Ray Kurzweil isn’t Nostradamus, but his track record is hard to ignore. His predictions up to 2009, from wireless networking and wearable tech to 3D printing and the cloud, and how well they held up. Read the rest
Kurzweil sees the history of the universe as six epochs of information: atoms, DNA, brains, technology, the merger of humans and machines, and finally a universe that wakes up. Oversimplified? Sometimes. But the trend he describes is hard to deny. Read the rest
Technology doesn’t grow in a straight line. It compounds. A town adding 10 people a year reaches 600 in fifty years; one growing 10% a year reaches nearly 12,000. That’s Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, and I see no sign of it slowing down. Read the rest
Inventor of a reading machine for the blind, pioneer of text-to-speech and music synthesizers, and by some counts right about 86% of the time. Meet Ray Kurzweil, the futurist whose forecasts deserve serious attention, even if he’s too optimistic about the risks. Read the rest
Inventor of a reading machine for the blind, pioneer of text-to-speech and music synthesizers, and by some counts right about 86% of the time. Meet Ray Kurzweil, the futurist whose forecasts deserve serious attention, even if he’s too optimistic about the risks. Read the rest
Intro to the AI Notebook section of my blog. Read the rest
AGI will match human thinking, then pass it. ASI will be AGI on steroids, and next to it, we may be like ants. What these terms mean, the cures and creativity they promise, and the risks that make them a double-edged sword. Read the rest
When an AI answers you fluently, does it understand a word? John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment says maybe not. Are chatbots just stochastic parrots, or is something deeper emerging from scale? An open question I still find hard to settle. Read the rest
What happens when AI can improve itself faster than we can follow? An introduction to the technology singularity, the point where machine intelligence outpaces ours, and why “Who is in control?” may be an existential question for our species. Read the rest
Lots of people would rather ignore AI. It seems too complicated, too scary, or just not their thing. I used to be one of them. Here’s why AI is a big deal, how it’s already in your daily life, and why information is our best defense. Read the rest
