How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa.
Anders Sandberg (born July 11, 1972, in Solna, Sweden) is a researcher, science debater, futurist, transhumanist, and author. He holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
Sandberg's research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as on assessing the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. His recent contributions include work on cognitive enhancement[1] (methods, impacts, and policy analysis); a technical roadmap on whole brain emulation;[2] on neuroethics; and on global catastrophic risks, particularly on the question of how to take into account the subjective uncertainty in risk estimates of low-likelihood, high-consequence risk.[3]
He is well known as a commentator and participant in the public debate about human enhancement internationally, as well as for his academic publications in neuroscience, ethics, and future studies.
He is co-founder of and writer for the think tank Eudoxa, and is a co-founder of the Orion's Arm collaborative worldbuilding project.[4] Between 1996 and 2000 he was Chairman of the Swedish Transhumanist Association. He was also the scientific producer for the neuroscience exhibition "Se Hjärnan!" ("Behold the Brain!"), organized by Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, the Swedish Research Council and the Knowledge Foundation, that toured Sweden in 2005–2006. In 2007 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University, working on the EU-funded ENHANCE project on the ethics of human enhancement.
Sandberg is also an accomplished and inventive electronic artist, whose renderings have been adapted to a number of covers for books by fellow futurist Damien Broderick: The Dreaming, Earth is But a Star, The Judas Mandala, Skiffy and Mimesis, Uncle Bones, Warriors of the Tao, and xyzt.
Submitted by Exponential Times on Sat, 2010-10-02 20:08
Peter Diamandis, Chairman and Co-Founder of Singularity University, discusses the best way to predict the future, and shares his personal philosophies on innovation and the commercial space industry. Flimed at Singularity University's Executive Program, March 2010.
Starred Review. Renowned inventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology's most credibly hyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent cancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence.
Submitted by Exponential Times on Fri, 2010-10-01 18:27
Ray Kurzweil visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One." This event took place on July 1, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series.
