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

By  33rd Square

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 Brain Imaging  

Bridging the worlds of neuroscience and high-tech virtual realty, the Glass Brain, a project of the new Neuroscape Lab at the University of California San Francisco may open up new insights into the complicated mechanisms of the brain.

Researchers have developed a new way to explore the human brain through virtual reality. The system, called Glass Brain, initiated by Philip Rosedale, creator of the famous game Second Life, and Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, combines brain scanning, brain recording and virtual reality to allow a user to journey through a person’s brain in real-time.

 For a recent demonstration at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, Rosedale made his wife a cap studded with electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes that measure differences in electric potential in order to record brain activity, while he wore a virtual reality headset to explore her brain in 3D, as flashes of light displayed her brain activity from the EEG.

The Glass Brain didn’t actually show what Rosedale’s wife was thinking, but Gazzaley’s team ultimately hopes to get closer to decoding brain signals and displaying them using the virtual reality system.

"High-tech innovations take a decade to move beyond the entertainment industry and reach science and medicine. That needs to change."

Gazzaley and Rosedale are hoping to paint a fuller picture of what is happening in the minds and bodies of those suffering from brain disease with the new Neuroscape lab, which bridges the worlds of neuroscience and high-tech.

In the Neuroscape lab, wireless and mobile technologies set research participants free to move around and interact inside 3D environments, while scientists make functional recordings with an array of technologies. Gazzaley hopes this will bring his field closer to understanding how complex neurological and psychiatric diseases really work and help doctors like him re-purpose technologies built for fitness or fun into targeted therapies for their patients.

“I want us to have a platform that enables us to be more creative and aggressive in thinking how software and hardware can be a new medicine to improve brain health,” said Gazzaley, an associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center. “Often, high-tech innovations take a decade to move beyond the entertainment industry and reach science and medicine. That needs to change.”

Image Source - Neuroscape Lab

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GlassBrain, a creation of the Neuroscape lab, creates vivid, color visualizations of the structures of the brain and the white matter that connects them, as they pulse with electrical activity in real time.

Whereas ordinary EEG recordings look like wavy horizontal lines, but GlassBrain turns the data into bursts of rhythmic activity that speed along golden spaghetti-like connections threading through a glowing, multi-colored glass-like image of a brain. Gazzaley is now looking at how to feed this information back to his subjects, for example by using the data from real-time EEG to make video games that adapt as people play them to selectively challenge weak brain processes.

Gazzaley has already used the technology to image the brain of former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart as he plays a hypnotic, electronic beat on a Roland digital percussion device with NeuroDrummer, a game the Gazzaley Lab is designing to enhance brain function through rhythmic training. Hart, whose brain is healthy, is collaborating with Gazzaley to develop the game and performed on NeuroDrummer while immersed in virtual reality on an Oculus Rift at the Neuroscape lab opening on March 5.

The Neuroscape lab will be available to all UCSF researchers who study the brain. Gazzaley ultimately hopes it will aid in the development of therapies to treat diseases as various as Alzheimer’s, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, autism, depression and multiple sclerosis.


SOURCE  UCSF

By 33rd Square

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Molly Wood of CNET sits down with Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author of The Singularity Is Near, to discuss his predictions of technology and humanity, space, and his upcoming book.