Cutting Edge: The Singularity

Singularity University’s inaugural Graduate Studies Program was such a success last year that they’ve decided to double the class size. That’s an understandable trend for an institution that hopes to educate entrepreneurs and leaders about the possibilities of exponential growth and accelerating technologies. Now, 80 students will be trek out to NASA’s AMES campus in Silicon Valley from June 19th to August 28th to experience cutting edge lectures, workshops, tours of nearby labs, a Zero-G suborbital flight, and sneak peeks at NASA technology. Those interested can sign up through March 15 at the SU website...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called Ray Kurzweil "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." In a book published in 1998, Kurzweil prognosticated the future we would see in 2009. Here are some of his hits and misses.

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting.

The personal computer and the technologies that led to the Internet were largely invented in the 1960s and ’70s at three computer research laboratories next to the Stanford University campus.

Physicist Stephen Hawking believes that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information." But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.

24 videos from the Singularity Summit 2009, includes talks by Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and other Singularity notables.

Just as Molière's bourgeois gentleman spoke in prose without being aware of it, most of those who fear forgetting do not realise that they have amnesiphobia. But perhaps this tiny lexical blind spot is not important any more. Amnesiphobics, unite and rejoice: Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (and Bill Gates, in his enthusiastic introduction) now inform us that we need never fear forgetting again. Total recall is around the corner. But alas, in such a world, even our phobia of forgetting cannot be forgotten.

BY 2040 YOU WILL BE ABLE TO UPLOAD YOUR BRAIN... or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age -- the 'singularity' -- when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) -- and even live forever. Is there sense to his science -- or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

Mr Kurzweil calls his theory the Law of Accelerating Returns. Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said: "I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies' stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever.