Future Current

Ray Kurzweil has received the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and has been honored by three U.S. presidents. For the February 21 keynote presentation of the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, he gave a talk entitled “The Next 20 Years of Gaming” where he discussed the foreseeable ramifications of the accelerating price performance growth of information technologies such as those found in the videogame industry.

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Will artificial intelligence bring about a technological singularity in a soft take off? Ray Kurzweil at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford gave an overview of smooth doubly exponential progressions that he believes could lead to such an outcome. While his projections are considered radical by some observers, it is often because they are thinking linearly and leave out the historically accurate exponential perspective.

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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 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. He helped organize the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in 2006 and gave the keynote presentation exploring some of the central issues explored in his book The Singularity Is Near. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he attended virtually, giving a brief talk before answering questions from the audience on how technologists are currently uncovering how the brain performs intelligence.

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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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