RayKurzweil
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We don't understand AI because we don't understand intelligence
Artificial intelligence prophets including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Raymond Kurzweil predict that by the year 2030 machines will develop consciousness through the application of human intelligence. This will lead to a variety of benign, neutral and terrifying outcomes. For example, Musk, Hawking and dozens of other researchers signed a petition in January 2015 that claimed AI-driven machines could lead to "the eradication of disease and poverty" in the near future. This is, clearly, a benign outcome. And then there's the neutral result: Kurzweil, who popularized the idea of the technological singularity, believes that by the 2030s people will be able to upload their minds, melding man with machine. On the terrifying side of things, Musk envisions a future where humans will essentially be house cats to our software-based overlords, while Kurzweil takes it a step further, suggesting that humans will essentially be eradicated in favor of intelligent machines.
Seth Rogen is developing a sitcom about the Singularity
If you've never heard of The Singularity, it's the concept made famous by Ray Kurzweil that society's going to be up-ended by the rise of AI. Give it a few years and it might be more well-known as a sitcom created by Seth Rogen and his writing/producing partner Evan Goldberg. Rogen told the Nerdist podcast (as reported by Slashfilm) that they're currently working on a script with a view to shooting a half-hour pilot for FX in 2017.
Google and Ray Kurzweil are making chatbots together
While we don't often hear Ray Kurzweil's name associated with Google products, Mountain View hired him back in 2012 to work on unspecified machine learning and language processing projects. Now, the famous futurist has finally revealed one of the projects his team has been working on: chatbots that can talk like humans do. He lifted the veil on the big G's chatbot initiative at the latest Singularity conference -- an annual conference on science, tech and the future.
Marvin Minsky, A.I. pioneer, dies of brain hemorrhage at 88
The world lost one of its brightest minds to a brain hemorrhage recently; Marvin Minsky was 88 when he passed on Sunday night. A World War II veteran, his life's work was essentially creating and advancing the field of artificial intelligence. The New York Times has eulogized the Turing Award winner, writing that when Minsky was choosing his career path he "ruled out genetics as interesting but not profound, and physics as mildly entertaining, he chose to focus on intelligence itself."
Futurist Ray Kurzweil: Nanotech is the key to better EV batteries
Living up to his billing as an inventor/visionary, Ray Kurzweil kicked off an engineering conference in Detroit this week by imagining what might power cars of the future. Sure, he mentioned the self-driving cars his employer Google is working on, but a more interesting response was to a question from our AutoblogGreen colleagues. Pressed on the future possibilities of electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells, Kurzweil first mentioned the "modest" progress batteries have made so far and suggested nanotechnology will provide a solution. He believes that being able to "manipulate energy and matter at a molecular level" will lead to revolutionary applications.
Google's short film examines the science of voice recognition
People used to think it's harder to make computers play chess (or Jeopardy) and do mathematics than it is to make them understand human language. Turns out the opposite is true -- yes, engineers have made great advancements in voice recognition (Siri and Google voice commands are perfect examples), but they've yet to create a system that can speak with us like another human can. Google's documentary (after the break) talks about the beginnings of voice recognition, the current state of language understanding, as well as the future of artificial neural network technology, which can be used to improve both. The main goal of scientists and engineers is to make computers reach human levels of language understanding, but whether that'll ever happen remains to be seen.
Ray Kurzweil becomes a Googler, named Director of Engineering
Come December 17th, futurist extraordinaire Ray Kurzweil will be joining Google's ranks as Director of Engineering to work on projects that involve machine learning and language processing. Specifics regarding those projects, however, haven't yet surfaced. The technologist took the announcement to pat himself on the back about predicting the arrival of self-driving cars and smartphones that can answer questions more than a decade ago, and says he's "thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade's 'unrealistic' visions into reality." If things pan out how the Google greenhorn predicts, we might just see computers as crafty as Homo sapiens by 2029. [Image credit: Ed Schipul]
Blio for Windows review, now available for download
Last week we brought you news that KNF-B was prepping for a September 28 launch of its Blio e-reader software, and according to our date books, the time has come! The free PC software (Windows XP, Vista and 7 are all supported) can be downloaded now at the source link below; the iPhone app should be hitting the App Store very soon, however. We've been using the program for the last few days to, you know, "read," so before heading over to download it yourself you'll naturally want to hit the break for our impressions of the unique reading application. %Gallery-103557%
Blio for PC will be available on September 28, iOS and Android apps soon after
The fact that Blio was preloaded on our Toshiba Libretto W105 was a good hint that the company was getting ready to release its software to the digital reading masses, and sure enough in just a few weeks that's exactly what's going to happen. The full-color program, which was designed to mimic the look of a book with fancy 3D page turns, will be available for download starting on September 28 directly from Blio's website. Sure, Blio's no Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but they're promising a million free titles at launch and they've partnered with Baker & Taylor to provide another 10,000. We're also intrigued by the software's advanced text-to-speech capabilities -- hey, don't forget Ray Kurzweil is the founder! Not too far after the launch of the PC software, Blio will be releasing Android, iPhone and iPad apps. It's also promising that there will be numerous partnerships with device (i.e. tablet, laptop) manufacturers, retailers, and carriers, so it looks like we'll be hearing quite a bit about the company in the weeks to come. We'll hit you back with our impressions of the apps sometime soon, but in the meantime you can peruse the screenshots and press release after the break. %Gallery-102197% %Gallery-102324%
Toshiba Book Place full-color e-book store is powered by Blio, launches soon (video)
And here we go, an honest to goodness book store built around Ray Kurzweil's Blio e-reader software. It's been a long time coming and still it's only a teaser page, but Toshiba is promising to unleash its Book Place store "in the coming weeks" stocked with "thousands" of full-color e-books. The Blio software, you might remember from our video hands-on, offers a fully interactive reading experience rich in multimedia capabilities and should run beautifully on oh, say, Toshiba's new dual-screen Libretto W100. Man, when did Toshiba suddenly become interesting? See it in a cheesy, promotional packaging rager (that hints at an iOS app at the 2.42 mark) after the break.
Blio finally launching e-reading software soon, Walmart excited for some reason or another
So yeah, we sort of forgot all about Blio and its e-reading software for laptops and smartphones, but it turns out the company has kept on truckin'. While it seems to have missed the February release of its software, famed inventor and founder of the company Ray Kurzweil told the New York Times that it will be more widely available over the next two months. He also went on to mention that "large PC" manufacturers along with retailers "like Walmart" will start offering it on their own products. Oh, Wally World, you say? Apparently, the mega-tailer wouldn't comment on the statement, but it certainly has us raising our eyebrows wondering about a Walmart e-reading product of sorts. Regardless, we're excited to see Blio finally making some waves after being fairly impressed with the features of the color reading experience when we saw it back at CES -- now, to see if those waves lead to action.
Blio seeks to take digital reading in a new, more inclusive, and colorful direction
As if we didn't have enough pretenders in the ebook space, here's Ray Kurzweil with a new format of his own and a bagful of ambition to go with it. Set for a proper unveiling at CES in a week's time, the Blio format and accompanying application are together intended to deliver true-to-life color reproductions of the way real books appear. Interestingly, the software has been developed in partnership with Nokia, in an effort to turn Espoo's phones into "the smallest text-to-speech reading devices available thus far," though apps are also being developed for the iPhone, PC and Mac. The biggest advantage of this format might actually be behind the scenes, where the costs to publishers are drastically reduced by them having to only submit a PDF scan of their books, whose formatting remains unchanged in Blio. We'll be all over this at CES, but for now you'll find more pictures and early impressions over at Gizmodo.
Kurzweil predicts that machines will match man by 2029 -- bring it on
Famed technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil is on the record about human-machine intelligence parity: it's going down by 2029, so be prepared to get digital on entirely new levels. Apparently, machines "will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence" by then, but even if it's not in the form of meatbag-terminating cyborgs, Kurzweil thinks one future of intelligent machines is on the nano scale, with interfaces to enhance our own physiology and intelligence. Oh sure, this stuff is completely pie in the sky -- but it's still absurdly fun to think of what kinds of crazy crap the 21st century's going to hold.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Kurzweil set to unveil portable reader for the blind
Even though we've seen a ton of products designed to aid the visually-impaired in their daily lives, technology still has a long way to go before disabled folks are able to enjoy a completely unrestricted lifestyle, which is why inventor/visionary Ray Kurzweil has spent the last quarter-century building devices that make reading easier for the blind. His latest invention, called the K-NFB, is basically a five megapixel digital camera attached to the back of a Windows Mobile 5.0-powered PDA, which is loaded with software that uses optical character recognition and text-to-speech technology to read aloud the words contained in user-captured photos. Once it's called into action, the $4,860 device supplies the operator with an initial "situation report" that attempts to describe whatever's in the camera's field of vision; if the report indicates that the desired text is within range, owners can then choose to snap a photo and listen to the resulting translation. Although the K-NFB is scheduled to be released soon by the UK's Sight & Sound, several technical issues -- most importantly, the software's difficulty in understanding inverted (white-on-black) text -- still have to be ironed out before it's available to the public.[Thanks, Megan]
