Jef's web files - Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 14:00:54 -0400

Ray Kurzweil

Recipe for Destruction

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:51:38 -0400

After a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

In Search of the Sixth Sense

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 10:07:53 -0500

In this expanded interview transcript, inventor Ray Kurzweil discusses birth, death, and the potential offered by non-biological thinking processes.
By: Lucas Conley

Fast Company: First off, without death, CEOs will never give up their jobs. There won't be any succession plans.

Ray Kurzweil: I don't think we need to kill people off to provide opportunity for new leadership and creativity. The marketplace of ideas and technologies is going to expand -- it has been for years. Look at the computer industry. 60 years ago it was a handful of research projects, and now it's a trillion-dollar industry.

FC: But biotech? Who's to say how quickly it will advance?

Kurzweil: A lot of people say you can't really tell the future, and there are certain things that are hard to predict. What will Google's stock be three years from now? That's hard to predict. But if you ask me what it will cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2010 or the cost to move a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2015, those things turn out to be remarkably predictable.

Kurzweil proposes research programs to replace DNA, block bioterror viruses

Sun, 30 May 2004 13:52:01 -0400

Ray Kurzweil has proposed a nanobiotechnology research program to replace the cell nucleus and ribosome machinery with a nanocomputer and nanobot to prevent diseases and aging and another program to create defensive technologies against rogue designer viruses.

Kurzweil presented the ideas in a keynote at the recent "Breakthrough Technologies for the World's Biggest Problems" conference on April 28, sponsored by the Arlington Institute.

an invention has to make sense in the world in which it was finished

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 17:19:15 -0400

"I'm an inventor, and I started looking at long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it was finished, not the world in which it started."
- Ray Kurzweil

Law of accelerating returns

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 12:37:52 -0500

The observation that technological progress, feeding back into itself, provides an ever-increasing rate of technological progress.

See this page on the Kurzweil website for detail.

The Intelligent Universe

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 09:36:35 -0500

RAY KURZWEIL: The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. That's one role of intelligence. The theories that we heard on cosmology look at the evidence that exists in the world today to make inferences about what existed in the past so that we can develop models of how we got here.

Singularity Chat with Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil

Mon, 12 Aug 2002 14:03:28 -0400

Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge recently discussed the singularity via live public chat. A transcript is here.

Are We Spiritual Machines?: Kurzweil vs. Critics of Strong AI

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 13:56:46 -0400

Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I.
Computers become more powerful at an ever-increasing rate, but will they ever become conscious? Artificial intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil thinks so and explains how we will "download" our software (our minds ) and "upgrade" our hardware (our bodies) to become immortal -- before the dawn of the 22nd century!