Can we prepare for the environmental impact of technologies we cannot imagine? Will education be revolutionized in our lifetimes? How will the technological singularity improve your sex life? Ray Kurzweil answers these and other provocative questions posed by Dr. Moira Gunn of Tech Nation and audience members in this question and answer period from Accelerating Change 2005.
Kurzweil points out that life is in a permanent state of change. Human cells are renewed constantly, but the overall pattern of what makes each person unique remains the same. Paradigm shifts do change everything in some regards, but rarely are the "old ways" replaced. Rather, opportunities increase with every advance in technology and human understanding.
This session is a follow-up to Ray Kurzweil's keynote address at Accelerating Change 2005. IT Conversations audio of that talk can be found here.
Ray 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. Ray was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, 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.
He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray's books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.
Resources:
This free podcast is from our Accelerating Change series.
For The Conversations Network: