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Ray Kurzweil Speech Preview

Premiere Speakers Bureau: Exclusively Representing the World's Most Compelling Speakers. Ray Kurzweil, One of the Most Successeful Inventors of All Time. Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist. Called “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes, Kurzweil’s ideas on the future have been touted by his many fans, ranging from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton. MIT’s Marvin Minsky writes that “with his brilliant descriptions of the coming connections of computers with immortality, Kurzweil clearly takes his place as a leading futurist of our time.” George Gilder writes that “Kurzweil’s ideas make all other roads to the computer future look like goat paths in Patagonia.” Sun Microsystems Chief Scientist Bill Joy, whose own discussions of the promise and peril of technology have attracted worldwide attention, writes in his now famous Wired magazine cover story that “I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.”

KurzweilAI.net

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Eeviac

Those guys just make me want to start smashing computers everywhere and anywhere.

Besides the trumpet, I aspire to play the monkeywrench, long and well.

Jude

I thought futurists were supposed to be passé?

Eeviac

Jude - nope, they're still around....... I like to think a good treatment with boric acid will work but they keep coming back.... worse than bedbugs really....

Somewhere in the misty not-too-past I read something called "the age of batshit crazy machines" that's the title, basically these people are as we say, "nucking futs".

You'll have to read up on Peak Oil and stuff like EROEI (for energy returned on energy invested) to understand why, thank God, these nutters' ideas of the future will not come to pass.

Here's a good quickie way to get an idea of the overall picture and the basic nature of these techo-utopians' bankrupt ideas. Read up on something called Coltan. Essentially, the techno-utopia we're laboring under now is built on the backs of African slave children.

Jude

This was what I had in mind (from The Economist, Dec 14, 2007):

"We can see now that the golden age of blockbuster futurology in the 1960s and 1970s was caused, not by the onset of profound technological and social change (as its champions claimed), but by the absence of it. The great determining technologies—electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, even manned flight—were the products of a previous century, and their applications were well understood. The geopolitical fundamentals were stable, too, thanks to the cold war. Futurologists extrapolated the most obvious possibilities, with computers and nuclear weapons as their wild cards. The big difference today is that we assume our determining forces to be ones that 99% of us do not understand at all: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. When the popular sense of direction is baffled, there is no conventional wisdom for futurologists to appropriate or contradict."

So - they're still around, but they've been so wrong so often since things started getting complicated that nobody pays much attention any more.

godchaser

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Michio Kaku on Artificial Intelligence
Physicist Michio Kaku : The Screensavers on TechTV. Topics : Artificial Intelligence Physics Universe Space Moore's Law Quantum Computers ... and More...michio kaku physics

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Transcending Moore's Law with Molecular Electronics and Nanotechnology
by Steve T. Jurvetson




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rowuk

Hey,
let us just live every day out, give all around us pleasure with the music that we make and let the thinkers think. It is critical that we get the NEXT election right, not jump to saving civilization in 100 years.

One step at a time, a bit of foresight, a lot of tolerance and as much beautiful as we can squeeze into a day! Dreams are what makes the human state special. There is room for futurists - it just has to kept in perspective!

Toobz

Just our generations version of Chicken Little.

Vulgano Brother

Here at the mission talking about the future kind of revolves around meeting future needs, rather than future dreams. I'm all for whiz-bang hi-tech bells & whistles stuff, but there is still going to be a real need for socks and blankets down the road. Food too.