Elon Musk claims AI will overtake humans in ‘less than five years’

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Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence are already capable of passing some Turing tests. ( AFP via Getty Images )

Existential threat posed by artificial intelligence is much closer than previously predicted, billionaire warns.

Elon Musk has warned that humans risk being overtaken by artificial intelligence within the next five years.

The prediction marks a significant revision of previous estimations of the so-called technological singularity, when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and accelerates at an incomprehensible rate.

Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil previously pegged this superintelligence tipping point at around 2045, citing exponential advances in technologies like robotics, computers and AI.

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Would you want immortal life as a cyborg?

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Transhumanism can mean uploading one’s mind into cyberspace. But some transhumanists hope to slowly morph into “immortal cyborgs” with endlessly replaceable parts.

Five years ago, we were told, we were all turning into cyborgs:

Did you recently welcome a child into the world? Congratulations! An upstanding responsible parent such as yourself is surely doing all you can to prepare your little one for all the pitfalls life has in store. However, thanks to technology, children born in 2014 may face a far different set of issues than you ever had to. And we’re not talking about simply learning to master a new generation of digital doohickeys, we’re talking about living in a world in which the very definition of “human” becomes blurred.

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“Father of Artificial Intelligence” Predicts Singularity is 30 Years Away

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The “Father of Artificial Intelligence” Says Singularity Is 30 Years Away

All evidence points to the fact that the singularity is coming (regardless of which futurist you believe).

You’ve probably been told that the singularity is coming. It is that long-awaited point in time — likely, a point in our very near future — when advances in artificial intelligence lead to the creation of a machine (a technological form of life?) smarter than humans.

If Ray Kurzweil is to be believed, the singularity will happen in 2045. If we throw our hats in with Louis Rosenberg, then the day will be arriving a little sooner, likely sometime in 2030. MIT’s Patrick Winston would have you believe that it will likely be a little closer to Kurzweil’s prediction, though he puts the date at 2040, specifically.

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What if AI can make us more human in the age of robotic automation?

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“We now live in a global, exponential world,” Steven Kotler tells my coauthor Michael Ashley and I from his Santa Monica office. We’re interviewing the New York Times bestselling author and entrepreneur for our upcoming book: Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked: A Modern Primer on A.I. for the Modern Business. “You need to understand our brains evolved in a local, linear environment. We cannot process change at this speed or this scale; we’re bad at it. But in the 21st century, according to research done by Ray Kurzweil, we will experience over 20,000 years’ worth of change. To put it succinctly, over the next 80-something years we will go through the birth of agriculture to the industrial revolution — twice — in terms of our technological advancement.”

Much has been made of the fact that humans are poised to be replaced by artificial intelligence in the workplace, from home-care robots to robot waiters. However, what Kotler and his coauthor Peter Diamandis have asserted in such books as Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and the Impact the World, is that unprecedented technological abundance is also coming. Importantly, these thinkers suggest the future of prosperity depends not just on exponential technological innovation, but also on exponential creativity.

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Disrupting death: Technologists explore ways to digitize life

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New technologies are opening the door to near-everlasting life as well as a myriad of ethical and philosophical questions.

Technologists are working on a variety of ways to avoid death — including uploading your brain to a computer.

Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond are attempting to disrupt what has long been seen as one of the only inevitabilities of life: death.

Computer scientists and artificial intelligence specialists are developing programs that allow people to theoretically avoid death, opening the door to near-everlasting life as well as a myriad of ethical and philosophical questions.

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What is Ray Kurzweil up to at Google? Writing your emails

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RAY KURZWEIL HAS invented a few things in his time. In his teens, he built a computer that composed classical music, which won him an audience with President Lyndon B. Johnson. In his 20s, he pioneered software that could digitize printed text, and in his 30s he cofounded a synthesizer company with Stevie Wonder. More recently, he’s known for popularizing the idea of the singularity—a moment sometime in the future when superintelligent machines transform humanity—and making optimistic predictions about immortality. For now, though, Kurzweil, 69, leads a team of about 35 people at Google whose code helps you write emails.

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Kurzweil: By 2030, Nanobots Will Flow Throughout Our Bodies

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, is a well-known futurist who seems to have a penchant for accurate predictions. Most recently, he has again reiterated his prediction that the so-called technological singularity will happen by 2045. For Kurzweil, this doesn’t translate to an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario courtesy of artificially intelligent (AI) machines. Rather, it means human beings will become powered by machines.

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Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s radical plan to be the first man to achieve immortality

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s engineering director, is famous for the strides he has made in machine learning, speech recognition and music technology. But he would rather be known for achieving immortality.

 

 

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This is your future: Ray Kurzweil

By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging, by the early 2020’s. Health and medicine have been a hit or miss up until recently. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.

 

 

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