Ray Kurzweil  

Speaking recently at the Geek Park Innovation Conference in Beijing, Ray Kurzweil discussed his familiar themes of exponential technology, and stated that what he is trying to build at Google is a "synthetic neocortex."

Ray Kurzweil is regularly featured on 33rd Square, as one of the main originators of the concept of the Singularity.  As a frequent speaker, Kurzweil does bring up familiar themes of exponential growth of information technology, but it has been a few months since he has given a talk like this.

In the video above, Kurzweil, looking "different" speaks at the Geek Park Innovation Conference, in Beijing.

Kurzweil reminds the audience that the future is not far away from us, and that we must nowbe planning for it. Yesterday's unveiling of the HoloLens from Microsoft, only seems to reinforce that view.

"You see a lot of movies where there's one person that has the artificial intelligence and threatens the world. Its not going to be like that.  Artificial intelligence is not in one or two hands, its already in one or two billion hands and will be in everybody's hands within a decade."

When discussing the progress in biotechnology, the author of How to Create a Mind makes a prediction that, "It will be a very different era.  We are going to be able to dramatically extend human life starting in about 10 years from the exponential growth of biology."

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"I've been thinking about thinking for about 50 years," Kurzweil continues as he talks about the "synthetic neocortex," he is trying to build as Director of Engineering at Google. During an interview after the talk, Kurzweil goes into some of these themes in more detail.

He does address the recent increase of warnings against the future of artificial intelligence, by the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.  According to Kurzweil, the extension of our thinking onto the cloud will keep artificial intelligence.  "You see a lot of movies where there's one person that has the artificial intelligence and threatens the world. Its not going to be like that.  Artificial intelligence is not in one or two hands, its already in one or two billion hands and will be in everybody's hands within a decade."


SOURCE  Geek Park

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 Exponential Technology  

Six key exponential technologies: 3D printing, robotics, artificial intelligence, the "Internet of Things," infinite computing and synthetic biology are described in a new Draw Shop video created for Peter Diamandis.

Armed with exponential technologies like artificial intelligence, 3D printing and cloud computing, today's entrepreneurs are poised to create abundance.

"In the future [AI] will look more like Jarvis from Marvel's Iron Man, quickly gathering incomprehensible amounts of data from the Internet to make incredibly accurate split-second decisions."

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This Draw Shop video, originally created for entrepreneurs in Peter Diamandis' Abundance 360 coaching program, illustrates the powerful implications of six key technologies: 3D printing, robotics, artificial intelligence, the "Internet of Things," infinite computing and synthetic biology.

"Today's artificial intelligence exists in the forms like Siri and IBM's Watson which understood the nuances in human language," claims the video's narrator.  "In the future it will look more like Jarvis from Marvel's Iron Man, quickly gathering incomprehensible amounts of data from the Internet to make incredibly accurate split-second decisions."

Learn more about Abundance 360 and apply here: http://abundance360summit.com.


SOURCE  Peter Diamandis

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 Futurism  

Recently, Peter spoke in the plenary session on the second day of The Government Summit in the United Arab Emirates about what the world would be like in 2050, and the technologies that will lead to a world of Abundance.

Peter Diamandis, Co-Founder of Singularity University, Planetary Resources and Founder of the X-Prize spoke in the plenary session on the second day of The Government Summit in the United Arab Emirates about what the world would be like in 2050, and the technologies and phenomena that would make it so. He shared insights on how bright the future looks and what are the trends that will shape the world as we know it in the next 25 years.

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Focusing on "breakthroughs leading to a world of abundance," Diamandis spoke of a world where the needs of every man, woman and child are met and spoke of a shift in thinking, from 150,000 years of linear and local human development that progressed in centuries and decades, to an exponential and global curve that is pushing progress in years and months.

Globally renowned as the founder of the X-Prize challenge as well as other initiatives that impact citizens globally and know no boundaries, Diamandis, co-author of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Thinkbased his picture of the future on trends that have shaped the previous 25 years, opening the audience up to some very striking possibilities.

"In 10 years from now, 40% of the current Fortune-500 companies will not exist," said Diamandis.

"We've seen a 150,000-times improvement in computing power in 25 years," he noted. "In next 25 years, computers will be everywhere," he said.

Talking about Linear vs. Exponential growth, he says, the difference is either "disruptive stress or opportunity," depending on the point of view. Using an example of a kid who has created a brand new technology in his garage juxtaposed the giant conglomerate this technology is going to drive out of business, Diamandis explains the different points of view of this disruption in human development.

He cited Kodak's fall from imaging giant in 1999, with a $28B market cap and 140,000 employees, to bankruptcy in 2012, put out of business by the same technology developed within their offices, by engineer Steven Sasson. Sasson developed a ".01 megapixel camera the size of an oven toaster and showed it to Kodak," Diamandis noted, who turned it down because of its infantile capabilities, choosing instead to focus on their high-resolution film photography.

Diamandis calls this the, "New Kodak Moment."



SOURCE  The Government Summit

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 Moore's Law  

Researchers have developed a new technique in silicon photonics that could allow for exponential improvement in microprocessors to continue well into the future. By using light waves instead of electrical wires for microprocessor communication the breakthrough could eliminate some of the limitations now faced by conventional microprocessors.

A pair of breakthroughs in the field of silicon photonics by DARPA-funded researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Micron Technology Inc. could allow for the trajectory of exponential improvement in microprocessors that began nearly half a century ago—the famous Moore’s Law—to continue well into the future, allowing for increasingly faster electronics, from supercomputers to laptops to smartphones.

The research team, led by CU-Boulder researcher Milos Popovic, an assistant professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering, developed a new technique that allows microprocessors to use light, instead of electrical wires, to communicate with transistors on a single chip, a system that could lead to extremely energy-efficient computing and a continued skyrocketing of computing speed into the future.

Popovic and his colleagues created two different optical modulators—structures that detect electrical signals and translate them into optical waves—that can be fabricated within the same processes already used in industry to create today’s state-of-the-art electronic microprocessors. The modulators are described in a recent issue of the journal Optics Letters.

First laid out in 1965, Moore’s Law predicted that the size of the transistors used in microprocessors could be shrunk by half about every two years for the same production cost, allowing twice as many transistors to be placed on the same-sized silicon chip. The net effect would be a doubling of computing speed every couple of years.

The projection has held true until relatively recently. While transistors continue to get smaller, halving their size today no longer leads to a doubling of computing speed. That’s because the limiting factor in microelectronics is now the power that’s needed to keep the microprocessors running. The vast amount of electricity required to flip on and off tiny, densely packed transistors causes excessive heat buildup.

“The transistors will keep shrinking and they’ll be able to continue giving you more and more computing performance,” Popovic said. “But in order to be able to actually take advantage of that you need to enable energy-efficient communication links.”

Microelectronics also are limited by the fact that placing electrical wires that carry data too closely together can result in “cross talk” between the wires.

In the last half-dozen years, microprocessor manufacturers, such as Intel, have been able to continue increasing computing speed by packing more than one microprocessor into a single chip to create multiple “cores.” But that technique is limited by the amount of communication that then becomes necessary between the microprocessors, which also requires hefty electricity consumption.

Using light waves instead of electrical wires for microprocessor communication functions could eliminate the limitations now faced by conventional microprocessors and extend Moore’s Law into the future, Popovic said.

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Optical communication circuits, known as photonics, have two main advantages over communication that relies on conventional wires: Using light has the potential to be brutally energy efficient, and a single fiber-optic strand can carry a thousand different wavelengths of light at the same time, allowing for multiple communications to be carried simultaneously in a small space and eliminating cross talk.

Optical communication is already the foundation of the Internet and the majority of phone lines. But to make optical communication an economically viable option for microprocessors, the photonics technology has to be fabricated in the same foundries that are being used to create the microprocessors. Photonics have to be integrated side-by-side with the electronics in order to get buy-in from the microprocessor industry, Popovic said.

“In order to convince the semiconductor industry to incorporate photonics into microelectronics you need to make it so that the billions of dollars of existing infrastructure does not need to be wiped out and redone,” Popovic said.

Last year, Popovic collaborated with scientists at MIT to show, for the first time, that such integration is possible. “We are building photonics inside the exact same process that they build microelectronics in,” Popovic said. “We use this fabrication process and instead of making just electrical circuits, we make photonics next to the electrical circuits so they can talk to each other.”

In two papers published last month in Optics Letters with CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Jeffrey Shainline as lead author, the research team refined their original photonic-electronic chip further, detailing how the crucial optical modulator, which encodes data on streams of light, could be improved to become more energy efficient. That optical modulator is compatible with a manufacturing process—known as Silicon-on-Insulator Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor, or SOI CMOS—used to create state-of-the-art multicore microprocessors such as the IBM Power7 and Cell, which is used in the Sony PlayStation 3.

The researchers also detailed a second type of optical modulator that could be used in a different chip-manufacturing process, called bulk CMOS, which is used to make memory chips and the majority of the world’s high-end microprocessors.

“This innovation could enable optical processor to memory interconnects in supercomputers within five years, and likely within consumer electronics like game consoles, cell phones, as well,” Popovic told KurzweilAI. “Chips enabled with optical processing could also impact an array of other areas, including medical imaging, advanced analog signal processing like analog to digital conversion, etc. The bottom line is that optics is becoming an essential part of advanced microelectronics as performance continues to scale.



SOURCE  University of Colorado Boulder

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 Singularity  

Ray Kurzweil — the noted innovator, inventor and current Director of Engineering at Google — answered questions from WSJ editor Gabriella Stern and Startup of the Year entrepreneurs covering Moore's Law, cloud computing, patents, entrepreneurship and many other topics in a recently recorded live chat.

Ray Kurzweil — the noted innovator, inventor and current Director of Engineering at Google — answered questions from WSJ editor Gabriella Stern and Startup of the Year entrepreneurs covering Moore's Law, cloud computing, patents, entrepreneurship and many other topics in a recently recorded live chat.

Image Source: singularity.com

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Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

He was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Kurzweil is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.

He has received nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has authored seven books, five of which have been national bestsellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in science.

Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times bestseller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. His latest New York Times bestseller is How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.

He was recently appointed Director of Engineering at Google.  He is working on the problem of natural language understanding.  He calls this a key technology in having computers achieve human intelligence levels.



SOURCE  WSJ Digital Network

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 Singularity  

Nick Bostrom studies existential risks to humanity in depth at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.  One of the key risks he has identified is that of artificial intelligence.

Existential risks are those that threaten the entire future of humanity. At the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, Nick Bostom studies these possibilities in depth.

Nick Bostrom, author of Global Catastrophic Risks highlights machine intelligence as one of the main potential threats to humanity.

Early computer scientists grossly underestimated the power of the human brain and the difficulty of emulating one. As a recent article in Mother Jones by Kevin Drum pointed out, it is sort of like filling up Lake Michigan one drop at a time. Drum's explanation of Moore's Law, and the impact it will have is strking.  In fact, not just sort of like. If you want to understand the future of computing (and the exponential growth it encompasses), it's essential to understand this.

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Suppose it's 1940 and Lake Michigan has (somehow) been emptied. Your job is to fill it up using the following rule: To start off, you can add one fluid ounce of water to the lake bed. Eighteen months later, you can add two. In another 18 months, you can add four ounces. And so on. Obviously this is going to take a while. 

By 1950, you have added around a gallon of water. But you keep soldiering on. By 1960, you have a bit more than 150 gallons. By 1970, you have 16,000 gallons, about as much as an average suburban swimming pool. 

At this point it's been 30 years, and even though 16,000 gallons is a fair amount of water, it's nothing compared to the size of Lake Michigan. To the naked eye you've made no progress at all. 

So let's skip all the way ahead to 2000. Still nothing. You have—maybe—a slight sheen on the lake floor. How about 2010? You have a few inches of water here and there. This is ridiculous. It's now been 70 years and you still don't have enough water to float a goldfish. Surely this task is futile? 

But wait. Just as you're about to give up, things suddenly change. By 2020, you have about 40 feet of water. And by 2025 you're done. After 70 years you had nothing. Fifteen years later, the job was finished.

Just like the example, Bostrom uses the factors of exponential technological growth to demonstrate just how likely and serious the rise of artificial intelligence will be.

For illustration, Bostrom looks a the world if Earth had formed one year ago.  If this were the case, Homo sapiens would have evolved less than 12 minutes ago, agriculture only began one minute ago, the industrial revolution less than two seconds ago, the first electronic computer was only  0.4 seconds ago and the internet about 0.1 seconds ago.

"It is hard looking at data series like this, not to get a sense that there is some kind of accelration, that one is moving towards some kind of discontinuity," says Bostrom.

Bostrom also points out that super intelligent AIs may help offset the risks posed by other factors like nanotechnology and bio-terrorism.  For this reason developing it as soon as possible might be worth the risk:

... a superintelligence could help us reduce or eliminate other existential risks*, such as the risk that advanced nanotechnology will be used by humans in warfare or terrorism, a serious threat to the long-term survival of intelligent life on earth. If we get to superintelligence first, we may avoid this risk from nanotechnology and many others. If, on the other hand, we get nanotechnology first, we will have to face both the risks from nanotechnology and, if these risks are survived, also the risks from superintelligence. The overall risk seems to be minimized by implementing superintelligence, with great care, as soon as possible.

SOURCE  VeerStichting Leiden, Mother Jones, Future of Humanity Institute

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 The Singularity  

Inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, explains the multilayered notion of the Singularity and how far off it is in this series of videos from the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, explains the multilayered notion of the Singularity and how far off it is in this series of videos from the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Related articles Is It Humanity's Fate To Be The 'Mitochondria' of Super-Intelligent AIs?  Ray Kurzweil On The Computers That Will Live In Our Brains  Science of the Singularity - Can Technology Surpass Scientists?

Kurzweil is the author of The Singularity Is Near, a book discussing the future of science and technology. In the interview videos below, he also examines the questions, Is technological innovation endless? Is there a point where we will not be able to sustain this rapid pace of growth? What are some of the problems associated with the rapid advancement of technology?

Kurzweil also talks about the relationship between the rapid changes in technology and government regulation. He thinks that decentralized communication is democratizing governance at many levels and stimulating grass-roots creativity. He goes on to discuss how the Singularity will affect the management of strategic natural resources.

Finally, Kurzweil gives advice to the college and university students watching this video on how to dealing with this rapidly changing world.











 
SOURCE  Center for Strategic & International Studies

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 Nanotechnology  

K. Eric Drexler is the founding father of nanotechnology—the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.

K.Eric Drexler is known as the founding father of nanotechnology—the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to dramatically change our world.

Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost says Drexler. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.

Already, scientists have constructed prototypes for circuit boards built of millions of precisely arranged atoms. The advent of this kind of atomic precision promises to change the way we make things—cleanly, inexpensively, and on a global scale. It allows us to imagine a world where solar arrays cost no more than cardboard and aluminum foil, and laptops cost about the same.

Related articles Nanotechnology Breakthrough Has Potential To Improve Drug Delivery  How Close Are We To Iron Man Extremis Nanotechnology?  The Amazing Potential of Nanotechnology

A provocative tour of cutting edge science and its implications by the field’s founder and master, Radical Abundance offers a mind-expanding vision of a world hurtling toward an unexpected future.

The topics include:

• -The nature of science and engineering, and the prospects for a deep transformation in the material basis of civilization.
• -Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.
• -A personal narrative of the emergence of the molecular nanotechnology concept and the turbulent history of progress and politics that followed
• -The quiet rise of macromolecular nanotechnologies, their power, and the rapidly advancing state of the art
• -Incremental paths toward advanced nanotechnologies, the inherent accelerators, and the institutional challenges
• -The technologies of radical abundance, what they are, and what they will enable
• -Disruptive solutions for problems of economic development, energy, resource depletion, and the environment
• -Potential pitfalls in competitive national strategies; shared interests in risk reduction and cooperative transition management
• -Steps toward changing the conversation about the future

SOURCE  TWIT Triangulation

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