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The Most Significant Futurists of the Past 50 Years

The Most Significant Futurists of the Past 50 Years
Related:  Futurology

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?

Futurist Futurists or futurologists are scientists and social scientists whose specialty is futurology, or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, whether that of human society in particular or of life on Earth in general. Definition[edit] The term "futurist" most commonly refers to authors, consultants, organizational leaders and others who engage in interdisciplinary and systems thinking to advise private and public organizations on such matters as diverse global trends, possible scenarios, emerging market opportunities and risk management. (Futurist is not in the sense of the art movement futurism.) Visionary writers such as Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy and H. Futures studies[edit] "Futures studies"—sometimes referred to as futurology, futures research, and foresight—can be summarized as being concerned with "three P's and a W", i.e. Futurists and futurology[edit] Notable futurists[edit] See also[edit]

Outline of futurology The following outline is presented as an overview of and topical guide to futures studies – study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures, and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. It seeks to understand what is likely to continue, what is likely to change, and what is novel. What is futures studies? Futures studies can be described as all of the following: a branch of science[citation needed] – a branch of social science –a parallel discipline to history – the field of history concerns the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. "In contrast to many future-oriented organizations that think of "the future" in a singular way as determined by present trends, WFSF [and the futures field in general] encourages and promotes 'plural futures' through exploration of alternative and preferred futures General futures studies concepts[edit] Futures studies organizations[edit] Research centers[edit] Academic programs[edit]

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.

Ray Kurzweil Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor, futurist, and is a 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 has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner,[2] the first omni-font optical character recognition,[2] the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,[3] the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer,[4] the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.[5] Life, inventions, and business career[edit] Early life[edit] Mid-life[edit]

A Future Without War :: Home 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.

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