Ray Kurzweil –  

The brain, according to Ray Kurzweil, consists of repeating modules that self-organize into hierarchies that build simple patterns into complex concepts. We don’t have a complete understanding of how this process works yet, but Kurzweil believes that as we study the brain more and reverse engineer what we find, we’ll learn to write a master algorithm.

For many years, Ray Kurzweil has been evangelizing his theory of how the brain deals with information, and how this understanding can be used to develop artificial intelligence. He recently discussed how our understanding of the neocortex could lead to finding a 'master algorithm' for Singularity University. (See video below.)

"The complexity of the brain does have a regular, repeating structure"

In his book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed Kurzweil explored the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain, specifically the neocortex.

"The basics of human intelligence is pattern matching," Kurzweil relates.

In order for a digital neocortex to learn a new skill, it will still require many iterations of education, just as a biological neocortex does, but once a single digital neocortex somewhere and at some time learns something, it can share that knowledge with every other digital neocortex without delay, according to the futurist and Google director of Engineering.

The master algorithm in the brain is the use of repeating patterns, Kurzweil suggests.

"The complexity of the brain does have a regular, repeating structure," according to Kurzweil. "Each of these 300 million modules is basically the same. They self-organize into hierarchies, and each module discovers a pattern, learns it, remembers it, and can recognize it, even in different contexts."

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The brain, according to Kurzweil, consists of repeating modules that self-organize into hierarchies that build simple patterns into complex concepts. We don’t have a complete understanding of how this process works yet, but Kurzweil believes that as we study the brain more and reverse engineer what we find, we’ll learn to write the master algorithm.

Interestingly, Kurzweil claims his system is not based on deep neural networks, or deep learning, and offers another way to pursue smart machines.

Kurzweil is an inventor, thinker, and futurist famous for forecasting the pace of technology and predicting the world of tomorrow. In this video, Kurzweil suggests the blueprint for the master algorithm—or a single, general purpose learning algorithm—is hidden in the brain..

SOURCE  Singularity University

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Ray Kurzweil  

In two recent interviews, Ray Kurzweil emphatically affirmed his optimism about the future. Despite the impression in the media that things might be getting worse, Kurzweil remains confident in the trends he fist started tracking 35 years ago.

Futurist, author, inventor and Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil spoke recently at the CeBIT 2017 Conference. In the talk, Kurzweil covered many of his common themes and extrapolations of his Law of Accelerating Returns, an extension of Moore's Law. Kurzweil is famous, in large part for this postulation, which he uses to track many technology models that, when distilled to information, point to exponential progression trends.

"There has actually been 18 percent growth every year, in every form of information technology, for the last fifty years, despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it each year for the same cost," he states in the video below.

Kurzweil first explored these technological trends in the books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near, and has continued over the years to be a popular speaker on the subject. He started making his predictions 35 years ago, and they are still coming true.

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To be honest, if you have seen Kurzweil speak before, you might want to skip to 34:20 for the question and answer portion. His take on alien life and the importance of religion are interesting viewpoints.

Kurzweil shares his optimism about the future in the segment too. "The reality is things are getting better, but people don't realize that," he says, following up the question with a number of facts and statistics on poverty, longevity, education, democratic values, and health.

Kurzweil encourages us to weigh the exponential rise in news availability with the actual trends in crime, illness and violence. Our compassion is what is being demonstrated by the collective feeling that things are getting worse instead of better.

"We hear about this terrible thing that happens to a family halfway across the world, and our heart goes out to them—it's actually a good thing, even though it is painful, because then we actually try to do something about it," he says.

Also recently, James Bedsole, who previously made an excellent documentary about the futurist, interviewed Kurzweil, in his Google office in Mountain View, California.

"Optimism is not an idle prediction about the future, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy."

In the interview (included below), Kurzweil is asked if he is comfortable being an optimist. "Optimism is not an idle prediction about the future, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy," he answers. "I do come out on the optimistic side, but it is not an idle optimism that ignores the dangers."

People quickly forget the past, according to Kurzweil. "Imagine life without search engines or search engines or smartphones," he suggests.

SOURCES ExpovistaTV,  James Bedsole

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Singularity  

Recently at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, Kurzweil reaffirmed his longstanding prediction that the Technological Singularity will happen sometime in the next 30 years.

With a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions, futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil has been called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine.

"By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence."

At the recent SXSW Conference, Kurzweil reaffirmed his predictions about the Singularity. Kurzweil made the statements in an interview following his keynote address, that he undertook with his daughter, author Amy Kurzweil Comix. The two discussed their creative work, inspirations, and collaborations across disciplines, while speculating about the future of storytelling, the arts and technology.

“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” he said. “That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, that’s not just a future scenario. It’s here, in part, and it’s going to accelerate.”

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For Kurzweil, the Singularity represents the exponential improvement of intelligence—both human and machine. He envisions the same technology that will make AIs more intelligent giving humans a boost as well.

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

“We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier,” the author of The Singularity Is Near said. “We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.”

“Ultimately, it will affect everything,” Kurzweil said during the interview. “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.”

SOURCE  SXSW

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Artificial Intelligence  

At the Beneficial AI Conference recently, Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Sam Harris, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Bart Selman, and Jaan Tallinn chatted with moderator Max Tegmark what likely outcomes might be if we succeed in building human-level AGI, and also what we would like to happen.

Last month a panel of experts gathered at the Beneficial AI Conference, in Asilomar, California organized by the Future of Life Institute to discuss the most important issue of this century. The amazing group of AI researchers from academia and industry, and thought leaders in economics, law, ethics, and philosophy for five days dedicated to beneficial AI.

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Below, Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Sam Harris, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Bart Selman, and Jaan Tallinn discuss with moderator Max Tegmark what likely outcomes might be if we succeed in building human-level AGI, and also what we would like to happen.

When Tegmark polls the panel about when this may happen, the consensus (apart from Musk who plays to the crowd) is that this will happen in the time frame of years. Tegmark comments that the timescale makes a huge difference—hard takeoff versus soft takeoff.

"We're talking about human AI. Human AI is by definition at human levels, therefore is human."

Kurzweil talked about how the growth of AGI might be better in a slow takeoff scenario. "As technologists we should do everything we can to keep the technology safe and beneficial. As we do each specific application, like self driving cars, there's a whole host of ethical issues to address, but I don't think we can solve the problem just technologically." Kurzweil projects that even if the most perfect and safe AI is created, it might be at the expense of the political system or other factors, it won't be an ideal outcome.

"We're talking about human AI. Human AI is by definition at human levels, therefore is human," he states. According to the futurist, the issue of how we make humans ethical is the same issue as how we make AIs human-level ethical.

In conjunction with the AI conference in Asilomar a large group of the leaders in AI and related fields teamed up and extended the open letter into a set of 23 principles for AI research, design and use, intended to ensure that AI lives up to its great potential to help and empower people in the decades and centuries ahead.

Artificial intelligence has already provided beneficial tools that we use every day by people around the world. According to the conference participants, continued development, guided by the following principles, will offer amazing opportunities to help and empower people in the decades and centuries ahead.

The Asilomar Principles 

1) Research Goal: The goal of AI research should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence. 

2) Research Funding: Investments in AI should be accompanied by funding for research on ensuring its beneficial use, including thorny questions in computer science, economics, law, ethics, and social studies, such as: 

• How can we make future AI systems highly robust, so that they do what we want without malfunctioning or getting hacked?
• How can we grow our prosperity through automation while maintaining people’s resources and purpose?
• How can we update our legal systems to be more fair and efficient, to keep pace with AI, and to manage the risks associated with AI?
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?

3) Science-Policy Link: There should be constructive and healthy exchange between AI researchers and policy-makers. 

4) Research Culture: A culture of cooperation, trust, and transparency should be fostered among researchers and developers of AI. 

5) Race Avoidance: Teams developing AI systems should actively cooperate to avoid corner-cutting on safety standards. 

Ethics and Values

6) Safety: AI systems should be safe and secure throughout their operational lifetime, and verifiably so where applicable and feasible. 

7) Failure Transparency: If an AI system causes harm, it should be possible to ascertain why. 

8) Judicial Transparency: Any involvement by an autonomous system in judicial decision-making should provide a satisfactory explanation auditable by a competent human authority. 

9) Responsibility: Designers and builders of advanced AI systems are stakeholders in the moral implications of their use, misuse, and actions, with a responsibility and opportunity to shape those implications. 

10) Value Alignment: Highly autonomous AI systems should be designed so that their goals and behaviors can be assured to align with human values throughout their operation. 

11) Human Values: AI systems should be designed and operated so as to be compatible with ideals of human dignity, rights, freedoms, and cultural diversity. 

12) Personal Privacy: People should have the right to access, manage and control the data they generate, given AI systems’ power to analyze and utilize that data. 

13) Liberty and Privacy: The application of AI to personal data must not unreasonably curtail people’s real or perceived liberty. 

14) Shared Benefit: AI technologies should benefit and empower as many people as possible. 

15) Shared Prosperity: The economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly, to benefit all of humanity. 

16) Human Control: Humans should choose how and whether to delegate decisions to AI systems, to accomplish human-chosen objectives. 

17) Non-subversion: The power conferred by control of highly advanced AI systems should respect and improve, rather than subvert, the social and civic processes on which the health of society depends. 

18) AI Arms Race: An arms race in lethal autonomous weapons should be avoided.
Longer-term Issues 

19) Capability Caution: There being no consensus, we should avoid strong assumptions regarding upper limits on future AI capabilities. 

20) Importance: Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. 

21) Risks: Risks posed by AI systems, especially catastrophic or existential risks, must be subject to planning and mitigation efforts commensurate with their expected impact. 

22) Recursive Self-Improvement: AI systems designed to recursively self-improve or self-replicate in a manner that could lead to rapidly increasing quality or quantity must be subject to strict safety and control measures. 

23) Common Good: Superintelligence should only be developed in the service of widely shared ethical ideals, and for the benefit of all humanity rather than one state or organization.

If you'd like to join Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig, Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Dean, Tom Gruber, Francesca Rossi, Bart Selman, Leslie Kaelbling, Guru Banavar and others as a signatory, you'll find the principles and a signature form here.

Learn more about the Asilomar AI Principles that resulted from the conference and the process involved in developing them.

SOURCE  Future of Life Institute

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Ray Kurzweil  

Ray Kurzweil was featured in a one-on-one interview at the New York Times Global Leaders Collective, recently, discussing global accelerating change, artificial intelligence and other factors that are dramatically changing our world.

Recently renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil was featured in a one-on-one interview at the New York Times Global Leaders Collective, with host and top journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discussed Kurzweil’s theories on global accelerating change including examining his insights on how computing and information technologies can advance markets and lead to progress.

"If you look at the impact on employment, the perception is entirely opposite the reality."

When asked about the future of the economy in light of artificial intelligence and other accelerating technology Kurzweil responds, "economic growth statistics completely ignore the increasing value of a dollar. I spent a few hundred dollars for this device on my belt [referring to his mobile phone] and it counts as a few hundred dollars of economic activity. This, despite that it is a billion dollars circa 1980, or a trillion dollars circa 1965 of computation and communication."

"Manufacturing is going to be transformed," continues Kurzweil. "If you look at the impact on employment, the perception is entirely opposite the reality." He also describes how polls continuously show that people perceive things are getting worse, when they are actually getting much better for many more people.

"People are actually better off, but their perception of their economic security is infused with more knowledge of the change in the world," he says in reference to the recent US election results.

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Responding to Bill Gates and Elon Musk's latest descriptions of the threats of artificial intelligence, Kurzweil states that people go through three phases when examining the potential of new technology. One is inspiration, then fear at the potential dangers of the technologies, and finally, a balanced view that the technologies offer both risks and rewards.

The New York Times hosted the first meeting of the Global Leaders’ Collective, a select group of influential C.E.O.s, executives and innovators who lead companies in the luxury space around the world.

The purpose of this inaugural summit was to bring the best minds from diverse industries together to assess and navigate the dramatic new challenges in a key global market. In the wake of Brexit, President-Elect Trump's administration on the horizon, innovative technologies impacting strategic decisions, volatile demand in emerging markets, geopolitical risk and shifting trends in consumer behavior, companies require stronger leadership than ever before.

Kurzweil has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind.  He is co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University and a director of engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

SOURCE  The New York Times Conferences

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Artificial Intelligence  

Stephen Hawking – one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, and a man who rarely gives interviews – joins Larry to discuss the greatest issues facing the planet, where artificial intelligence is headed (and what he makes of Kurzweil’s singularity theory), and what still mystifies him about the universe.

Larry King recently interviewed physicist Stephen Hawking for RT. The video below also features  astrophysicist Garik Israelian on creating the Starmus Festival, which celebrates the intersection of science and art and is this year dedicated to Hawking.

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In the interview, when asked about the dangers of artificial intelligence, Hawking explained that increases in technology may be coming at a steep cost, saying: “Governments seem to be engaged in an AI arms race, designing planes and weapons with intelligent technologies. The funding for projects directly beneficial to the human race, such as improved medical screening seems a somewhat lower priority.”

That does not mean that artificial intelligence may not come without a cost.

“Artificial intelligence has the potential to evolve faster than the human race. Beneficially AI could co-exist with humans,” but there must be a line drawn, Hawking said. “Once machines reach the critical stage of being able to evolve themselves, we cannot predict whether their goals will be the same as ours.”

"I don't think advances in artificial intelligence will necessarily be benign."

When asked about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, Hawking responds, "I think his views are both too simplistic and too optimistic."

"Exponential growth will not continue to accelerate," says Hawking. "Something we don't predict will interrupt it, as has happened with similar forecasts in the past. And I don't think advances in artificial intelligence will necessarily be benign. "

Hawking was at the Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands where, this year, the festival is dedicated to the lifelong researcher. Hawking has been a large presence in science and mathematics, and his reputation precedes him. One of the many unique things about Hawking is how well he has beaten the odds. Having lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Hawking has become gradually paralyzed over the decades. The majority of ALS patients die of respiratory failure within three to five years from the onset of symptoms. However, Hawking has made it to 50 years and counting.

SOURCE  RT

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Artificial Intelligence  

Google's restless genius, Ray Kurzweil commented recently that he is working on a next generation chatbot that will be able to hold meaningful conversations with you. 

Digital assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Now already are widely used, especially on mobile devices despite still being early stage technology. The level of artificial intelligence in these examples is remarkable, but is far behind human levels. Soon Viv Labs be releasing what promises to be the next generation of digital assistant.

One of the first prognosticators of such AI, Ray Kurzweil has himself been working on the next generation of such assistants as a director of engineering at Google. Recently the inventor, author and futurist revealed that he and his team have been working with Google to create chatbots. These are said to be advanced bots with which you can have “interesting conversations”.

"If you think you can have a meaningful conversation with a human, you’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation with an AI in 2029. But you’ll be able to have interesting conversations before that," said Kurzweil at the Exponential Manufacturing conference this year, and sticking to his familiar prediction timelines.

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"If you think you can have a meaningful conversation with a human, you’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation with an AI in 2029. But you’ll be able to have interesting conversations before that."

Kurzweil included in his telepresence talk that one of the chatbots would be based off one of his book’s characters – Danielle. But these chatbots won’t be limited to specific personalities. He said you will be able to create your own AI bots by feeding them significant amounts of text, like a blog.

Kurzweil also stated that, in principle, anyone can create a chatbot. You have to feed it with enough input in the form of text, so that it has enough answers to create an illusion of natural conversation. If you feed the chatbot with the texts that you wrote yourself, then it assumes its own personality and your own style.

He added: "The pace of change is faster and faster. An idea that works this year won't necessarily work next year. When I started in technology a generation of technology was about 20 years; now it's two years. It's very quick and you can't rest on your laurels."

Kurzweil says they're planning to release some of the chatbots they've been working on later this year.

SOURCE  Singularity Videos

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Videos  

If God created his universe in seven days; what could AI do to ours? A new multimedia project explores the arrival of artificial intelligence and the promise of an Intelligence Explosion - where a Singularity would lead to an exponential increase in A.I. capabilities. This Super Intelligence could lead to the arrival of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being. How would humanity receive this new entity? 

Multimedia students Keizac Lee, Kunal Rathore, Marcus Lee, Pierre Roquet were inspired by the biblical concept of the seven days of creation, to create a dystopian science-fiction retelling that put a spotlight on the possibility of AI evolving and eventually supplementing the role of God. See the full video below.

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Based on their assumption that artificial intelligence would learn at an exponential rate, they wanted to make sure that the actions taken by a superintelligence they called 'DeepMind' (after Google's Go-winning company) would progressively escalate day after day.

The fundamental distinction however was that DeepMind would not share the same sense of human empathy- something that led to its destructive actions in the later days. "Overall, we let the readings discussed in class form the individual plot points of the specific days (automation, love & robots, fully automated luxury communism) whilst still taking certain creative freedoms," claim the creators.

Day 1

Day 1 draws inspiration from Nick Bostrom’s lecture on Superintelligence where he claims that AI’s developmental path is a lot faster paced than human’s biological cognition evolution and it would radically outperform us which eventually leads to a form of Superintelligence. In addition, game AI and the AI’s ability to perform at various complex games were cited as huge milestones towards developing human-level intelligence AI. Bostrom proposes that once human-level intelligence AI is achieved, the time frame in which Superintelligence is achieved may be relatively short and faster than we expect. We employ these concepts extensively within our multimedia project, most evidently in Day 1 and the lead-in into Day 2. 

He also claims that the number of applications relying on AI in the background, backed by multiple tech heavyweights such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, has surged and will be instrumental in AI development.

Day 2

DeepMind is now focused around the concept mentioned in the Packer and Reeves reading, 'Taking People Out'. This idea claims that for the emergence of a super intelligence / or full autonomy human fallibility must be taken out of the equation thus leading to an idea of a AI that has gained full sentience and self-awareness. The latter portion of day draws its inspiration from the reading Love+Sex With Robots by David Levy as well as the Waldman reading. This portion of the video revolves around the idea that once the AI has reached a level of self awareness it now has the ability to make itself romantically attractive and sexually desirable towards the user leading to unique relationship with each individual user.

Day 3

Day 3 largely relates to Martin Ford’s automation arguments in Rise of the Robots. Our AI has now assumed control over many computing devices, whether directly or indirectly. Many types of work are now displaced, we use videos of robots making hamburgers and a automated sushi restaurant to illustrate the impact on the service industry. Additionally, we also form a narrative on white-collar jobs on Wall Street, how automated trading algorithms are trading on behalf of their human counterparts and the market has become algorithms trading with other algorithms. Finally we make reference to the Fully Automated Luxury Communism movement as well as a basic income scheme as there will be parties who resist the rise of automation as well as solutions which will have to come forth to restructure our economy as a result of automation.

Day 4 & 5

Although Day 4 and 5 were brief segments, the idea of DeepMind providing advanced therapy towards humans stem from the readings by Levy and Waldman. Specifically, Waldman’s ideas about how human interaction with robots and AI will yield low emotional resistance/ high trust and acceptance are reflected in how open humans openly share their hopes, dreams and anxieties with Deepmind. The military escalations and points about North Korea did not reference any specific reading but were instead used to simultaneously act as a darker turning point in the narrative. To a certain extent, the nuclear attack on North Korea was meant to draw parallels to the violent and unforgiving nature of God in the Old Testament.

Day 6

Day 6 is key turning point in the video for the DeepMind system, it profound wisdom and experience have led it to a point of realization that not many humans may understand right away. This portion of the video draws it’s inspiration from Ray Kurzweil when he mentions that by 2040 you will be able to upload your brain to the internet. This state is also referred to as the state of singularity in which the technology is able to change human life irreversibly. The idea that deepmind is able to facilitate individuals uploading their brain and transcend the human body. By transcending beyond the need for a human body you effectively decrease the burden on earth.

Day 7

Day 7 continues the theory of singularity discussed by Kurzweil. After humans witness the long-term benefits of transcending beyond the biological body the idea is adopted worldwide. Soon the natural human craving for knowledge and power condemns the entire world to upload themselve online. The new cyborg race is now self-sufficient and with the DeepMind AI source code running through each individual the AI is no longer needed on earth. DeepMind leaves earth in the quest for more knowledge as well as saturing that new found knowledge to the rest of the universe. This phenomenon runs in parallel with ideas expressed in Isaac Isamov’s ‘The Last Question’; where humanity creates an internet of minds, in the search to reverse entropy. It also attempts to link the religious idea of ascension, or Rapture, with the events that occur at the end of Her.

The visual content of the video varies from the Hollywood film industry, as well as relevant news footage or material collected from Youtube. All movies included some form of contention surrounding artificial intelligence. Scenes from movies included:

• 2001: Space Odyssey
• Blade Runner
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Ex Machina
• The Matrix
• Her
• Minority Report
• The Day After
• Transcendence
• Wargames
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence
• I, Robot
• HOME

The project's creators agree that this science-fiction scenario is much too fast to be probable for humanity, but the stages that the AI system encounters is within the realm of possibility. The intelligence explosion is a phenomenon which could spell the end of humanity, as expressed in cinema, but we opted to take a partial account. One more realistic, and open to prediction.

SOURCE  fluberwinter

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Ray Kurzweil  

3D printing food, future methods of payment and many more signs of things to come are discussed by Ray Kurzweil in this video.

Ray Kurzweil is a prize-winning author and scientist. He was named Inventor of the Year by MIT in 1988 and was awarded the Dickson Prize, Carnegie Mellon's top science prize, in 1994. He is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and honors from two American presidents.

Kurzweil believes that we will enhance our natural biological intelligence through artificial intelligence in the future. Kurzweil explores logarithmic advances in computing power and information technologies and uses the history of their trajectories to project when and how artificial intelligence may enhance our daily lives.

SOURCE  Future Thinking

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The Singularity  

Recently astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sat down with futurist and author Ray Kurzweil for the first time. Check out the video here.

They have talked circles around each other for years, but finally astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and futurist Ray Kurzweil sat down for a chat about the Singularity and the power of exponential technology. See the video below.

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Tyson begins the interview with Ray by saying that he was skeptical, joking that he is angry that Kurweil stole his trademark term from astronomers. Tyson actually agrees with Kurzweil at the end, he said he's "cured" of his skepticism.

Maybe one day he'll become a supporter of the Technological Singularity in the future.

SOURCE  Tech Insider

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Artificial Intelligence  

Ray Kurzweil was asked recently about the political and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence being able to vote.

Speaking at Singularity University last year, Ray Kurzweil was asked the question, should an artificial intelligence that passes the Turing Test be able to vote.

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• Google Once Again Shows That It Is Serious About Making The Singularity A Reality 
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Kurzweil recounted the scenario he laid out in his film, The Singularity Is Near where Ramona, the self-improving artificial intelligence fights for similar rights. The issue, admits Kurzweil is even more complex.

“In the world of computation in which an intelligence is just a process, you can run 100 processes on one computer or you can have a million computers that are one process,” says Kurzweil, “It’s very fluid—how are you going to count them? They don’t come in these discrete enclosures which are countable and you can keep track of them and say: ‘OK, you have voting rights; but you’re too young, you don’t have it.’”

SOURCE  Singularity Hub

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Ray Kurzweil  

Ray Kurzweil shared insights into what the current rate of technological progress portends for information technology, healthcare, and much more at the CEO Cloud Summit last year.

A child in Africa with a cell phone has access to more information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago, according to Ray Kurzweil. The smart phone in your pocket is a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer all the students and professors shared at MIT in 1965.

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As author, futurist, and inventor Kurzweil shared in his talk at the CEO Cloud Summit last year, innovators and entrepreneurs should internalize this exponential rate of progression before launching their projects. By doing so, they can put themselves in a position to accurately time projects — and best take advantage of tomorrow’s capabilities as soon as they are available. See the video below.

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 shared insights into what the current rate of technological progress portends for information technology, healthcare, and much more.

SOURCE  Bessemer Venture Partners

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Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Ray Kurzweil and other debated AI and the Singularity at this year's Nobel Prize event in Gothenburg.

During the annual Nobel Prize Week, held each December, the current year’s Nobel Prize laureates participate in a whirlwind of events and activities leading up to the actual handing out of the awards. Since 2012, the roster of activities has expanded to include a new event, the Nobel Week Dialog, a day of lectures and panel discussions.

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The goal of the event is to bring together a select group of the world’s leading thinkers for a series of thought provoking sessions and working groups on a topical science theme. With this event the Nobel Institutions aim to deepen the dialog between the scientific community and society on issues connected with the Nobel Prize and of importance for the world.

At this year's discussion Ray Kurzweil, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark and others discussed the Singularity at the event. See the video below for more.

"Of the three new information technologies that are going to transform the world, biotechnology--reprogramming the ancient software in our bodies, nanotechnology--reprogramming materials and artificial intelligence, the one that's actually an existential risk already is biotechnology," says Kurzweil. He cites how the Asilomar guidelines have been used to mitigate the risk associated with the technology.

"To be able to welcome [new technology] and feel very optimistic and excited about the future, we need to win this race between the growing power of the technology of AI and the growing wisdom of humanity to manage it."

Russell suggests that artificial intelligence now faces a similar containment problem that nuclear technology has. His research has covered many areas of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on machine learning, probabilistic modeling and inference, theoretical foundations of rationality, and planning under uncertainty. He also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty. His current concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity.

Tegmark describes how the newer technologies do not allow us the luxury of learning from our mistakes. "I feel that to be able to welcome [new technology] and feel very optimistic and excited about the future, we need to win this race between the growing power of the technology of AI and the growing wisdom of humanity to manage it," he says.

Tegmark is an MIT physics professor with more than two hundred technical papers and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” He is the president of the Future of Life Institute, which recently launched a $10M research program for keeping Artificial Intelligence beneficial.

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