Lifeboat Foundation

KITCHENER — Big jumps in life expectancy will begin in as little as 10 years thanks to advances in nanotechnology and 3D printing that will also enable wireless connections among human brains and cloud computers, a leading futurist said Thursday.

“In 10 or 15 years from now we will be adding more than a year, every year, to your life expectancy,” Ray Kurzweil told an audience of 800 people at Communtech’s annual Tech Leadership conference.

Kurzweil, a futurist, inventor and author, as well as a director of engineering at Google, calls this “radical life extension.”

Continue reading “‘Radical life extension’ coming, futurist says” »

A documentary film just had its premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. How To Build A Time Machine, the work of filmmaker Jay Cheel, is a strange and incoherent little document of two middle-aged men with loosely related obsessions: One of them wants to build a perfect recreation of a movie prop – the machine from the 1960 movie The Time Machine, based on the H.G. Wells novel – and the other is a theoretical physicist who thinks he may have effected a kind of time travel in a lab, on a microscopic scale, using lasers that push particles around. The weak connection between the two men is that they both regret a death in their past – a best friend, a father – and are preoccupied with what they might have done to prevent the death; they both wonder if time travel to the past might have been a remedy for death itself. (Compared to the protagonist of Zero K who seeks immortality as a way of avoiding the loss of a loved one.) The 80s synthpop song Forever Young by Alphaville booms symbolically at one point.

Why this sudden ascendancy of yearning for immortality now? Is it simply because immortality of a medical sort might be imminent, a result of technological advances, such as nanobots, that will fight disease in our bloodstream? Or is it because, as Ray Kurzweil implies, digital technology is now so advanced that we have already left our bodies behind? We already live outside them, and our digital selves will outlive them. (“I mean,” says Kurzweil, “this little Android phone I’m carrying on my belt is not yet inside my physical body, but that’s an arbitrary distinction.”)

The frequently quoted axiom of Arthur C. Clarke – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – is pertinent to this current fascination with life without end. We are now perceiving technology as not just magic but as god-like, as life-giving, as representing an entirely new plane of being.

Continue reading “Russell Smith: What’s behind our sudden fascination with immortality?” »

A beautiful story about Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy meeting and discussing Singularity many years ago.

There may be such a thing as a social fabric, or just a tapestry of individual interactions. Either way, we should worry about biotech-super-charged transhumanism, which is on a tear.

Kurzweil, me and others have been saying devices will eventually be phased out for a while now. However, I do not believe the phase out will be due to AI. I do believe it will be based on how humans will use and adopt NextGen technology. I believe that AI will only be a supporting technology for humans and will be used in conjunction with AR, BMI, etc.

My real question around the phasing out of devices is will we jump from Smartphone directly to BMI or see a migration of Smartphone to AR Contacts & Glasses then eventually BMI?…

(Bloomberg) — Forget personal computer doldrums and waning smartphone demand. Google thinks computers will one day cease being physical devices.

Continue reading “Google CEO Pichai Sees the End of Computers as Physical Devices” »

What the bleep is an exocortex and why should we care?

Continue reading “Thinking Outside the Brain – Why We Need to Build a Decentralized Exocortex” »

Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 40 as a director of engineering at Google, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045.

Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up attending a Unitarian church. He worshipped knowledge above all, and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurzweil was designing programs to help do homework. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze and create music in the style of various famous composers. The program won him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to the White House. That year, on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some buttons on a data processor the size of a small car. It coughed out original sheet music that could have been written by Brahms.

After earning degrees in computer science and creative writing at MIT, he began to sell his inventions, including the first optical character recognition system that could read text in any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading machine” could help the blind, but to make it work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner; both are still in wide use. In the 1980s Kurzweil created the first electronic music keyboard to replicate the sound of a grand piano and many other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil on the back of a synthesizer.

Continue reading “Reinvent Yourself: The Playboy Interview with Ray Kurzweil” »

The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world.

Many observers first noticed this acceleration with the advent of modern microchips, but as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near, we can find a number of eerily similar trends in other areas too.

According to Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, technological progress is moving ahead at an exponential rate, especially in information technologies.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil Predicts Three Technologies Will Define Our Future” »

You hear a lot these days about the potential for impending doom as AI becomes ever smarter.

Indeed, big names are calling for caution: the futurist optimism of protagonists like Ray Kurzweil is outweighed by the concern expressed by Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. And Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom’s scary thought experiments around what AI might lead to could well sustain a new strain of Nordic noir. There are, indeed, reasons to be concerned.

The fictional Hal’s refusal to open the pod bay doors in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seems a lot less like fiction than it did when the movie came out almost 50 years ago. Today, we have real reason to be concerned about the potential for autonomous drones making decisions about who to take out, or self-driving cars making a choice between hitting a roadside tree and hitting a child.

Continue reading “The era of AI-human hybrid intelligence” »

Like this article highlights; we will see a day soon when all techies will need some level of bio-science and/ or medical background especially as we move closer to Singularity which is what we have seen predicted by Ray Kurzweil and others. In the coming decade/s we will no longer see tech credentials relying strictly on math/ algorithms, code, etc, Techies will need some deeper knowledge around the natural sciences.

If you are majoring in biology right now, I say to you: that was a good call. The mounting evidence suggests that you placed your bet on the right degree. With emergent genetic recombination technologies improving at breakneck speed alongside a much deepened understanding of biological circuitry in simple, “home grown” metabolic systems, this field is shaping up to be a tinkerer’s paradise.

Many compare this stage of synthetic biology to the early days of microprocessing (the precursor to computers) when Silicon Valley was a place for young entrepreneurs to go if they needed a cheap place to begin their research or tech business. One such tech entrepreneur, the founder of O’Reilly media, Tim O’Reilly — who also coined the term “open source” — made this comparison in an interview with Wired magazine., O’Reilly further commented on synthetic biology saying, “It’s still in the fun stage.”

Continue reading “Introduction: Explaining the Future of Synthetic Biology with Computer Programming’s Past” »