What Ray Kurzweil Is Doing at Google 1. What Ray Kurzweil is doing at Google: teaching computers to read. "So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m 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. 2. "The system consists of a 1.0 mm×1.0 mm ingestible sensor and an on-body wearable sensor. 3. "First, Vertesi made sure there were absolutely no mentions of her pregnancy on social media, which is one of the biggest ways marketers collect information. 4. "In China Miéville’s The City & The City, citizens of the grosstopically overlapping cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma are taught from birth to 'unsee' the architecture, people, events, and surroundings of the other city. 5. Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip: begging the question.
Technology singularity - News & Rumors Posts Tagged «technology singularity» Elon Musk warns us that human-level AI is ‘potentially more dangerous than nukes’ August 4, 2014 at 8:39 amElon Musk, the mastermind behind SpaceX and Tesla, believes that artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes,” imploring all of humankind “to be super careful with AI,” unless we want the ultimate fate of humanity to closely resemble Judgment Day from Terminator. Personally I think Musk is being a little hyperbolic — after all, we’ve survived more than 60 years of the threat of thermonuclear mutually assured destruction — but still, it’s worth considering Musk’s words in greater detail. What is transhumanism, or, what does it mean to be human?
10 Big Mistakes People Make in Thinking About the Future Photo Credit: Frank Peters Being a working futurist means that I think a lot about how people think about the future. It also means spending a lot of time with people who are also thinking about their own futures. Typically, this involves a dialogue between three distinct groups. First, there's usually a small handful of very foresighted people, who are aware of their own blind spots and biases, and who are eager and open about the prospect of soaring into a wild blue sky to gather a lot of exciting new information. Second, there's a larger group of people who don't usually think at 50,000 feet -- but are willing to go there if they're with people they trust. And then there's a third small group that's very resistant to the idea that anything could or should change. 1. But the gotcha is: research by academic futurists has found that this expected future really isn't the most likely outcome at all. It's good to know what your expected future is. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
MIT Technology Review Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist (PhysOrg.com) -- Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change. Fenner, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said homo sapiens will not be able to survive the population explosion and “unbridled consumption,” and will become extinct, perhaps within a century, along with many other species. United Nations official figures from last year estimate the human population is 6.8 billion, and is predicted to pass seven billion next year. Fenner told The Australian he tries not to express his pessimism because people are trying to do something, but keep putting it off. Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. Easter Island is famous for its massive stone statues.
Home - The Venus Project www.closertotruth Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, futurist, and Director of Engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is generally recognized as a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, due to his stances on life extension technologies, his efforts to forecast future advances in technology, and his interest in the concept of the technological singularity. Ray is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation.
According To A Nasa Funded Study, We're Pretty Much Screwed Our industrial civilization faces the same threats of collapse that earlier versions such as the Mayans experienced, a study to be published in Ecological Economics has warned. The idea is far from new, but the authors have put new rigor to the study of how so many previous societies collapsed, and why ours could follow. Lead author Mr Safa Motesharrei is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. Motesharrei is a graduate student in mathematics at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, a National Science Foundation-supported institution, and the research was done with funding from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent," the forthcoming paper states
When will Singularity happen – and will it turn Earth into heaven or hell? Defined as the point where computers become more intelligent than humans and where human intelligence can be digitally stored, Singularity hasn't happened yet. First theorised by mathematician John von Neumann in the 1950s, the 'Singularitarian Immortalist' (and Director of Engineering at Google) Ray Kurzweil thinks that by 2045, machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined, and that technological development will be taken over by the machines. "There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality," he writes in his book 'The Singularity Is Near'. But – 2045? Hardware innovation Moore's Law states that computer processing power will double every 18 months, which is a thousand-fold increase every decade. What is cognitive computing? We're already in the era of cognitive hardware and brain-inspired architecture. What does Singularity have to do with artificial intelligence?