Future Current

Ray Kurzweil delivering his keynote presentation at Transvision 2007

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist. Called “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Sun Microsystems Chief Scientist Bill Joy, whose own discussions of the promise and peril of technology have attracted worldwide attention, writes in his now famous Wired magazine cover story that “I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.”

On July 26, 2007, he presented at the Transvision conference the keynote lecture entitled “The Coming Merger of Human and Machine,” in which he outlined the foreseeable implications of accelerating technological progress. At the reception following the event taking place at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, the technology trends researcher, inventor, and writer was presented the HG Wells Award for Outstanding Transhumanist Contributions.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the world’s foremost researchers on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow.

In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence,” a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.”

In his Transvision 2007 talk on the power of intelligence, called “Mind Is All That Matters: Reasons to Focus on Cognitive Technologies,” he reminded us that the human brain more than any other development in history has changed the face of the earth, and logically one can expect that improved cognitive technologies will likely have the same dramatic impact on human conception and control over the physical universe.

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