortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.

“We’re going to get more neo-cortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music, we’re going to be sexier. We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree,” he said.

on the web
Wikipedia | Alan Turing
Wikipedia | Turing test

The South by Southwest festival is a place where people come and talk about the future.They imagine what the world will look like when we have human-level artificial intelligence and science fiction grade human augmentation.

Futurist speakers were asked whether they think humans will one day swim as fast as sharks. Humans at their peak can swim 6 miles per hour. A short-fin mako shark, on other hand, can hit top speeds of about 60 mph.

The question was first posed to Will Roper, the director of the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, in a conversation about advanced weaponry and super-soldiers.

It was asked in a different panel discussion with Ray Kurzweil, one of the best known futurists and author of the book The Singularity Is Near.

A common theme in the futurist & trans-humanism movements is that humanity will augment and improve itself:

• genetically engineered super-humans
• brain-computer interfaces that make us smarter
• merged AI & humans
• the ability to live forever

Roper and Kurzweil were good sports about it. Roper said he wasn’t aware of any active Pentagon research trying to augment humans with fins or gills, but said he’d sign up to be made a faster swimmer. Kurzweil commented about medical devices that help people restore lost limb functions. “I don’t know about the shark application,” he added.

on the web
The Verge | main
The Verge | YouTube channel

The Verge | column : TL • DR
The Verge | column : Circuit Breaker

Singularity University is a for-profit, non-accredited institution dedicated to the theories of futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Several times a year it admits groups of executives for a $14,000, week course in exponential leadership.

Singularity University was founded by Ray Kurzweil and space entrepreneur and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis in 2009. It promulgates the philosophy of Kurzweil — the futurist, now at Google — who believes progress biotechnology and artificial intelligence is accelerating and will rapidly, radically change what it means to be human.

Ray Kurzweil predicted that in the 2020s your life-span will increase by more than a year for every year that you live. Kurzweil sometimes meets the class via robot.

web references:
Singularity University | main
Singularity University | executive program
Singularity University | YouTube channel
Singularity University | Vimeo channel

1. video | Singularity University — executive program
Instructors explain how humanity has entered an era of rapidly accelerated change.

2. video | Singularity University — executive program
Founder Peter Diamandis explores key & transformative aspects of session.

Tech hubs that enable a more advanced society can progress at a faster rate than other societies.

19th century entrepreneurs knew more and had better tech than 15th century business owners, so society was far more advanced in the 19th century. This law of accelerating returns works on the small scale particularly in Silicon Valley, as self-driving cars become a reality.

As we can see with self-driving cars, entrepreneurs are making the law of accelerated returns prominent.

If the predictions are accurate and self-driving cars are a distinctive part of culture by 2021 then we are on the brink of advances we have never seen before in such a short period of time.

Singularity comes from the science fiction concept of a point where tech changes so rapidly it transforms human life. More specifically, it comes from futurist & inventor, co-founder Ray Kurzweil’s 2006 book The Singularity Is Near: when humans transcend biology. Singularity University co-founder Peter Diamandis is best known for X Prize, a $10 million reward for the first private reusable manned spacecraft.

Google co-founder Larry Page championed Kurzweil’s and Diamandis’ idea of a “transhumanist” approach to goals. Founded in 2009, Singularity University changed from a non-profit to a benefit corporation, a form of for-profit business. It considers solving big problems and ordinary corporate profit making goals.

Singularity University’s summer program called Global Solutions has this participant agenda: come up with an idea to positively impact the lives of a billion people. Clean water, renewable energy, health, hunger, poverty. “Exponential” is a word used at Singularity University, which focuses on tech with potential to accelerate at warp speed.

related links:
Singularity University | main
Singularity University | YouTube channel

1.) video | Singularity University
Founders’ vision.

2.) video | Singularity University
Our inspiration.

3.) video | Singularity University
Welcome to the Singularity University YouTube channel.

Futurist, author and inventor Ray Kurzweil delivered a keynote speech to 800 attendees at 2016 Tech Leadership Conference in Waterloo, Canada. Ray Kurzweil envisions the future — by year 2020, 3D printing will transform manufacturing. People will print their own clothing, he predicts. In Asia, builders are making small office buildings using modules made by 3D printers. Inventors created jet engines and cars out of printed parts, Kurzweil says.

Impact on a declining manufacturing industry could be catastrophic. Jobs will be lost, manufacturing will turn into an information industry, but there’s a silver lining behind industry disruption, he says.

The fashion industry will explode with new ideas as people design, make and share clothes using 3D printers. Kurzweil sees manufacturing moving into open source design and production.

Kurzweil doesn’t make wild predictions. The 68 year old is considered a leading thinker, inventor, futurist. He authored best selling books on artificial intelligence, and heads up a Google team studying machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

As a child, he brought home old bicycles and radios to fix when 5 year olds “could still rummage through neighborhoods.” At 14 he wrote a paper on how the brain worked. It earned him an audience with US president Lyndon Johnson.

Kurzweil was one of 2 keynote speakers at Communitech’s annual Tech Leadership Conference held in Kitchener, Canada. 800 people attended the show, featuring presentations on robot ethics, marketing for tomorrow, artificial intelligence and building a brain.

Industry will undergo massive change in coming years. Tech will revolutionize human health and biotechnology, Kurzweil predicts. Stem cells can be programmed to rejuvenate heart attack victims, genes manufactured and injected into the body to reduce pulmonary hypertension. Tiny robots might be inserted into the brain to extend thinking, connected to cloud computers accessing vast amounts of data in seconds. They will make us funnier, sexier and more creative, he predicts.

Second keynote speaker was Robin Chase, Zipcar founder, the world’s largest car sharing company, and expert on innovation and the sharing economy. Chase said collaborative economy is the best solution to climate change. Shared assets generate ideas better than traditional companies.

The car is the second most expensive purchase people make, but used 5% five of the day. Chances are greater the right person and idea will appear in collaborative economy. Individuals bring creativity, local knowledge and customization. Companies offer large investments, manufacturing capacity and growth management. She calls this Peers Inc. —  “Peers” stands for individuals and “Inc.” for large companies.

Attendees broke into groups for learning sessions. Kate Darling, PhD a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expert on interaction of people and machines, spoke on robot ethics.

For many people, robots have a negative image. They’re going to steal our jobs, spy on us as drones, even kill us — a scenario in Hollywood movies, Darling says. But robots have positive uses. Cute robots help autistic children be responsive, and are companions for seniors, she says. People have learned languages or lost weight more quickly working with robots rather than humans. In Japan, factory robots are given names, do gymnastics with workers to make them more acceptable. “You have to weigh the positive about robots against the creepiness.”

In a presentation on virtual & augmented reality, Jesse Hirsh technology strategist, said these can transform architectural and construction industries. By simulating 3D reality, architects can design buildings easily and creative people can design their own cottages, Hirsh says.

By modeling battlefields and how troops move in them, virtual reality can transform military conflicts, he says. It can also let people switch gender.

Adam Green, who runs advertising agency relations for Google Canada, spoke on marketing for tomorrow. Customers buy based on their future, not product features, he says. Recent iPhone ad shows users taking pictures of Yangtze River in China — but never mentions camera’s specs. People buy cars on emotional response, he says.

Mark Roberge, chief revenue officer at Hub Spot, a software company for in-bound marketing, said massive job loss in media can be an advantage in marketing. Journalists tell a company’s story, describe products better than ordinary sales people. Journalists can blog and do short e-books drawing customers in, he said.

In a presentation on artificial intelligence, Nikolas Badminton said machine learning systems can spot skin cancer in photos of seniors or work with children in schools. They can improve traffic flows and operate traffic lights. Fridges can be programmed to lock their doors and tell you when to exercise, says Badminton, who studies how technology is affecting the office. It might be difficult to change them when you get home at 3 a.m. and want a beer and pizza, he says.

Chris Eliasmith, PhD director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo, conducted a learning session on building a brain. His lab has built the world’s largest functional brain model, called Spaun. In addition to solving brain disorders, the model can help scientists and engineers build smarter machines, he says. They can do this by designing computer chips that function more like a brain.

In a fireside chat with education futurist Sarah Prevette, former Open Text CEO Tom Jenkins outlined three emerging trends in the tech industry. The first, digital disruption, has already had a major impact on manufacturing. Now it is poised to disrupt white collar sectors such as financial services and banking, he says.

Job losses are expected to reach 30 per cent over the next 5 years, says Jenkins, now chair of the Open Text board and chancellor of the University of Waterloo. The second trend data sovereignty, threatens to shake up information sector, he says. The location of servers will be more important if countries and regions form trading blocs, restrict access.

The third trend regulatory frameworks, is changing, Jenkins says. Regulatory platforms need to become principal based rather than rules based to adapt to changing environments.

Regulatory bodies are “boring but they have a big impact,” he says. Ever tried to get something approved by the Food & Drug Administration in the US? It takes a decade, Jenkins says.

related reading:
Communitech | main
Communitech | YouTube channel 
Communitech | Tech Leadership Conference

set | videos
In Conversation with Ray Kurzweil series from Communitech Tech Leadership Conference.

video | 1.
Ray Kurzweil on Waterloo, Canada region.

Communitech | At Tech Leadership Conference 2016, futurist, author, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses Waterloo, Canada region’s reputation, and why among many cities claiming a similarity to Silicon Valley, Waterloo might come closest.

video | 2.
Ray Kurzweil on optimism & pessimism in society.

Communitech | At Tech Leadership Conference 2016, futurist, author, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses the source of his tech optimism — what he calls the law of accelerating returns.

video | 3.
Ray Kurzweil on his passion for immortality.

Communitech | At Tech Leadership Conference 2016 futurist, author, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses his passion for life extension and human immortality.

video | 4.
Ray Kurzweil on where the next Steve Jobs will emerge.

Communitech | At Tech Leadership Conference 2016, futurist, author, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses the tech revolutions that will produce the next Steve Jobs.

video | 5.
Ray Kurzweil on the Human Genome Project and perceptions of research.

Communitech | At Tech Leadership Conference 2016, futurist, author, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses how perception of the Human Genome Project has changed over time, and why our expectations of research are never ready for exponential returns.

Ray Kurzweil’s initial claim to fame was his inventions — including the flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech converter for the blind, and a groundbreaking music synthesizer .

But he has received more attention in past decades for his predictions and his books. In the 1990s, he made 147 projections for 2009. In 2010, he reflected on them and determined that 86% of them were correct.

While his critics dispute the accuracy of some of his forecasts, Kurzweil has predicted the age of mobile computing, digital books, wearables, self-driving cars, and high speed wireless data transmission. In the 1980s, he eerily predicted the emergence of a global online network long before the internet as we now know it exists. Bill Gates has called Kurzweil “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”

Many of Kurzweil’s ideas seem outlandish at first — a necessity he argues, because our human brains are only equipped to think linearly while technology is evolving at an exponential rate. His most famous theory is the singularity: tech will continue to evolve at exponential pace, changing human destiny, giving humans the option of immortality. In the Wall Street Journal, he deflected criticism from theologians who insist death is necessary by saying: “Oh, death, that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing.”

Kurzweil sees humans heading for a tipping point — adding more than a year to our life expectancy each year. Biology is inherently an information process, Kurzweil argues, and in the coming decades, humans will gain the ability to not only turn off disease genes and program our own biology.

So it’s not surprising that tech entrepreneurs find creative ways to blow off steam in their spare time.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, spends time learning flying trapeze, while former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is an avid beekeeper.

From DIY rocketry and zero gravity flight to sonic meditation, many tech execs need more than yoga to claim their me time — and say it helps them feel more fulfilled, relaxed, productive at work. But it’s also a revealing insight into what makes them tick. Here, in their own words, 8 entrepreneurs explain their favorite extra-curricular activity.

name: Ray Kurzweil
hobby: collecting Alice in Wonderland memorabilia
day job: currently a director of engineering at Google, heading up a team working on machine intelligence

Ray Kurzweil discovered a painting of the girl Alice Liddell by artist Terry Guyer — the inspiration behind book Alice in Wonderland — in a fair in San Francisco, CA.

In his own words: The first piece I collected related to Alice was a facsimile of a 90 page handwritten manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, written by Charles Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll.

The manuscript was written for and inspired by Alice Liddell. Later he expanded this into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and it became a world-wide success.

Decades later Miss Liddell needed money and sold the original manuscript. I have since collected various original editions, annotated editions of the book, and some paintings.

Alice is emblematic of the imaginative alternative realities we will create with emerging tech.

Once I was walking in a San Francisco, CA city fair and recognized the girl Alice Liddell in a painting by artist Terry Guyer. I was familiar with the photograph of Alice by Charles Dodgson — that Guyer had based his painting on — so I bought the painting.

I also have a painting of the White Rabbit by Grace Slick and a hologram of the Cheshire Cat, who disappears when you move leaving only his smile.

related reading:
Terry Guyer | main
Terry Guyer | oil portraits: main
Terry Guyer | oil portraits: Alice Liddell

Lime Light Agency | art of Grace Slick

image | portrait of girl Alice Liddell, inspiration for Alice in Wonderland
Oil painting by artist Terry Guyer from a photo by Lewis Carroll.

Back in the 1980s — when we were lugging around our Motorola bricks  — he already predicted a bunch of things that are now part of everyday life.

This includes self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics, and wirelessly accessing info on the internet. He also reckons singularity, where human intelligence will merg with non-biological technology, will happen in 2045.

“The non-biological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today,” he said in an interview. “I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical tech will add one additional year, every year to your life expectancy. By that I don’t mean life expectancy based on your birthday, but rather your remaining life expectancy.”

He went on to say that we might be able to just hack our bodies and live forever.

Explaining the accelerating rate of technical progress, Kurzweil said technical developments form very predictable trajectories, and those trajectories are exponential.

Consider the progress of the computing industry, he said. He spoke about his cell phone, which he said is several billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer he used as a student at MIT.*

“I went to MIT because it was so advanced that it actually had a computer in the late 1960s,” Kurzweil said. “It took up the floor of a building. Still, this cell phone is thousands of times more powerful, and a million times less expensive. That’s a several billion-fold increase in price|performance. It’s also a tiny fraction of the size.”

Kurzweil said 4 years ago Google founder Larry Page and he were asked by the National Academy of Engineering to study emerging energy tech. Page and Kurzweil selected solar due to its exponential growth. Kurzweil said solar has been around for over 25 years, and its market share has doubled every 2 years.

Kurzweil explained, “In 2012 solar panels were producing 0.5% of the world’s energy supply. Some people dismissed it, saying it’s nice but at a half percent solar is a fringe player, not going to solve the problem. They were ignoring the exponential growth — like they ignored the exponential growth of the internet and human genome project. Half a percent is only 8 doublings away from 100%.

“Now 4 years later solar has doubled twice again. Now solar panels produce 2% of the world’s energy, right on schedule. People dismiss it saying 2% is nice, but a fringe player. That ignores the exponential growth — which means it’s only 6 doublings or 12 years from 100%.”

2 years ago Kurzweil presented this to the prime minister of Israel, who attended his class at the MIT Sloan School in the 1970s. Kurzweil said the prime minster asked him a question, “Do we have enough sunlight to do this with a doubling 7 more times?”

Kurzweil said, “Yes. After we double 7 more times, and meeting 100% of the world’s energy needs, we’ll still be using only one part in 10,000 of the sunlight we have. It’s not true we’re running out of energy. We’re only running out of resources if we stick with 19th century tech.”

* MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology

set | background on 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering
Highlighting the global challenges for humanity with featured solutions from field leaders.

Wikipedia | Grand Challenges

National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: main
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: challenges list
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: report
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: committee — members list
National Academy of Engineering | Grand Challenges for Engineering: committee — Ray Kurzweil

list | 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering
Developed by the National Academy of Engineering.*

1. Advance personalized learning

A growing appreciation of individual preferences and aptitudes has led toward personalized learning — instruction is tailored to a student’s individual needs.

Given the diversity of individual preferences, and the complexity of each human brain, developing teaching methods that optimize learning will require engineering solutions of the future.

2. Make solar energy economical

Currently solar energy provides less than 1% of the world’s total energy, but it has the potential to provide much more.

3. Enhance virtual reality

Within many specialized fields, from psychiatry to education, virtual reality is becoming a powerful new tool for training practitioners and treating patients, in addition to its growing use in various forms of entertainment.

4. Reverse engineer the brain

A lot of research has been focused on creating thinking machines — computers capable of emulating human intelligence— however, reverse-engineering the brain could have multiple impacts that go far beyond artificial intelligence and will promise great advances in health care, manufacturing, and communication.

5. Engineer better medicines

Engineering can enable the development of new systems to use genetic information, sense small changes in the body, assess new drugs, and deliver vaccines to provide health care directly tailored to each person.

6. Advance health informatics

As computers have become available for all aspects of human endeavors, there is now a consensus that a systematic approach to health informatics – the acquisition, management, and use of information in health — can greatly enhance the quality and efficiency of medical care and the response to widespread public health emergencies.

7. Restore and improve urban infrastructure

Infrastructure is the combination of fundamental systems that support a community, region, or country. Society faces the formidable challenge of modernizing the fundamental structures that will support our civilization in centuries ahead.

8. Secure cyberspace

Computer systems are involved in the management of almost all areas of our lives; from electronic communications, and data systems, to controlling traffic lights to routing airplanes. It is clear that engineering needs to develop innovations for addressing a long list of cybersecurity priorities

9. Provide access to clean water

About 1 out of every 6 people living today do not have adequate access to water, and more than double that number lack basic sanitation, for which water is needed. It’s not that the world does not possess enough water – it is just not always located where it is needed.

10. Provide energy from fusion

Fusion is the energy source for the sun. The challenges facing the engineering community are to find ways to scale up the fusion process to commercial proportions, in an efficient, economical, and environmentally benign way.

11. Prevent nuclear terror

Engineering shares the formidable challenges of finding the dangerous nuclear material in the world, keeping track of it, securing it, and detecting its diversion or transport for terrorist use.

12. Manage the nitrogen cycle

It doesn’t offer as catchy a label as “global warming,” but human-induced changes in the global nitrogen cycle pose engineering challenges just as critical as coping with the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels for energy.

13. Develop carbon sequestration methods

The growth in emissions of carbon dioxide, implicated as a prime contributor to global warming, is a problem that can no longer be swept under the rug. But perhaps it can be buried deep underground or beneath the ocean.

14. Engineer the tools for scientific discovery

Grand experiments and missions of exploration always need engineering expertise to design the tools, instruments, and systems that make it possible to acquire new knowledge about the physical and biological worlds.

* National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine

related reading:
news | Ray Kurzweil proposes entrepreneurial peace fund and renewable-energy initiatives to Israeli leaders

video | the future of wind + solar power
Current challenges to productivity and consistency.

Prager University | Is green energy, particularly wind and solar energy, the solution to our climate and energy problems? Or should we be relying on things like natural gas, nuclear energy, and even coal for our energy needs and environmental obligations? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress explains.

related reading:
Prager Unviversity | YouTube channel
Prager University | main

That may be tough to swallow, given that solar currently only supplies around 2% of global energy. But Kurzweil’s predictions have been overwhelmingly correct over the last 2 decades.

Kurzweil’s basic point, reported by Solar Power World, was that while solar is still tiny, it has begun to reliably double its market share every 2 years — today’s 2% share is up from 0.5% in 2012.

Many analysts extend growth linearly from that sort of pattern, concluding we’ll see 0.5% annual growth in solar in the future, reaching 12% solar share in 20 years. But linear analysis ignores what Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns — that as new technologies get smaller and cheaper, their growth becomes exponential.

So instead of looking at year over year growth in percentage terms, Kurzweil says we should look at the rate of growth — the fact that solar market share is doubling every 2 years. If the current 2% share doubles every two years, solar should have a 100% share of the market in 12 years.

Technically, that would suggest solar would have a 128% share of the market in 12 years — highlighting the fact that Kurzweil’s prediction is only partially grounded in the real world. Even 100% share is extremely unlikely, fossil fuel giants are not going down without a fight.

But those giants ignore Kurzweil at their own peril. He predicted the internet, cloud computing, and wearable tech nearly 20 years ago — on the basis of the same principle of accelerating returns that’s behind his solar call.

related reading:
Solar Power World | main
Solar Power World | “Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts solar industry dominance in 12 years”

The 4th Industrial Revolution’s first victims will be blue collar workers. Some people — like my colleagues at the US Central Intelligence Agency — insist their specialized skill, knowledge can’t be replaced by artificial intelligence. Until they see autonomous drones that don’t require human hands, automated image analysis that outperforms human eyes.

Corporations and investors spent $8.5 billion in 2015 on artificial intelligence, $1.8 billion on robots. McKinsey & Co. forecasts 45% of today’s work activities could be done by robots, AI or some tech.

Companies that sell personal data should pay a percentage of the resulting revenue into a Data Mining Royalty Fund that would provide annual payments to US citizens.

Deniers point to retraining programs, insist there’s always need for people to build and service these machines — even as engineers are focused on developing robots that fix themselves or each other. They believe shifts are many decades away.

Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil, who is also Google’s director of engineering, says AI will equal human intelligence by 2029 and new jobs will be created. The World Economic Forum 2016 report said tech changes underway will destroy 7.1 million world jobs by 2020, with only 2.1 million replaced.

related reading:
Business Insider • Tech Insider | Use this calculator to see if robots will take your job
BBC * | Will a robot take your job?

* BBC is British Broadcasting Co.

PBS | What if we could overcome disease and aging to extend our lives indefinitely? Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil says that’s a reality that’s coming soon. He sees living forever in our future. Kurzweil reflects on the exponential growth of technology and the promise of human immortality.

Part of the PBS* News Hour special series Brief but Spectacular.

related reading:
PBS | News Hour : main
PBS | News Hour : Brief but Spectacular

full transcript | Inventor Ray Kurzweil sees immortality in our lifetime
With PBS News Hour host Judy Woodruff.

Judy Woodruff: And now to another in our Brief but Spectacular series.

Tonight, we hear from inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil about immortality and the exponential growth of technology. Since 2012, Kurzweil has been a director of engineering at Google.

Ray Kurzweil: Our immediate reaction to death is that it’s a tragedy. And that’s really the correct reaction. We have rationalized it, saying, oh, that tragic thing that’s looming, that’s actually a good thing. But now we can actually seriously talk about a scenario where we will be able to extend our longevity indefinitely.

I decided to become an inventor when I was 5. I would bring back broken bicycles, radios. This was an era where you would allow a 5 year old to roam the neighborhood and do this. And I had this idea, if I could just figure out how to put all these things together, I could solve any problem.

Ray Kurzweil: I wrote a program that could recognize the patterns in melodies from famous composers and write original music. So I went on this show I’ve Got a Secret hosted by Steve Allen. And my secret was, I had built and programmed a computer that composed music. I created a program that could recognize printed letters in any type and created a reading machine for the blind.

Probably, the most important theme I have talked about is the exponential growth of information technology. Price, performance, and capacity of information technology progresses predictably and exponentially. It doubles every period of time. So this little computer is actually billions of times more powerful per dollar than the computer I used when I was an undergraduate.

We will do that again in the next 25 years. And we will have computers the size of blood cells, little robotic devices that can go through our bloodstream, its capability thousands or millions-fold by connecting to the cloud. That’s a 2030s scenario.

We have been expanding our life expectancy for thousands of years. It was 19 1,000 years ago, 37 in 1800. We’re going to get to a point 10, 15 years from now where we’re adding more time than is going by to our remaining life expectancy.

People say, oh, I don’t want to live past 90. But you know, I talk to 90 year olds, and they definitely want to live to 91 and to 100. People sometimes say that death gives meaning to life because it makes time short, but actually death is a great robber of meaning, of relationships, of knowledge.

We’re going to be able to overcome disease and aging. Most of our thinking will be nonbiological. That will be backed up, so part of it gets wipes away, you can recreate it. And we will be able to extend our lives indefinitely. I would rather use that word than forever.

My name is Ray Kurzweil, and this is my Brief but Spectacular take on our exponential future.

Judy Woodruff: And you can watch more Brief but Spectacular episodes on our website.

books | by Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman, MD on longevity

Ray Kurzweil has authored 2 best selling books on high tech medicine and the breakthroughs in science heralding a future of health and even immortality, co-authored with visionary practitioner Terry Grossman, MD.

1. book | Fantastic Voyage: live long enough to live forever

about | Immortality is within our grasp. In Fantastic Voyage, futurist Ray Kurzweil teams up with life extension expert Terry Grossman, MD, to consider the benefits to human health and longevity promised by leading edge medicine — and how you can take advantage of startling advances. Citing extensive research 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 more extreme life extending, life enhancing technologies in development, become available. This bridge to the future will enable us to make the journey from this century to the next.

2. book | Transcend: 9 steps to living well forever

about | This groundbreaking book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD marshals thousands of scientific studies to make the case that new developments in medicine and tech will allow us to radically extend our life expectancies and slow down the aging process. Soon, our notion of what it means to be a 55 year old will be as outdated as an 8 track tape player.

Transcend presents a practical, enjoyable program so that readers can live long enough — and remain healthy long enough — to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace during the years ahead. This easy-to-follow program will help readers transcend boundaries of our genetic legacy and live long enough to live forever.

To help readers remember the 9 key components of the program, Kurzweil and Grossman have arranged them into a mnumonic.

Talk with your doctor
Relaxation
Assessment
Nutrition
Supplements
Calorie reduction
Exercise
New technologies
Detoxification

* PBS is Public Broadcasting Service

Another artificial intelligence called Deep Blue, built by IBM, was used 20 years ago to beat the world’s chess champion, spelling the beginning of machine learning’s rivalry with human ability. What does this new artificial intelligence victory mean for the future of AI?

James Barrett explores this question in his book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era in which he interviews futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Alpha Go is artificial intelligence in a narrow sense, it can only be used to play go. But our brains can do many different tasks, humans have a universal intelligence. However, this development can lead to the creation of a robot, a computer system that has farther reaching abilities, this depth of learning is a very important step.

related reading:
Google | Deep Mind: main
Google | Deep Mind: Alpha Go
Google | Alpha Go using machine learning to master the ancient game of go: summary

Nature | main
Nature | Mastering the game of go with deep neural networks and tree search: paper

Deep Mind | Alpha Go
About the Nature paper.

Our Nature paper describes the technical details behind a new approach to computer go that combines Monte Carlo tree search with deep neural networks that have been trained by supervised learning, from human expert games, and by reinforcement learning from games of self-play.

The game of go is widely viewed as an unsolved “grand challenge” for artificial intelligence. Despite decades of work, the strongest computer go programs still only play at the level of human amateurs. In this paper we describe our go program, Alpha Go. This program was based on general purpose AI methods, using deep neural networks to mimic expert players, and further improving the program by learning from games played against itself.

Alpha Go won over 99% of games against the strongest other go programs. It also defeated the human European champion by 5–0 in an official tournament match. This is the first time ever that a computer program has defeated a professional go player, a feat previously believed to be at least a decade away.

video | How AI beat the world’s top human at Chinese board game of go
Background on the historic artificial intelligence victory.

Nature | Go is an ancient Chinese board game, often viewed as the game computers could never play. Now researchers from Google owned company Deep Mind have proven the nay-sayers wrong, creating an artificial intelligence, called Alpha Go, which has beaten a professional go player for the first time.

In this Nature video, we go behind the scenes to learn about the game, the program and what this means for the future of artificial intelligence.

related reading:
Nature | YouTube channel: main
Nature | YouTube channel: news stream

The talk with leading, innovative thinkers was part of 92 Street Y’s week long 7 Days of Genius festival. Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author and futurist.

In the future, Kurzweil said, there will be a premium on specialized, comprehensive knowledge. If you have passion for art, music or literature — follow that, he says. Kurzweil learned when he was young he had a passion for inventing. “But for some people it’s not clear,” he says. “They should explore many different avenues.”

Money should not be the motivating factor, says Kurzweil, who is something of a romantic. “Don’t do what you think is practical, just because you think that’s a way to make a living. The best way to pursue the future is find an expression you have a passion for,” he says.

Tyson encourages people to seek out learning, visit museums and follow curiosity. Tyson says, “I’m here to make more people passionate, to transform the world for good.”

about | 7 Days of Genius festival at 92 Street Y
Background on the week long event series on science, innovation and culture.

7 Days of Genius is a multi-platform, week long festival with stage events featuring thought leaders in science, innovation and culture. It explores the concept of genius, and how it transforms lives and cultures. Events are also hosted by partner organizations, and digital broadcast through partners MS • NBC and National Geographic.

The event is held each year at the historic 92 Street Y* — famous cultural and community center in New York, New York over 140 years old. It’s now a significant United States landmark and center for music, arts, philosophy, celebrity talks and entertainment.

The yearly series of inspiring conversations with experts in politics, technology, knowledge, ethics is focused on the power of genius to change the world for the better.

* 92 Street Y is 92 Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association

92 Street Y | 7 Days of Genius festival
Program for the week long event series.

92 Street Y | main
92 Street Y | 7 Days of Genius: main

92 Street Y | video on-demand: main
92 Street Y | video on-demand: 7 Days of Genius

92 Steet Y | YouTube channel: 92 • Y
92 Steet Y | YouTube channel: 92 • Y plus

92 Street Y | 7 Days of Genius
Conversation on stage during the week long event series, held at the historic community center.

featured talk | Ray Kurzweil with host Neil DeGrasse Tyson, PhD — on Invention & Immortality

Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil is joined by astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD for a discussion of some of the biggest topics of our time. They explore the role of technology in the future, its impact on brain science — and coming innovations in artificial intelligence, energy, life extension and immortality.

Ray Kurzweil has been accurately predicting the future for decades. He explains to Star Talk show host Neil DeGrasse Tyson, PhD how he does it.

Kurzweil also says microscopic robots called nanobots will connect your neocortex to the cloud — the expansion of the human brain that he predicts will happen in the 2030s.

This featured talk is part of a week long series of events called 7 Days of Genius. Presented by the celebrated, historic 92 Street Y cultural arts and community center.

video | 1.
Highlights from the talk with Ray Kurzweil and host Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD

video | 2.
Highlights from the talk with Ray Kurzweil and host Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD

92 Street Y | 7 Days of Genius
Some featured speakers from the series.

1.  Manjul Bhargava, PhD
2.  Esther Dyson
3.  Ray Kurzweil
4.  Martine Rothblatt, PhD
5.  Yancey Strickler
6.  Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD

Business Insider • Tech Insider | Astrophysicist and Star Talk show host Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD sits down with futurist and author Ray Kurzweil for the first time.

Two of the smartest people in the world on what will happen to our brains and everything else.

Star Talk is a podcast and radio show hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD — where comic co-hosts, guest celebrities and scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe.

producer | Kamelia Angelova, Laura Berland, Kevin Reilly, Darren Weaver
producer | Curved Light, Star Talk
executive producer | Helen Matsos

related reading:
Star Talk | main
National Geographic Channel | Star Talk

Business Insider • Tech Insider | YouTube channel: Business Insider
Business Insider • Tech Insider | YouTube channel: Tech Insider
Business Insider • Tech Insider | YouTube channel: Star Talk
Business Insider • Tech Insider | presented by Boeing + Star Talk: innovators

Wikipedia | Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD
Wikipedia | Star Talk: radio show
Wikipedia | Star Talk: television show

Boeing | innovation series

American Museum of Natural History | Hayden Planetarium: main
American Museum of Natural History | Hayden Planetarium: Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD

Business Insider • Tech Insider  | The world’s leading futurist Ray Kurzweil isn’t shocked by much. Except for this one thing. Kurzweil, one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism, has a strategy on how to prolong his own life — until science figures out how to make us immortal.

But he still can’t wrap his head around this one fact. The futurist is also author of best selling books, including The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind.

producer | Will Wei
editor | Christine Nguyen

transcript | What is the one scientific fact that blows your mind?

“Well, the size of the universe blows my mind. There are billions and billions, to quote Carl Sagan, of stars in our galaxy. And there are billions and billions of galaxies. So the vastness of the universe is quite extraordinary. But it appears that we may be the only place — at least within our light sphere — that we know about, in terms of light coming to us, that has a technologically capable civilization.

Because if the other ones were out there, I believe we would have noticed them already. That’s a long discussion. But we may be in the lead, despite the vastness of the universe.”

— Ray Kurzweil

related reading:
Business Insider | main
Business Insider | YouTube channel

Tech Insider | main
Tech Insider | YouTube channel

gallery | Carl Sagan collection

image | Portrait illustration of Carl Sagan by Heather Brennan.

Heather Brennan | main
Heather Brennan | Billions upon Billions

image | Quote from Carl Sagan by AZ Quotes.

AZ Quotes | main
AZ Quotes | Carl Sagan

image | Carl Sagan quote print by Leyda V Campbell.

Leyda Design | main
Leyda Design | Etsy

“Technology’s at its best when used to heal, not hinder, and enhance human potential,” says Dave Zaboski, an animator and classically trained painter who gave a keynote February 9, 2016 at the UBM* conference Medical Design + Manufacturing, called MD+M west.

“The ability of technologists to improve the lives of others is increasing dramatically. It’s all about exponentially accelerating technologies empowering like minded people aligned around a shared goal.”

Consider for instance the Limbitless Solutions project, a student led non-profit based at the University of Central Florida, which distributes 3D printed prosthetic arms to children for free. To date, the group has distributed 2000 body powered arms to kids in more than 40 countries.

“Behind the curtain, all of us are students. When I first started, I had no idea that it was just college students getting together to create these arms for someone else,” said Stephanie Valderrama, Limbitless creative director.

She shared the keynote stage with Dominique Courbin, director of production at Limbitless, and renowned futurist and author Ray Kurzweil.

gallery | UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing

image | Exhibitors gather at UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing. Over 2,100 innovative suppliers demo latest, ground breaking technologies and comprehensive products.

The program offered interactive hands-on sessions and panel discussions led by industry thought leaders with valuable insights.

image | Medical device manufacturers look for inspiration and cutting edge products and services.

“It was beautiful to see that passion really change in our community, to see that we’re not all engineers as well. I’m an artist, we have fashion designers. We’re open to have others help create these arms.”

The group made all of its current prosthetic designs open source, releasing upgraded plans so anyone can use or help create future design iterations. We’re at a unique point in time when the divisions between traditionally separate fields are blurring, clearing the way for insights from niche disciplines to be applied to other fields.

“We can now fully cross pollinate different disciplines to solve problems and challenges in a more holistic way,” Dave Zaboski said, who also teaches creativity at Singularity University, which Ray Kurzweil co-founded. “In archetypal terms, we have concluded our individual hero’s journey — our deep dive into particular discipline specialties — we can now share expertise to solve bigger problems.”

This was a theme in Ray Kurzweil’s keynote address at MD+M west. Kurzweil anticipates continued advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning to have profound cultural implications.

People should question whether the same types of problems that have affected humanity in the past will continue to do so in the future, Kurzweil said. While the earth’s quickly growing population is concerning, tech will ultimately meet the resources and needs of humanity in the future. “I think we will avoid the kind of problems we had before,” Kurzweil said.

Kurzweil pointed to internet history. “If you remember the 1990s, there was the internet craze, and if you had the URL dog.com, you were a billionaire.

“Then in 2000, people took stock and said you can’t really make money with these websites. And we had the internet crash,” he recounted. “After the exponential growth continued, and we had mature understanding of what was required, we now have internet companies like Google that are worth half a trillion dollars.”

Kurzweil and Limbitless team members Stephanie Valderrama and Dominique Courbin asked how tech can solve previously unsurmountable challenges. “Ray Kurzweil certainly has optimism in his talk. The work Dominique and Stephanie are doing is beautifully aligned with a whole view of tech. That’s the future,” Zaboski said.

gallery | UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing

image | At UBM conference MD+M west, Dave Zaboski animator and classically trained painter, gave a speech and sketched Ray Kurzweil, who gave a keynote.

related reading:
Dave Zaboski | The Divine Line
Dave Zaboski | The Alchemy of Creativity 

keynote | Science, Technology and Invention: strategies to create the future
by Ray Kurzweil

about | The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process with rapid creation, violent destruction, many winners and many losers. Despite the apparent chaos, we can discern predictable patterns. The pace of innovation itself is doubling every decade. The overall price-performance and capacity of every form of information technology grows exponentially, generally doubling in a year or less. As information technology achieves each new level of price-performance and capacity, new applications become feasible and existing business models lose their viability.

Another implication is that the tools of disruptive change have been democratized. A couple of students created Google on their thousand dollar laptops. A few years later, a couple of undergraduates created Facebook with tools that everyone has. The rate of change is now so rapid that even three to five year business plans need to consider that every level of an industry will undergo major changes during that period.

It’s not just the devices we carry around that are influenced by these exponential changes. Health and medicine is now an information technology with the collection of the human genome, the means of changing genes in a mature individual, and the ability to design interventions on computers and to test them on biological simulators. Even energy will be transformed as we apply nanotechnology to the design of solar panels and energy storage devices. The means to change the world are in everyone’s hands.

keynote bio | Ray Kurzweil: influential author, inventor, futurist. Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc ranked him no. 8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS selected Kurzweil as one of the “revolutionaries who made America.” He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists.

That’s not all. Kurzweil was the first to invent many things — the first CCD flatbed scanner, omni-font optical character recognition, print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, text-to-speech synthesizer, and large vocabulary speech recognition, are among his list of creations.

gallery | UBM event Medical Design + Manufacturing

image | Keynote speaker Ray Kurzweil anticipates advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning to have profound cultural implications.

related reading:
UBM | events
UBM | events — Medical Design + Manufacturing: east
UBM | events — Medical Design + Manufacturing: west 
UBM | Med Tech World

Qmed | main
Qmed | The future of medical technology according to Ray Kurzweil
Qmed | How unbridled optimism can spur innovation

* UBM is United Business Media

Within 30 years, machines will be smarter than humans and have power over society, says Kurzweil, renowned inventor and author. He sees an immensely bright future. He predicts:

• There will be more of everything: humans will become funnier, sexier and more creative.
• This technology is a continuation of evolution. And it will make us smarter.

Prompted by today’s Nobel Prize events, our topic is the future of intelligence. Confidence among the distinguished scholars and successful entrepreneurs participating in the Nobel talks is strong. They firmly believe that human beings are becoming more educated, working more and more with machines that are increasingly intelligent — which will bring us solutions to most social problems.

Who really has seen the light is Ray Kurzweil, now a Director of Engineering at Google to make computers more teachable. The trend is in the right direction, he says.

The world is becoming wealthier and more peaceful. Unfortunately, these positive trends are under-reported in the media, creating unnecessary pessimism. This also applies to concerns that intelligent machines will take away jobs from humans.

That fear of losing work to mechanization is 200 years old, arising among English weavers during early days of industrialization.They were right, their jobs disappeared. But new, even more qualified jobs are created all the time.

Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines is the most optimistic text I’ve ever read. Sometimes it’s provocative.

His book claims there is no reason to refrain from machines, and the path we’ve embarked on is a road paved with gold. Risks? Well, maybe. The machines are quickly becoming so intelligent that they constitute a power that must not fall into the wrong hands.

“We must,” writes Kurzweil, “use technology in accordance with our human values.” At the same time, these risks could be brushed aside without reasoning. It is optimistic to believe in humanity’s capacity to rein in the forces that liberate it.

The origin of Kurzweil’s optimism lies in the exponential growth curve. Artificial intelligence capacity increases exponentially, by doubling per a given unit of time, rather than growing linearly. The capability curve bends dramatically upward.

The exponential growth of computing power — that makes it enormously cheaper, faster and smaller — will enable us to enhance our biological intelligence on a large scale. First, by various electronic implants, partly through miniature computers the size of blood cells that link our brains to the cloud.

I ask if this is really an example of progress. Since we will all have access to the same cloud, since the connection will be so fast and so cheap, won’t that equalize all people without giving an individual an advantage? It is not fundamentally about being forced to run, just to stand still?

Kurzweil says, “Well, the fact is that we all become smarter over time. Before, it was through education, now it is through upgrades to the brain that will connect us with all human knowledge. But this does not mean that we all become equally intelligent, even if we have the capacity and conditions. We are leveraging our capabilities in different ways, and I think that the differences will increase in the future.”

The singularity is the hotly debated time in the future when machines’ intelligence outruns humans, then the technology finally takes over the development of society while becoming incomprehensible to us. We simply will not understand how it works anymore, nor where it is heading. Incomprehensibly intelligent machines will create even more intelligent machines, ad infinitum.

His 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, places the singularity in year 2045. What I wonder is how it’s even theoretically possible to be optimistic — or indeed pessimistic — about a process that we are challenged to understand, by definition.

Kurzweil explains, “The singularity is a metaphor taken from physics — we have enough knowledge to understand what would happen if we were sucked into a black hole, for example. We can describe how we experience singularity, although we probably would be destroyed rather quickly. And in the same way I can in my books discuss what happens after 2045. What I foresee is a great intelligence and knowledge explosion, comparable to what happened two million years ago when we evolved from primates to hominids. The difference is that everything is going to change so immeasurably quicker when we can upload the brain’s neocortex to the cloud — and to different kinds of synthetic neocortex.”

But, I insist, if we look at history and how people treat less intelligent species, is there really a reason to be optimistic about super-intelligent machines, that would act against us? Isn’t surrender the price for survival?

Kurzweil replies, “No, when you talk about the different species, it is not a proper analogy. We are our tools and machines, it is not about a contradiction or conflict. We will fuse with them. It’s already happening now.”

Which is hard to dispute and does not exclude the need for a continued dialog about where the convergence is actually different from subjugation. Kurzweil maintains that people will become immortal.

about | Ray Kurzweil is a United States writer and researcher, born in 1948. He is active in the computer field of optical character recognition and machine learning.

Among other things, he invented the first machine that converts written text to spoken reading, an assistive tool for the blind. Since 2012, he is a Director of Engineering at Google.

Google’s resident futurist and famed inventor Ray Kurzweil takes 100 pills a day to help him reach singularity, the point at which he believes exponential developments in technology will allow him to live forever.

He stopped by our office and talked to us about food science and supplemental nutrition. Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading minds on artificial intelligence, technology and futurism. He is author of 5 best selling books, including The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind.

related reading:
Tech Insider | main
Tech Insider | YouTube channel

Business Insider | main
Business Insider | YouTube channel

As author, futurist, and inventor Ray Kurzweil — who also happens to be my father — shared in his talk, innovators and entrepreneurs should internalize this exponential rate of progression before launching their projects.

By doing so, we put ourselves in a position to accurately time our projects, and best take advantage of tomorrow’s capabilities as soon as they are available.

video | Ray Kurzweil talk at Cloud CEO Summit

Insights on cloud computing

Ray Kurzweil shared insights into what the current rate of technological progress portends for information technology and health care. Check out his full talk here.

Cloud CEO Summit gathered 100 of the top cloud CEOs who are defining the future of cloud computing — hosted by Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Bessemer Venture Partners presented its State of the Cloud Report. We are pleased to make this year’s 2015 version public. This report provides an in depth look into the state of the cloud, industry trends, future predictions, and key metrics that cloud start-ups can use to benchmark trajectories.

The State of the Cloud Report draws on our experiences as early cloud evangelists, operators, and investors in the space. Through the years we have collectively met with thousands of private and public cloud companies, invested in almost 100 of them directly, and developed extensive custom data sources and assets.

This is only the beginning. We remain bullish on the cloud and predict the Bessemer Venture Partners Cloud Index — tracking top public companies — will triple in the next 5 years, reaching $500 billion of total market cap by 2020.

Bessemer Venture Partners | State of the Cloud Report: 2015
Key findings from the report.

the cloud wins

1. first category — customer relationship management — goes over 50% cloud in 2016
2. now at 42 public cloud companies in Bessemer Venture Partners Cloud Index — up 160% in 3 years
3. Bessemer Venture Partners Cloud Index crosses $500 billion by 2020

major trends + coming disruption

1. industry cloud comes of age
2. cyber security a threat + opportunity
3. business-to-dealer opportunity for developers + entrepreneurs
4. further commoditization of infrastructure-as-a-service
5. more mergers + acquisitions from legacy vendors ahead
6. dawn of enterprise mobile

related reading:
Bessemer Venture Partners | main
Bessemer Venture Partners | cloud computing
Bessemer Venture Partners | State of the Cloud Report: 2015

about | Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers and futurists, with a 30 year track record of accurate predictions. Called a restless genius by The Wall Street Journal and the ultimate thinking machine by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the rightful heir to Thomas Edison. PBS selected him as one of 16 revolutionaries who made America.

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, 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.

Kurzweil received the 2015 Technical Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in the field of music technology. He is recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds honors from 3 United States presidents.

He authored New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind. He is a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

They talked about evil and progress, then the audience went upstairs for cocktails. Steinsaltz is a writer on religious principles, Jewish theorist, and a popular university and radio commentator.

Kurzweil is a prolific inventor and writer, known for his predictions about technology, who brought his kids up Jewish in Massachusetts. He is a director of engineering at Google.

“Our tools are better and better. Our brains are not better. There are depths of human viciousness and human evil. We have a little hell within us,” said Steinsaltz.

“The amount of violence in the world is at its lowest level ever,” said Kurzweil, who grew up a Unitarian Universalist. “Life has already expanded.” Kurzweil cited political theorist Hannah Arendt on evil.

“That won’t be helped by more information,” Steinsaltz said. “It’s not just information. As communication has improved, so has democracy,” said Kurzweil.

“Democracy is a nice name,” Steinsaltz said. “Democracy is a good idea, and democracy is theoretically with people that have equal intelligence, democracy can work.”

Kurzweil quoted Winston Churchill on democracy. Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 1950s. “The most beautiful time in the history of Rome was the time of the emperors,” Steinsaltz said.

And then, just as Steinsaltz seemed on the brink of a broad argument against democratic rule, the moderator cut everyone off and asked them to predict the future. The rabbi said most people are like chemical elements, but some are like radioactive elements, “the moving power,” he said. Kurzweil did not respond directly.

The setting was a dinner for the Aleph Society at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, New York. After, the audience retired for drinks, a chicken dinner and dessert.

Rabbi Adin Even Israel Steinsaltz is a philosopher, social critic and author called by Time magazine a “once in a millennium scholar.” His work in education earned him the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor.

audience comments

The dialog sounds like cynicism in one corner and optimism in another. When times are good, which orientation prevails? I wonder if Judaism isn’t paddling upstream in an era of stability and prosperity. Even more to the point, was Judaism ever about cynicism? I thought it was supposed to be the antidote to it. — Dana Lieberman

I consider futurist Ray Kurzweil one of the greatest minds today. In his sphere, he’s on a plane with Einstein. His philosophy, thinking and book The Singularity Is Near is genius. I personally heard Kurzweil speak at a packed audience lecture in Las Vegas, Nevada in January 2013. I posit the singularity, nanotechnology and molecular assemblers are our future. — Clyde Dinkins

related reading:
Aleph Society | main
Museum of Jewish Heritage | main

Wikipedia | Adin Even Israel Steinsaltz
Wikipedia | Hannah Arendt
Wikipedia | Winston Churchill

listen to the show | In this episode of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation tech trends radio show Spark, hostess Nora Young interviews Ray Kurzweil on his principles for understanding the brain’s organization and functions, heralding new advances that could result in computers that mimic human abilities.

full transcript | You can think of the brain as an amazing feat of engineering. Researchers struggle to piece together just how the brain does what it does — how nerve cells deep in the neocortex, a layer unique to us mammals, are involved in higher order functions like emotions, gut feelings and jokes.

“For the first time now we can see inside a living, thinking brain with enough resolution to really see what’s going on,” Ray Kurzweil told Nora Young on radio show Spark in an interview. “We not only see your brain create your thoughts, but we see your thoughts create your brain, because every time we think about something we’re creating new connections that embody that thought. It’s said ‘you are what you eat’ but really, you are what you think.”

Kurzweil is an inventor, author and futurist. In his new book, How to Create a Mind: the secret of human thought revealed, he discusses how the brain creates thought, and examines how we can use our understanding of that process to create better artificial intelligence. He wants to reverse engineer the brain, if that’s possible.

“If we understand how the brain works, we can create human like intelligence in our machines, and then use that to make ourselves smarter,” Kurzweil explained.

Since the late 1980s, Kurzweil has written extensively on where he thinks humanity goes next. Kurzweil is a steadfast proponent of a particularly potent vision of AI: not just that we can create something that can pass for intelligence, but that we can create something that does what humans do when we think.

Human intelligence is already considerably dependent on digital technology. “I would say we’re already in that process…all the gadgets and services we use like Google and Wikipedia do make us smarter,” Kurzweil said.

First, though, we have to wrap our heads around one important concept: the pattern recognition theory of the mind, which Kurzweil considers the fundamental algorithm for thinking. “I’ve always felt that what the human brain does well is recognize patterns,” he said.

“And now that we’re actually discovering how the brain works by looking inside it, we’re discovering that’s what it does. The same algorithm is repeated throughout the neocortex.” And there’s a hierarchy, from low level pattern recognition like recognizing capital letters to higher level functions like identifying humor or irony.

“We have this capacity for hierarchical thinking. We have ideas that are composites of other ideas, and those ideas are composites of other ideas. We have this very elaborate hierarchy in the brain,” he said. “And animals that don’t have a neocortex can’t do hierarchical thinking.”

Of course, human thought is far from perfect. We’re subjective and biased. Is there a risk of mimicking our flaws in addition to our strengths? “As we take on broader challenges, imperfection is inherently part of the test,” said Kurzweil. “But I think this hierarchical structure that the neocortex represents is the best way to be intelligent. There are limitations that we can recognize, one of which is just capacity.”

One of the goals is to expand the neocortex, according to Kurzweil. He pointed out that “300 million pattern recognizers [what our brains are currently made of, on average] sounds like a big number, and it was big enough for humans to master language and art and science, but it’s also very limited. We see that in how long it takes us to master one book, and how many different subjects or languages you can learn. We could use a greater neocortex. Why not a billion?”

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation | Spark

about | Spark radio show is all about tech, trends, and fresh ideas. With an eye on the future, host Nora Young guides you through this dynamic era of technology led change, and connects your life to the big ideas changing our world right now. Spark is produced by Michelle Parise, Dan Misener, Kent Hoffman and Nora Young.

Nora Young was the founding host of the CBC Radio show Definitely Not the Opera, where she often focused on new media and technology. As a journalist, author, and speaker, Nora Young explores how new technology shapes the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. Her book is The Virtual Self. Her favorite tech is her bicycle.

related reading:
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation | Spark
book | The Virtual Self: how our digital lives are altering the world around us by Nora Young
blog | The Sniffer: New Directions in Trends + Tech by Nora Young and Cathi Bond
blog | At the Corner of Technology + Culture by Nora Young

Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist and inventor, envisions a more cooperative future. He says the human brain will soon merge with computer networks to form a hybrid artificial intelligence. “In the 2030s we’re going to connect directly from the neocortex to the cloud,” said Kurzweil. “When I need a few thousand computers, I can access that wirelessly.”

Creating artificial minds

In his 2012 book, How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil said the neocortex of the human brain contains 300 million pattern processors that are responsible for human thought. These pattern processors could be artificially replicated, he argued, allowing artificial intelligence to surpass human ability.

That wouldn’t make the human brain obsolete, though. By linking our brains to cloud computers, humans could expand the limits of our own computing ability — and eventually, upload our own brains to the cloud. “As you get to the late 2030s or 2040s, our thinking will be predominately non-biological and the non-biological part will ultimately be so intelligent and have such vast capacity it’ll be able to model, simulate and understand fully the biological part,” said Kurzweil. “We will be able to fully back up our brains.”

Kurzweil said human intelligence has already merged with technology, although not to the extent that he predicts. “A kid in Africa with a smartphone has more access to human knowledge than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. I finally figured out how to live forever in a robot body,” he joked.

Fear of artificial intelligence

Kurzweil acknowledged artificial intelligence is a scary prospect. He argued that humans will eventually become comfortable sharing the world with AI.

“It’s helping us diagnose disease and cure disease, alleviate poverty, clean up the environment. I’m optimistic, but that doesn’t mean we should be lulled into a lack of concern,” said Kurzweil.

“I think this concern will die down as we see more and more positive benefits of artificial intelligence and gain more confidence that we can control it.”

Kurzweil also tackled the question of legal rights for artificial intelligences, a popular science fiction motif. To him, the rise of intelligent machines connected to human consciousness will force humanity to rethink the idea of rights. “It wasn’t very long ago that women didn’t have the right to vote,” noted Kurzweil in response to an audience question. “We’ll realize that consciousness, free will does not require a biological substrate.”

A history of bold predictions

Kurzweil has a long history of making bold predictions about the future of technology. Much of his writing has focused on the singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence.

In a 2010 essay, Kurzweil reviewed 147 predictions — essay | “How my predictions are faring”  — he made  in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Of those predictions, Kurzweil determined that 78 percent were “entirely correct” as of the end of 2009, and eight percent were “essentially correct.”

Those predictions included:

• The rise of portable computing.
• The availability of wearable computing.
• The removal of keyboards from portable devices.
• Cables disappearing in favour of wireless technology.
• Computer displays built into eyeglasses, and,
• The distribution of media such as books, music, and movies in an entirely digital form.

An expert in the artificial intelligence field of pattern recognition, Kurzweil is known for inventing software that could scan a document written in any font and turn it into digital text. He was also a pioneer in text-to-speech technology and computerized speech recognition. He has received numerous awards and accolades in the fields of engineering and technology design. Kurzweil joined Google as director of engineering in 2013.

related reading:
Futurism | main
Futurism | infographics
Futurism | videos

explore the series:
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Exponential Technology — series
The World Post  | YouTube channel
The Huffington Post  | YouTube channel

full series | articles:

• article link | 1.  Peter Diamandis’ Bold a reminder of how entrepreneurs will control the world’s fate
by Vivek Wadhwa | 3.25.2015

• article link | 2.  Let’s treat robots like Yo Yo Ma’s cello: as an instrument for human intelligence
by Nicholas Agar | 09.10.2015

• article link | 3.  Controversial philosopher says man and machine will fuse into one being
— An interview with philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.
by Nathan Gardels | 9.10.2015

• article link | 4.  Genome pioneer: we have the dangerous power to control evolution
— An interview with genome and synthetic life scientist J. Craig Venter, PhD.
by Nathan Gardels | 9.10.2015

• article link | 5.  We are sequencing the genomes of the world, and it’s giving us a new vision of life
by Dawn Field | 9.10.2015

• article link | 6.  This 50 cent paper microscope could democratize science
by Aaron Pomerantz | 9.14.2015

• article link | 7.  Can we create an artificial brain?
— This leading neuroengineer thinks it’s dangerous to even try.
by Kathleen Miles | 9.16.2015

• article link | 8.  As sexbot technology advances, ethical and legal questions linger: do me baby, said the robot
— What happens to society when sexbots are everywhere?
by Peter Mellgard | 9.22.2015

• article link | 9.  A post human world: should we rage, rage against the dying of the mites?
by Martin Rees, PhD + Huw Price, PhD | 9.23.2015

• article link | 10. Ray Kurzweil: in the 2030s tiny nanorobots in our brains will make us god like
— Once we’re cyborgs, he says, we’ll be funnier, sexier and more loving.
by Kathleen Miles | 10.1.2015

• article link | 11. The qualities most valued in employees are changing and not how you think
Nicholas Agar | 10.7.2015

10. article summary | Ray Kurzweil: in the 2030s tiny nanobots in our brains will make us god like

Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts humans are going to develop emotions and characteristics of higher complexity, as a result of connecting their brains to computers. Once we’re cyborgs, he said we’re going to be funnier and sexier.

“We’re going to be better at expressing loving sentiment,” Kurzweil said at a recent discussion at Singularity University, Executive Program 2015, which he co-founded with Peter Diamandis, MD.

Kurzweil predicts that in the 2030s, human brains will connect to the cloud, allowing us to send e-mails and photos directly to the brain and back up our thoughts and memories. This will be possible, he says, via nanobots — tiny robots from DNA strands — swimming around in the capillaries of our brain.

He sees the extension of our brain into predominantly non-biological thinking as the next step in the evolution of humans — just as learning to use tools was for our ancestors.

And this extension, he says, will enhance not just our logical intelligence but also our emotional intelligence. “We’re going to add more levels to the hierarchy of brain modules and create deeper levels of expression,” he said.

link | full article

full series | videos:

• watch video | 1. Ray Kurzweil talk at Singularity University
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Futurist Ray Kurzweil speaks about humans becoming more god like.

• watch video | 2. Ray Kurzweil talk at Singularity University
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Ray Kurzweil says AI will result in more human jobs, not fewer.

• watch video | 3. Craig Venter, PhD says we now have the power but not the wisdom to control evolution.
The Huffington Post + The World Post  | Craig Venter, PhD explains the near future of synthetic biology and understanding the human genome.

related reading:
Singularity University | main
Singularity University | YouTube channel

Fittingly for a conference discussing the viability of robotics, the closing keynote was futurist, inventor Ray Kurzweil, author of book The Singularity Is Near, and now a director of engineering at Google, with a focus on machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

Kurzweil’s keynote was packed with a whirlwind tour through computing history, bringing us right up to date with 3D printed organs, populated by stem cells.

“Reprogramming biology as a software program to overcome disease is the next frontier,” Kurzweil said. He talked about turning on and off genes and “putting our neocortex on the cloud” so we become a hybrid of biological and non-biological processes, augmenting our limited capabilities, especially while aging.

As the conference drew to a close, Kurzweil said he thought a machine will pass the Turing test convincingly in 2029. There were many people at Robo Business who are spending a lot of money in the hope that that day comes.

related reading:
Boston Consulting Group | main
Boston Consulting Group | “The rise of robotics” — report

Electronic House Publishing | Robo Business
Electronic House Publishing | Robotics Trends
Electronic House Publishing | Robotics Business Review

For me, the possibility that machines will acquire the equivalent of human feelings and emotions is pure fantasy. And yet, as a neurologist, I cannot ignore advancing machine intelligence’s implications about the human mind.

Uncovering the biology of creativity is big business. Functional MRI scan aficionados tell us which brain areas light up when someone has a novel idea. Brain wave experts propose electrical patterns specific to originality.

Even if these observations pan out, they cannot tell us how to interpret a brilliant chess move arising out of a software glitch. If we are forced to expand our notion of creativity to include random electrical firings, what does that tell us about our highly touted imaginative superiority over a mindless machine?

related reading:
The New York Times | The Opinionator: main
The New York Times | The Opinionator: The Stone

The legendary Ray Kurzweil was recruited by Google to work on AI projects. Eric Schmidt alludes to Google’s gmail, but doesn’t mention Deep Mind, now teaching machines how to read.

It’s a question of morality. There is no way to prove that one entity is conscious and another is not. Virtual characters can claim to be, but that does not convince us that they are.

Some scientists say therefore that consciousness is an illusion. I would argue against that, however, because our entire moral system is based on it.

If morality and rights are based on consciousness, and if consciousness is not a scientifically testable proposition, then we have to conclude that there is a proper role for philosophy, which is the study of important matters that cannot be resolved through scientific experimentation alone. Indeed, the idea of rights may be philosophy’s fundamental issue.

If an AI can convince us that it is at human levels in its responses, and if we are convinced that it is experiencing the subjective states that it claims, then we will accept that it is capable of experiencing suffering and joy. At that point artificial intelligences will demand rights, and because of our ability to empathize, we will be inclined to grant them.

by Ray Kurzweil, inventor and computer scientist

related reading
Time: Question Everything | main
Time: Question Everything | editor’s letter

Time: Question Everything | questions + answers on technology, science and the future

about | Time Question Everything opens the floor for debate of pop culture topics — serious to whimsical, sublime to ridiculous — that have no right or wrong answers but certainly elicit a wide spectrum of intense opinions.

Hopefully reading these different perspectives will open minds, challenge thinking and maybe even provoke a change in what you believe. Let’s discuss!

Time: Question Everything | Should we all wear body cams?

• answered by Elias Aboujaoude — Body cams are worth the loss of privacy
• answered by Jen Golbeck — Cameras on everyone is a dystopian nightmare

Time: Question Everything | Should we let ourselves be anonymous online?

• answered by Ellen Pao — Anonymity is appealing, but potentially toxic
• answered by Jonathan Taplin — Anonymity brings out the worst in humans

Time: Question Everything | Will robots need rights?

• answered by Ray Kurzweil — Robots will demand rights — and we’ll grant them
• answered by Susan N. Herman — The ACLU of the future may protect robot rights
• answered by David Gelernter — Robots won’t need rights — but maybe kindness

Time: Question Everything | Will artificial intelligence overtake humans?

• answered by John Giannandrea — True artificial intelligence is still elusive
• answered by Frank Wilczek — A brief history of the AI wars
• answered by Haley Joel Osment — We must halt the proliferation of weaponized AI
• answered by Stuart Russell — Moral philosophy will become part of the tech industry
• answered by Frank Chen — Humanoid robots? First make an auto-correct that works
• answered by Reid Hoffman — Robots will take our jobs — but we will adapt

As a virtual platform, people can chat for extended lengths of time with her. Users feel she has excellent listening skills, a great sense of humor and so called ability to love you unconditionally.

That machines may reduce the size of the workforce, and require a different skill, is a concern. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, is troubled by body transplants where “the human race drifts into dependence on machines, with no practical choice but to accept  machine decisions.” Talking with Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist, inventor, futurist, director of engineering at Google, Joy became more concerned for humans.

Ray Kurzweil believes machines will be more intelligent than humans in a short time — and a person’s history, experiences, emotions, consciousness can be downloaded making the decision to transplant more agreeable.

If it extends life another 100 years, people will accept the idea whether they are able to control their brain or  the mechanized brain take charge. […]

As long as Uber is around, flush with cash and hugely ambitious, autonomous vehicles will continue their doubling trend, ultimately becoming better than driver vehicles and much less expensive.

Uber is pretty much eating the world right now. It has more money than everybody else, more lobbyists than everybody else, more naked ambition than everybody else.

Once Uber gets access to self-driving cars, it has eliminated almost all of its labor costs. It has raised $5.5 billion, is worth somewhere between $40 and $50 billion. And the company  has proven itself willing to throw those resources at anything standing in its way, whether that’s regulation, market barriers, or technological limitations.

Last year, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick publicly imagined a future in which his drivers are replaced with robots. Uber poached 40 driverless car researchers and scientists from Carnegie Mellon University to populate its new tech center.

related viewing about Uber:

Uber | From before the start of your trip until after it’s finished, safety is built into the Uber experience. See why some riders choose Uber.

Uber | In April 2013 Uber celebrated our 100th city launch worldwide. Here’s a quick look at our journey so far.

The Times of India | Uber’s driverless taxis one step closer to reality. In a very short space of time, self-driving cars seem to have gone from far off science fiction concepts to actual vehicles driving around our highways and byways. Uber is the latest company to throw its hat into the ring.

The firm has recently opened an Advanced Technologies Centre at Carnegie Mellon University, so Pittsburgh residents can expect to see a lot more of these automobiles cruising around town in the near future.

Uber | As we embark on a partnership with UN Women, Uber is pledging to create 1,000,000 jobs for women globally on the Uber platform by 2020. Over the next 5 years, we’ll work in countries around the world to deliver access to flexible, equitable earning opportunities. One small step toward achieving UN Women’s mission for women’s empowerment.

Uber | main
Uber | safety
Uber | YouTube channel

Uber | UN Women plus Uber, a vision for equality
Uber | Making our roads safer for everyone

Popular Science | The war over your future driverless car service has begun
The Guardian | Are driverless cars the future of Uber

about | What is Genius online? Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. Your interactive guide to human culture.

Genius layers answers to questions over the text itself, enabling you to answer them as you read.

Whenever you’re interested in a passage, you can click it to read an annotation that explains in plain language what you’re reading and why it’s important.

How does it work? Who write the annotations? Why? Texts on Genius are living documents. Over time, they transform into definitive guides as people, just like you, from around the world add bits of knowledge to them.

about | Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, outlines a future for the world. He is an adviser at Google’s ambitious Calico venture, which aims to find a cure for aging.

Ray Kurzweil’s job description at Google sounds simple in its brevity: to bring natural language understanding to Google. But the inventor and futurist was brought onto the Google team to further Kurzweil’s lifelong project, the singularity, the point at which computers achieve consciousness and a seamless merger occurs between humanity and machine.

Ray Kurzweil: How the world will change
click here to see collaborative annotation | link

2017: Self-driving cars
Google self-driving cars have gone half a million miles without human drivers on highways and city streets, with no incidents.Within ten years they will be ubiquitous. Humans have a fairly narrow field of view, these cars have sensors, both visual and laser, and artificial intelligence to be able to assess what’s going on in their environment. Ultimately these cars will communicate with each other and co-ordinate their movements. You also won’t need to own a car, there’ll be a pool of them circulating, and you’ll just call one from your phone when you need it.

2018: Personal assistant search engines
Right now, search is based mostly on looking for key words. What I’m working on is creating a search engine that understands the meaning of these billion of documents. It will be more like a human assistant that you can talk things over with, that you can express complicated, even personal concerns to. If you’re wearing something like Google Glass, it could annotate reality; it could even listen in to a conversation, giving helpful hints. It might suggest an anecdote that would fit into your conversation in real time.

2020: Switch off our fat cells
It was in our interest a thousand years ago to store every calorie.There were no refrigerators, so you stored them in the fat cells of your body, which now means we have an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, medicine is now information technology, and we’re learning how to reprogram this outdated software of our bodies exponentially. In animals with diabetes, scientists have now successfully turned off the fat insulin receptor gene. So these animals ate ravenously, remained slim, didn’t get diabetes, and lived 20 per cent longer. I would say that this will be a human intervention in five to ten years, and we will have the means of really controlling our weight independent of our eating.

2020: Click and print designer clothes at home
Currently there is a lot of over-enthusiasm about 3D printing. Typically where people are prematurely very excited it leads to disillusionment and a bust, like the dot.com crash. I think we’re about five years away from the really important applications. By the early 2020s we’ll be replacing a significant part of manufacturing with 3D printing. We’ll be able to print out clothing and there’ll be an open source market of free designs. There will be personal 3D printers, but also shared ones in your local Starbucks, for example.

2023: Full immersion virtual realities
Computer games have pioneered virtual reality, and within ten years — but probably more like five — these will be totally convincing, full immersion virtual realities, at least for the visual and auditory senses, and there will be some simulation of the tactile sense. To fully master the tactile sense we have to actually tap into the nervous system. That will be a scenario within 20 years. We’ll be able to send little devices, nanobots, into the brain and capillaries, and they’ll provide additional sensory signals, as if they were coming from your real senses. You could for example get together with a friend, even though you were hundreds of thousands of miles apart, and take a virtual walk on a virtual Mediterranean beach and hold their hand and feel the warm spray of the moist air in your face.

2030: Vertical meat and vegetable farms
There will be a new vertical agriculture revolution, because right now we use up a third of the usable land of the world to produce food, which is very inefficient. Instead we will grow food in a computerized vertical factory building — which is a more efficient use of real estate — controlled by artificial intelligence, which recycles all of the nutrients so there’s no environmental impact at all. This can include hydroponic plants, fruits and vegetables, and in vitro cloning of meat. This could be very healthy. We could have meat with Omega-3 fats instead of saturated fats, this sort of thing.

2033: 100 per cent of our energy from solar
We are applying new nanotechnologies to the design of solar panels, and the costs are coming down dramatically. A recent report by Deutsche Bank said that ‘the cost of subsidized solar power is about the same as the cost of electricity from the grid in India and Italy. By 2014 even more countries will achieve solar grid parity. So I do believe that within 20 years we could get all our energy from solar energy. I presented this not so long ago to the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was actually my classmate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and he said: “Ray,do we have enough sunlight to do this with?” and I said: “Yes, we’ve got 10,000 times more than we need.

2040: Stay young forever
Twenty years from now, we will be adding more time than is going by to your remaining life expectancy. We’ve quadrupled life expectancy in the past 1,000 years and doubled it in the past 200 years. We’re now able to reprogram health and medicine as software, and so that pace is only going to continue to accelerate. There are three bridges to life extension. Bridge 1 is taking aggressive steps to stay healthy today, with today’s knowledge. The goal is to get to Bridge 2, the biotechnology revolution, where we can reprogram biology away from disease. Bridge 3 is the nanotechnology revolution. The quintessential application of that is nanobots, little robots in the bloodstream that augment your immune system. We can create an immune system that recognises all disease, and could be reprogrammed to deal with new pathogens.

about | What is Genius online? Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. Your interactive guide to human culture.

Genius layers answers to questions over the text itself, enabling you to answer them as you read. Whenever you’re interested in a passage, you can click it to read an annotation that explains in plain language what you’re reading and why it’s important.

How does it work? Who write the annotations? Why? Texts on Genius are living documents. Over time, they transform into definitive guides as people, just like you, from around the world add bits of knowledge to them.

about | Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, outlines a future for the world. He is an adviser at Google’s ambitious Calico venture, which aims to find a cure for aging.

Ray Kurzweil’s job description at Google sounds simple in its brevity: to bring natural language understanding to Google.

But the inventor and futurist was brought onto the Google team to further Kurzweil’s lifelong project, the singularity, the point at which computers achieve consciousness and a seamless merger occurs between humanity and machine.

Ray Kurzweil: On Google and the singularity
click here to see collaborative annotation | link

On Google:

My project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means. When you write an article you’re not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world’s information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would like to actually have the computers read. We want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage an intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions.

Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM’s Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 37 million pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I’m doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale.Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages.

Watson doesn’t understand the implications of what it’s reading. It’s doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn’t understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn’t understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.

On living forever:

My health regime is a wake-up call to my baby-boomer peers. Most of whom are accepting the normal cycle of life and accepting they are getting to the end of their productive years. That’s not my view. Now that health and medicine is in information technology it is going to expand exponentially. We will see very dramatic changes ahead. According to my model it’s only 10-15 years away from where we’ll be adding more than a year every year to life expectancy because of progress. It’s kind of a tipping point in longevity.

Our immediate reaction to hearing someone has died is that it’s not a good thing. We’re sad. We consider it a tragedy. So for thousands of years, we did the next best thing which is to rationalize. Oh that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing. One of the major goals of religion is to come up with some story that says death is really a good thing. It’s not. It’s a tragedy.

And people think we’re talking about a 95 year old living for hundreds of years. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking radical life extension, radical life enhancement. We are talking about making ourselves millions of times more intelligent and being able to have virtual reality environments which are as fantastic as our imagination.

Humanity is in a technological identity crisis and Google’s Ray Kurzweil is intent on designing our future. Can we humans become more human?

On the other hand, will subtle thinking, like sleep, be built into the immortal android race being prepared by Google’s head of research, Mr. Kurzweil?

“Humans will continue to be creative,” is Kurzweil’s simple answer to the question what will humans do when the androids take over. But what about the androids?

According to Ray Kurzweil, “My timeline is computers will be at human levels, such as you can have a human relationship with them, 15 years from now. When I say about human levels, I’m talking about emotional intelligence. The ability to tell a joke, to be funny, to be romantic, to be loving, to be sexy, that is the cutting edge of human intelligence, that is not a sideshow.”

With the new holding company structure for all things Google called Alphabet, you can bet that Ray Kurzweil will be given lots of room to play and fulfill his dream of reversing aging and reproducing the dead in the form of androids who think they are who someone used to be.

Is this man really head of research for one of the largest tech companies in the world? Yes. And has he yet to be proven wrong since at 14 he demonstrated a self programmed piano playing classical music? No.

In a recent talk, Ray Kurzweil showed the complexity of measuring machine consciousness.

“We can’t just ask an entity: Are you conscious?” he said. “Because we can ask entities in video games today, and they’ll say: Yes, I’m conscious and I’m angry at you.

“But we don’t believe them because they don’t have the subtle cues that we associate with really having that subjective state. My prediction is that by 2029 computers will have those convincing cues.”

As technological evolution begins intersecting our biological evolution as a species, the lines between human and non-human entities will begin blurring more so than humanity has ever encountered, and a new era of identity, and the surrounding ethics and philosophy, will take center stage.

Singularity University | Ray Kurzweil responds to the subject of god. At Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program 2015, a participant asks Ray Kurzweil: Do you believe in god? Kurzweil discuss the relationship between consciousness and morality below in response to a question about his own spiritual beliefs.

Singularity University | Vimeo channel

That will have a deep effect on technology. It implies the chip industry’s extra computing power, over the next decade, will be only half what it would have been.

Ways of mitigating a slowdown in Moore’s law:

Chip designs optimized for specific computing tasks. Graphical processing units, which break data intensive tasks into separate strands to make processing easier, and field programmable gate arrays — chips that can be reprogrammed for specific purposes — are among main growth markets. Google has been optimizing their data centers’ digital productivity.

IBM has trumpeted research into materials like graphene, as well as power theoretically possible with quantum chips. IBM’s new synapse chip is a processor that emulates the human brain.

Predictions based on the exponential growth of Moore’s law are expansive visions of how technology will change the world. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who works at Google, has predicted a moment when the intelligence of computers outpaces that of humans, leading to a merger around 2045 of man and machine — a moment he calls the singularity.

on the web | essentials

Intel | Moore’s law and Intel innovation
Intel | 50 years of Moore’s law

Financial Times | Intel chief raises doubts over Moore’s law
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers: Spectrum | The status of Moore’s law, it’s complicated

Big Think | Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, PhD discusses tweaking Moore’s law and the computers of the post-silicon era.

Honestly, no one knows the answers definitely yet, but here are the best tactics so far. Inventors like Google’s Ray Kurzweil believe it can be done with machines and mind uploading.

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Foundation Chief Scientist and Transhumanist Party anti-aging advisor, Aubrey de Grey, PhD believes it can be done with biology and medicine.

Others believe big data can find out the very best ways to achieve better methods for living far longer. Entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and business media are taking notice of how new transhumanist oriented companies are emerging and working to overcome death. Transhumanist technology is much larger than just biotech.It’s all technology that is reinventing the human being as we know it.

It’s driverless cars soon to be eliminating the tens of thousands of deaths worldwide from drunk driving accidents. It’s exoskeleton technology already getting wheelchair bound people standing up and walking. It’s chip implants monitoring our hydration and sugar levels, then telling our smartphones.

Transhumanity Party | main
Wikipedia | transumanist politics

Humanity + | main
Wikipedia | Humanity +