In case you are around Boston on Monday, May 11, 2009, here is the chance to hear Ray Kurzweil live.
The Coolidge Corner Theatre wraps up the 2008-2009 season of its acclaimed Science on Screen series with a special program, An Evening with Ray Kurzweil on Monday, May 11 at 7:00 p.m. I formally invite Jeff Markowitz to settle the score on our Kurzweil controversy once and for all….. Read the rest of this entry »

Max’s recent post brings up the issue of Ray Kurzweil, a polarizing figure if there ever was one. First, I try to take his musings with a truckload of salt, but his proclamations about the progress of neuroscience seem to go so far beyond the pale that its shade has surpassed the visible light spectrum. He seems to completely trivialize the daunting task set before neuroscience: create a biologically and mathematically precise functional characterization of the human brain. In other words, how does it do what it does with what it has? It seems like Ray is fixated, naturally, on the exponential growth of information technology and its implications for the field. I’ll summarize his thesis, based on the 7 minute video linked by Max, thusly: computers will become insanely powerful, along with ways to measure the brain, and so we’ll have a brain simulation by 2020, or 2029, or sometime in the next fifty years.

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In the 2008 Scientific American Special Report on Robots, Ray Kurzweil talks about “The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine”.

Ray Kurzweil has been long known as one of the main “futurologists” advocating the loss of intellectual supremacy by humankind to machines in the near future…actually, in the next few decades. Such a topic cannot be left without comments by Neurdon!

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