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97-3572: There have also been spinoff conferences in Melbourne, Australia in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Previous speakers include David Chalmers , Lawrence Krauss , Gregory Benford , Ben Goertzel , Steve Omohundro , Hugo de Garis , Marcus Hutter , Mark Pesce , Stelarc and Randal A. Koene . The first Singularity Summit took place in 2006 at Stanford University. Nick Bostrom , Todd Davies , Cory Doctorow , K. Eric Drexler , Tyler Emerson , Douglas Hofstadter , Ray Kurzweil , Bill McKibben , Max More , Christine Peterson , John Smart, Peter Thiel , Sebastian Thrun , Eliezer Yudkowsky . The second Singularity Summit took place in 2007 in San Francisco. Sam Adams, Rodney Brooks , Jamais Cascio, Tyler Emerson , Ben Goertzel , J. Storrs Hall , Charles L. Harper Jr , James Hughes , Neil Jacobstein , Steve Jurvetson , Ray Kurzweil , Peter Norvig , Stephen M. Omohundro , Barney Pell , Christine L. Peterson , Paul Saffo , Peter Thiel , Peter Voss, Wendell Wallach , Eliezer Yudkowsky The 2008 Singularity Summit took place in San Jose. Eric Baum, Marshall Brain , Cynthia Breazeal , Peter Diamandis , Esther Dyson , Pete Estep , Neil Gershenfeld , Ben Goertzel , John Horgan , Ray Kurzweil , Jame Miller , Dharmendra Modha , Bob Pisani , Justin Rattner , Nova Spivack , Vernor Vinge , Glen Zorpette The 2009 Singularity Summit took place in New York. Itamar Arel , Gregory Benford , Ed Boyden , David Chalmers , Aubrey de Grey , Gary Drescher , Ben Goertzel , Stuart Hameroff , Robin Hanson , Marcus Hutter , Randal Koene , Ray Kurzweil , Gary Marcus , Bela Nagy, Michael Nielsen , Anna Salamon, Anders Sandberg , Jurgen Schmidhuber , Brad Templeton , Peter Thiel , Michael Vassar, Gary Wolf , Stephen Wolfram , Eliezer Yudkowsky The 2010 Singularity Summit took place in San Francisco. Lance Becker , Dennis Bray , Ben Goertzel , David Hanson , Demis Hassabis , Ellen Heber-Katz , Ray Kurzweil , Shane Legg , Brian Litt , Steven Mann , Ramez Naam , Irene Pepperberg , James Randi , Terry Sejnowski , Mandayam Srinivasan , Gregory Stock , John Tooby , Michael Vassar , Eliezer Yudkowsky The 2011 Singularity Summit took place in New York on October 15 and 16, 2011. Sonia Arrison , Stephen Badylak , David Brin , Scott Brown, Dan Cerutti , Tyler Cowen , Riley Crane , David Ferrucci , Dileep George , Dmitry Itskov , Ken Jennings , Christof Koch , Ray Kurzweil , John Mauldin , Sharon Bertsch McGrayne , James McLurkin , Michael Shermer , Jason Silva , Jaan Tallinn , Max Tegmark , Peter Thiel , Alexander Wissner-Gross , Stephen Wolfram , Michael Vassar , Eliezer Yudkowsky The 2012 Singularity Summit took place on October 13–14, at Nob Hill Masonic Center, San Francisco. Stuart Armstrong , Linda Avey , Laura Deming , Julia Galef , Temple Grandin , Robin Hanson , Daniel Kahneman , James Koppel , Ray Kurzweil , Nathan Labenz , Melanie Mitchell , Luke Muehlhauser , Peter Norvig , Christopher Olah , Steven Pinker , Noor Siddiqui, Jaan Tallinn , Vernor Vinge , John Wilbanks , Carl Zimmer David Chalmers David John Chalmers ( / ˈ tʃ ɑː l m ər z / ; born April 20, 1966)

194-534: A glucose intolerance , an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease ). He then found a doctor, Terry Grossman , who shared his unconventional beliefs and helped him to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine , and various other methods to attempt to extend his lifespan. In 2007, Kurzweil was ingesting "250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea " every day and drinking several glasses of red wine

291-405: A primary intension and a secondary intension , which together form its meaning. The primary intension of a word or sentence is its sense , i.e., is the idea or method by which we find its referent. The primary intension of "water" might be a description, such as "the substance with water-like properties". The entity identified by this intension could vary in different hypothetical worlds. In

388-454: A silicon chip . Since each substitute neuron performs the same function as the original, the subject would not notice any change. But, Chalmers argues, if qualia (for example, the perceived color of objects) were to fade or disappear, the brain's holder could notice the difference, which would alter the brain's functional profile, leading to a contradiction. He concludes that such fading qualia are impossible in practice, and that after each neuron

485-467: A simulation without knowing it. Chalmers proposes that computers are forming a form of "exo-cortex", where a part of human cognition is 'outsourced' to corporations such as Apple and Google . Chalmers was featured in the 2012 documentary film entitled The Singularity by filmmaker Doug Wolens , which focuses on the theory proposed by techno-futurist Ray Kurzweil , of that "point in time when computer intelligence exceeds human intelligence." He

582-503: A Danielle , that provide real-world context. It was released in 2019. Kurzweil's latest book, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI , was published in June 2024. In 2010, Kurzweil wrote and co-produced the movie The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future , directed by Anthony Waller and based in part on the book The Singularity Is Near . Part fiction, part nonfiction,

679-469: A Healthy Life . Its main idea is that high levels of fat intake are the cause of many health disorders common in the U.S., and thus that cutting fat consumption down to 10% of the total calories consumed is optimal for most people. In 1999, Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines , which further elucidates his theories of the future of technology, which stem from his analysis of long-term trends in biological and technological evolution. Much emphasis

776-661: A White House ceremony. He received the $ 500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize for 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human-machine communication. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame , established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has 21 honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. The Public Broadcasting Service ( PBS ) included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of

873-461: A bet—made in 1998, for a case of wine—with neuroscientist Christof Koch that the neural underpinnings for consciousness would not be resolved by the year 2023, while Koch had bet that they would. Chalmers is best known for formulating what he calls the " hard problem of consciousness ," in both his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind . He makes

970-543: A child, he experienced synesthesia . He began coding and playing computer games at the age of 10 on a PDP-10 at a medical center. He also performed exceptionally in mathematics , and secured a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad . When Chalmers was 13, he read Douglas Hofstadter 's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach , which awakened an interest in philosophy. Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from

1067-475: A computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had been able to read text in only a few fonts. He decided that the technology's best application would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand text by having a computer read it to them aloud. But the device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD flatbed scanner and

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1164-439: A decade. Chalmers has published works on the "theory of reference" concerning how words secure their referents. He, together with others such as Frank Jackson , played a major role in developing two-dimensional semantics . Before Saul Kripke delivered his famous lecture series Naming and Necessity in 1970, the descriptivism advocated by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell was the orthodoxy. Descriptivism suggests that

1261-418: A distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" The essential difference between the ( cognitive ) easy problems and the ( phenomenal ) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via

1358-596: A doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness . He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995. In 1994, Chalmers presented a lecture at the inaugural Toward a Science of Consciousness conference. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education , this "lecture established Chalmers as

1455-466: A full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing". Google co-founder Larry Page personally hired him. Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google". Kurzweil received a Technical Grammy Award on February 8, 2015, specifically for his invention of the Kurzweil K250 . Kurzweil has joined

1552-412: A metaconnection; we will all be connected and omnipresent, plugged into a global network that is connected to billions of people and filled with data." In 2008, Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years. According to him, we need to capture only 1 part in 10,000 of the energy from

1649-466: A name does not secure its reference via any process of description fitting. Rather, a name determines its reference via a historical-causal link tracing back to the process of naming. And thus, Kripke thinks that a name does not have a sense, or, at least, does not have a sense which is rich enough to play the reference-determining role. Moreover, a name, in Kripke's view, is a rigid designator , which refers to

1746-454: A name is an abbreviation of a description, which is a set of properties. This name secures its reference by a process of properties fitting: whichever object fits the description most, is the referent of the name. Therefore, the description provides the sense of the name, and it is through this sense that the reference of the name is determined. However, as Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity ,

1843-618: A part-time professorship at the philosophy department of New York University in 2009, becoming a full-time professor in 2014. In 2013, Chalmers was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences . He is an editor on topics in the philosophy of mind for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . In May 2018, it was announced that he would serve on the jury for the Berggruen Prize . In 2023, Chalmers won

1940-408: A psychologist at Cornell . He attended MIT to study with Minsky, obtaining a B.Sc. degree in computer science and literature in 1970. Kurzweil took all the computer programming courses (eight or nine) MIT offered in his first year and a half. In 1968, during his second year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called

2037-480: A robotic puppet theater and robotic game. He was involved with computers by age 12 (in 1960), when only a dozen computers existed in New York City, and built computing devices and statistical programs for the predecessor of Head Start. At 14, Kurzweil wrote a paper detailing his theory of the neocortex . His parents were involved with the arts, and he is quoted in the documentary Transcendent Man as saying that

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2134-407: A single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece. South Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang bought Kurzweil Music Systems in 1990. As with Xerox , Kurzweil remained as a consultant for several years. Hyundai acquired Young Chang in 2006, and in 2007 appointed Kurzweil as Chief Strategy Officer of Kurzweil Music Systems. Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems, he created

2231-455: A son, Ethan, a venture capitalist, and a daughter, Amy , a cartoonist. Kurzweil has said: "I realize that most inventions fail not because the R&;D department can't get them to work, but because the timing is wrong‍—‌not all of the enabling factors are at play where they are needed. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment." For

2328-399: A streamlined regulatory process, a global program of monitoring for unknown or evolving biological pathogens, temporary moratoriums, raising public awareness, international cooperation, software reconnaissance, and fostering values of liberty, tolerance, and respect for knowledge and diversity." Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was found to suffer from

2425-453: A system of thousands of "programs" and believes that understanding all their functions could be the key to building truly sentient AI . Kurzweil advocates universal basic income (UBI), arguing that progress in science and technology will lead to an abundance of virtually free resources , enabling every citizen to live without the need to work : "We are clearly headed toward a situation where everyone can live very well". According to him,

2522-400: A term T such that (i) the parties to the dispute disagree over the meaning of T, and (ii) the dispute arises solely because of this disagreement. In the same work, Chalmers proposes certain procedures for the resolution of verbal disputes. One of these he calls the "elimination method", which involves eliminating the contentious term and observing whether any dispute remains. Chalmers addressed

2619-676: A thinker to be reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence." He went on to coorganize the conference (renamed "The Science of Consciousness") for some years with Stuart Hameroff , but stepped away when he felt it became too divergent from mainstream science. Chalmers is a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and one of its past presidents. Having established his reputation, Chalmers received his first professorship at UC Santa Cruz , from August 1995 to December 1998. In 1996 he published

2716-452: A way to explain how reference is determined by distinguishing between epistemic possibilities (primary intension) and metaphysical necessities (secondary intension), ensuring that the referent (H2O) is uniquely identified across all metaphysically possible worlds. In some more recent work, Chalmers has concentrated on verbal disputes. He argues that a dispute is best characterized as "verbal" when it concerns some sentence S which contains

2813-494: A week in an effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry. By 2008, he had reduced the number of supplement pills to 150. By 2015, Kurzweil further reduced his daily pill regimen to 100 pills. Kurzweil asserts that in the future, everyone will live forever. In a 2013 interview, he said that in 15 years, medical technology could add more than a year to one's remaining life expectancy for each year that passes , and we could then "outrun our own deaths". Among other things, he has supported

2910-461: Is a psychologist in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts ; she works with women, children, parents, and families. She holds faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and William James College in graduate education in psychology. Her research interests and publications are in psychotherapy practice. She also serves as an active overseer at Boston Children's Museum . Ray and Sonya Kurzweil have

3007-529: Is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of the philosophy of mind , and the philosophy of language . He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University , as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block ). In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities . In 2013, he

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3104-432: Is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies . These zombies are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone;

3201-517: Is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me." Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has said of Kurzweil's and Hans Moravec 's books: "It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid." VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has called Kurzweil's ideas "cybernetic totalism" and outlined his views on

3298-527: Is just a fact of life. It's a natural fact of life". Ray Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( / ˈ k ɜːr z w aɪ l / , KURZ -wyle ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist , author, entrepreneur, futurist , and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis , speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health technology , artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism ,

3395-464: Is on the likely course of AI development, along with the future of computer architecture. Kurzweil's next book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever , published in 2004, returned to human health and nutrition and was co-authored by Terry Grossman, a medical doctor and specialist in alternative medicine . The Singularity Is Near , published in 2005, was made into a movie starring Pauley Perrette . In 2007, Ptolemaic Productions acquired

3492-620: Is replaced, the resulting functionally isomorphic robotic brain would be as conscious as the original biological one. In addition, Chalmers proposed a similar thought experiment, "dancing qualia", which concludes that a robotic brain that is functionally isomorphic to a biological one would not only be as conscious, but would also have the same conscious experiences (e.g., the same perception of color when seeing an object). In 2023, he analyzed whether large language models could be conscious, and suggested that they were probably not conscious, but could become serious candidates for consciousness within

3589-415: Is six years his junior. Ray Kurzweil decided at age five that he wanted to be an inventor. As a young boy, he had an inventory of parts from various construction toys he had been given and old electronic gadgets he had collected from neighbors. In his youth, Kurzweil was an avid reader of science fiction. At age eight, nine, and ten, he read the entire Tom Swift Jr . series. At age seven or eight, he built

3686-410: Is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges". Using Vernor Vinge 's Singularity concept as a foundation, the university offered its first nine-week graduate program to 40 students in 2009. Kurzweil views the human body as

3783-656: The "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader) —a pocket-sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit. Like the Kurzweil Reading Machine of almost 30 years before, the K-NFB Reader is designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud. The newer machine is portable and scans text through digital camera images, while the older machine is large and scans text through flatbed scanning. In December 2012, Google hired Kurzweil in

3880-556: The Alcor Life Extension Foundation , a cryonics company. After his death, he has a plan to be perfused with cryoprotectants , vitrified in liquid nitrogen , and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him. Kurzweil is agnostic about the existence of a soul . Of the possibility of divine intelligence, Kurzweil has said: "Does God exist? I would say 'Not yet. ' " He married Sonya Rosenwald Kurzweil in 1975. Sonya

3977-469: The Kurzweil K250 was unveiled. The machine could imitate a number of instruments, and according to Kurzweil's press packet, musicians could not tell the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode and a grand piano, though reviewers who actually attempted it questioned that. The machine's recording and mixing abilities coupled with its ability to imitate different instruments made it possible for

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4074-916: The Lifeboat Foundation . On May 13, 2006, Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California . In 2013, he was the keynote speaker at the Research, Innovation, Start-up and Employment (RISE) international conference in Seoul . In 2009, Kurzweil, Google, and the NASA Ames Research Center announced the creation of the Singularity University training center for corporate executives and government officials. The university's self-described mission

4171-530: The Long Now Foundation called The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole . Other prominent AI thinkers and computer scientists such as Daniel Dennett , Rodney Brooks , David Gelernter , and Paul Allen have also criticized Kurzweil's projections. In the cover article of the December 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum , John Rennie criticized Kurzweil for several predictions that did not come true by

4268-690: The Russo-Ukrainian War , Kurzweil said: "I don't think [nuclear war] is going to happen despite the terrors of that war. It is a possibility but it's unlikely, even with the tensions we've had with the nuclear power plant that's been taken over. It's very tense but I don't actually see a lot of people worrying that's going to happen. I think we'll avoid that. We had two nuclear bombs go off in [1945], so now we're 77 years later... we've never had another one go off through anger... there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons." Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines , presents his ideas about

4365-578: The SENS Research Foundation 's approach to finding a way to repair aging damage, and has encouraged the general public to hasten their research by donating. Kurzweil's standing as a futurist and transhumanist has led to his involvement in several singularity-themed organizations. In 2004, he joined the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute . In 2005, he joined the scientific advisory board of

4462-497: The Seattle International Film Festival , in which Kurzweil and one of his major critics, the late Joseph Weizenbaum , argue about the benefits of eternal life. Independent filmmaker Doug Wolens's feature-length documentary film The Singularity (2012) showcases Kurzweil and has been acclaimed as "a large-scale achievement in its documentation of futurist and counter-futurist ideas" and "the best documentary on

4559-470: The University of Adelaide . After graduating Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe, before continuing his studies at the University of Oxford , where he was a Rhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course. In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter , writing

4656-493: The technological singularity , and futurism . Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology , robotics , and biotechnology . Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation , the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in

4753-510: The text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions like Bell Labs , and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind . Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device was large and covered an entire tabletop. Stevie Wonder heard about

4850-481: The twin Earth thought experiment , for example, inhabitants might use "water" to mean their equivalent of water, even if its chemical composition is not H 2 O. Thus, for that world, "water" does not refer to H2O. The secondary intension of "water" is whatever "water" refers to in this world. When considered according to its secondary intension, water means H 2 O in every world. Through this concept, Chalmers provides

4947-517: The "entirely" and "essentially" correct, Kurzweil's claimed accuracy rate comes to 86%. In Newsweek magazine, Daniel Lyons criticized Kurzweil for some of his incorrect predictions for 2009, such as that the economy would continue to boom, that a U.S. company would have a market capitalization of more than $ 1 trillion, that a supercomputer would achieve 20 petaflops , that speech recognition would be in widespread use, and that cars would drive themselves using sensors installed in highways. To

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5044-454: The Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services". Additionally, Kurzweil claims to have correctly foreseen that the preferred mode of Internet access would be through wireless systems, and estimated that this development would become practical for widespread use in

5141-484: The Kurzweil 1000 text-to-speech converter software program, which enables a computer to read electronic and scanned text aloud to blind or visually impaired users, and the Kurzweil 3000 program, a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills . Kurzweil sold KESI to Lernout & Hauspie . After the legal and bankruptcy problems of the latter, he and other KESI employees bought back

5238-515: The Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers each student applicant submitted. Around that time he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $ 100,000 ($ 876,172 in 2023) plus royalties. In 1974, he founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system,

5335-528: The Singularity to date". On December 12, 2000, Columbia Records released the Canadian alternative rock band Our Lady Peace 's album Spiritual Machines . Although not initially so intended, the project evolved into a conceptual interpretation of Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines . The band emailed Kurzweil to ask permission to use the title of his book for their project. Kurzweil's excitement at

5432-472: The Sun that hits Earth's surface to meet all of humanity's energy needs. Kurzweil was called "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes in 1998 and a "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal in 1989. PBS included him as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America", along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked Kurzweil eighth among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in

5529-409: The U.S. and called him "Edison's rightful heir". Bill Gates called him "the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence". Although technological singularity is a popular concept in science fiction, authors such as Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling have voiced skepticism about its real-world plausibility. Sterling expressed his views on the singularity scenario in a talk in 2004 at

5626-470: The best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated chess World Champion Garry Kasparov in a well-publicized chess match . Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. When The Age of Intelligent Machines was published, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content. He also said that

5723-428: The borders of the mind. According to Chalmers, systems that have the same functional organization "at a fine enough grain" (that are "functionally isomorphic ") will have "qualitatively identical conscious experiences". In 1995, he proposed the reductio ad absurdum "fading qualia" thought experiment . It involves progressively replacing each neuron of a brain with a functional equivalent, for example implemented on

5820-445: The charge that a 20-petaflop supercomputer had not been produced, Kurzweil responded that he considered Google a giant supercomputer, and that it was indeed capable of 20 petaflops. Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate, with seven incorrect, four partially correct, and one correct. For example, Kurzweil predicted, "The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition", which

5917-553: The claim that within 20 years millions of blood-cell sized devices, known as nanobots, would fight disease inside our bodies and improve our memory and cognitive abilities. Kurzweil also claims that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029. He says that humans will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence that becomes increasingly dominated by its non-biological component. In Transcendent Man Kurzweil writes, "We humans are going to start linking with each other and become

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6014-523: The company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, which debuted in 1987, was an early speech recognition program. KAI was sold to Lernout & Hauspie in 1997. Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems (KESI) in 1996 to develop new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia , and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in school. Products include

6111-776: The company. KESI was eventually sold to Cambium Learning Group, Inc. During the 1990s, Kurzweil founded the Medical Learning Company. In 1999, Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat" (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies), which began trading in 2006. He has said that the ultimate aim is to improve the performance of FatKat's A.I. investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends". In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines , Kurzweil predicted that computers would one day be better than humans at making profitable investment decisions. In June 2005, Kurzweil introduced

6208-477: The contest's national winners, for which President Lyndon B. Johnson personally congratulated him during a White House ceremony. The experiences impressed upon Kurzweil the belief that nearly any problem could be overcome. While in high school, Kurzweil had corresponded with Marvin Minsky and was invited to visit him at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , which he did. Kurzweil also visited Frank Rosenblatt ,

6305-626: The culture surrounding Kurzweil's predictions in an essay for the Edge Foundation called "One Half of a Manifesto". Physicist and futurist Theodore Modis claims that Kurzweil's thesis of a technological singularity lacks scientific rigor. British philosopher John N. Gray argues that contemporary science is what magic was for ancient civilizations: it gives hope to those willing to do almost anything to achieve eternal life. He cites Kurzweil's singularity as an example, noting that this line of thinking has been present throughout human history. In

6402-420: The demonstration of this new machine on The Today Show , and later became the user of the first production Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a long-term association with Kurzweil. Kurzweil's next major business venture began in 1978, when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought

6499-643: The dominant strategy in the philosophy of mind: physicalism . Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist . Chalmers characterizes his view as " naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states supervene "naturally" on physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. He has also characterized his view by more traditional formulations such as property dualism . In support of this, Chalmers

6596-479: The early 21st century. In October 2010, Kurzweil released his report "How My Predictions Are Faring" in PDF format, analyzing the predictions he made in his books The Age of Intelligent Machines , The Age of Spiritual Machines , and The Singularity is Near . Of the 147 predictions, Kurzweil claimed that 115 were "entirely correct", 12 were "essentially correct", 17 were "partially correct", and three were "wrong". Combining

6693-449: The facts about them are further facts . Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information -bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain

6790-438: The film blends interviews with 20 big thinkers (such as Marvin Minsky ) with a narrative story that illustrates some of Kurzweil's key ideas, including a computer avatar (Ramona) who saves the world from self-replicating microscopic robots. An independent, feature-length documentary, Transcendent Man , was made about Kurzweil, his life, and his ideas. In 2010, an independent documentary film, Plug & Pray , premiered at

6887-553: The future. Written from 1986 to 1989, it was published in 1990. Building on Ithiel de Sola Pool 's "Technologies of Freedom" (1983), Kurzweil claims to have forecast the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control of the flow of information. In the book, Kurzweil also extrapolates trends in improving computer chess software performance, predicting that computers will beat

6984-482: The growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially. He further emphasized this issue in his 2001 essay "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which proposes an extension of Moore's law to a wide variety of technologies and argues in favor of John von Neumann 's concept of a technological singularity . Kurzweil was working with the Army Science Board in 2006 to develop a rapid response system to deal with

7081-518: The household always discussed the future and technology. Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School . During class, he often held onto his class textbooks to seemingly participate while focusing on his own projects hidden behind the book. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs , taught Kurzweil the basics of computer science . In 1963, at 15, he wrote his first computer program. Kurzweil created pattern-recognition software that analyzed

7178-418: The issue of virtual and non-virtual worlds in his 2022 book Reality+ . While Chalmers recognises that virtual reality is not the same as non-virtual reality, he does not consider virtual reality to be an illusion, but rather a "genuine reality" in its own right. Chalmers sees virtual reality as potentially offering as meaningful a life as non-virtual reality, and argues that we could already be inhabitants of

7275-514: The major hurdle to introducing UBI is not its feasibility, but political will, which is slowly emerging. In a 2018 TED Talk , he predicted that "in the early 2030s, we'll have universal basic income in the developed world, and worldwide by the end of the 2030s. You'll be able to live very well on that. The primary concern will be meaning and purpose ." During a September 17, 2022, interview, Kurzweil explained his worries about technology being used for violence. When asked about nuclear armageddon and

7372-512: The originally predicted date. Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy agrees with Kurzweil's timeline of future progress, but thinks that technologies such as AI, nanotechnology, and advanced biotechnology will create a dystopian world. Lotus Development Corporation founder Mitch Kapor has called the notion of a technological singularity " intelligent design for the IQ 140 people... This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything

7469-410: The past several decades, Kurzweil's most effective and common approach to doing creative work has been conducted during a lucid dreamlike state immediately preceding his waking state. He claims to have constructed inventions, solved algorithmic, business strategy, organizational, and interpersonal problems, and written speeches in this state. Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines ,

7566-478: The past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him No. 8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him " Edison 's rightful heir". Kurzweil grew up in Queens , New York City. He attended NYC Public Education Kingsbury Elementary School PS188. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had emigrated from Austria just before the onset of World War II . Through Unitarian Universalism he

7663-515: The possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism . Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries. According to Chalmers, his arguments are similar to a line of thought that goes back to Leibniz 's 1714 "mill" argument ; the first substantial use of philosophical "zombie" terminology may be Robert Kirk 's 1974 "Zombies vs. Materialists". After

7760-452: The possible abuse of biotechnology. He suggested that a bioterrorist could use the same technologies that empower us to reprogram biology away from cancer and heart disease to reprogram a virus to be more deadly, communicable, and stealthy. But he suggests we have the scientific tools to defend against such an attack, much as we defend against computer software viruses. Kurzweil has testified before Congress on nanotechnology , saying that it has

7857-450: The potential to solve serious global problems such as poverty, disease, and climate change: "Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill". In media appearances, Kurzweil has stressed nanotechnology's extreme potential dangers but argues that, in practice, progress cannot be stopped because that would require a totalitarian system, and any attempt to do so would drive dangerous technologies underground and deprive responsible scientists of

7954-465: The program to upload paper legal and news documents to its nascent online databases. He sold Kurzweil Computer Products to Xerox, where it was first known as Xerox Imaging Systems and later as Scansoft ; he was a consultant for Xerox until 1995. In 1999, Visioneer, Inc. acquired Scansoft from Xerox to form a new public company with Scansoft as the new company-wide name. Scansoft merged with Nuance Communications in 2005. Kurzweil's next business venture

8051-445: The prospect prompted them to invite him to record spoken excerpts from his book for the album. As a result, short tracks of spoken dialog by Kurzweil are interspersed among the album's songs. The Kurzweil K250 keyboard is also used on the album. In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines , Kurzweil proposed "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including

8148-671: The publication of Chalmers's landmark paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies . These papers (by Daniel Dennett , Colin McGinn , Francisco Varela , Francis Crick , and Roger Penrose , among others) were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem . John Searle critiqued Chalmers's views in The New York Review of Books . With Andy Clark , Chalmers has written " The Extended Mind ", an article about

8245-442: The reference of natural kind terms. The kind of theory of reference that is advocated by Kripke and Putnam is called the direct reference theory . Chalmers disagrees with Kripke, and direct reference theorists in general. He thinks that there are two kinds of intension of a natural kind term, a stance called two-dimensionalism . For example, the statement "Water is H 2 O" expresses two distinct propositions, often referred to as

8342-468: The rights to The Singularity Is Near , The Age of Spiritual Machines , and Fantastic Voyage , including the rights to film Kurzweil's life and ideas for the documentary film Transcendent Man , which was directed by Barry Ptolemy. Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever , a follow-up to Fantastic Voyage , was released in 2009. Kurzweil's book How to Create a Mind was released in 2012. In it he describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind ,

8439-405: The same object in all possible worlds . Following this line of thought, Kripke suggests that any scientific identity statement such as "Water is H 2 O" is also a necessary statement, i.e. true in all possible worlds. Kripke thinks that this is a phenomenon that descriptivism cannot explain. And, as also proposed by Hilary Putnam and Kripke himself, Kripke's view on names can also be applied to

8536-576: The theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and argues that emulating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence. Kurzweil's first novel, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine , follows a girl who uses her intelligence and her friends' help to tackle real-world problems. It follows a structure akin to the scientific method. Chapters are organized as year-by-year episodes from Danielle's childhood and adolescence. The book comes with companion materials, A Chronicle of Ideas and How You Can Be

8633-475: The tools needed for defense. He suggests that the proper place of regulation is to ensure that technological progress proceeds safely and quickly but does not deprive the world of profound benefits. He said: "To avoid dangers such as unrestrained nanobot replication, we need relinquishment at the right level and to place our highest priority on the continuing advance of defensive technologies, staying ahead of destructive technologies. An overall strategy should include

8730-567: The widely cited book The Conscious Mind . Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and then Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona . In 2004, Chalmers returned to Australia, encouraged by an ARC Federation Fellowship , becoming professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University . Chalmers accepted

8827-588: The works of classical composers, then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. In 1965 he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret , where he performed a piano piece composed by a computer he had built. Later in the year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; his submission to Westinghouse Talent Search of his first computer program alongside several other projects resulted in his being one of

8924-534: Was a featured philosopher in the 2020 Daily Nous series on GPT-3 , which he described as "one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced." As of 2012 Chalmers was the lead singer of the Zombie Blues band, which performed at the music festival Qualia Fest in 2012 in New York. Regarding religion, Chalmers said in 2011: "I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except watered-down humanistic, spiritual views. And consciousness

9021-580: Was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences . Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness , and for popularizing the philosophical zombie thought experiment. Chalmers and David Bourget co-founded PhilPapers ; a database of journal articles for philosophers. David Chalmers was born in Sydney , New South Wales , and subsequently grew up in Adelaide , South Australia , where he attended Unley High School . As

9118-517: Was exposed to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. The Unitarian church has a philosophy that there are many paths to the truth: his religious education consisted of studying one religion for six months before moving on to another. His father, Fredric, was a concert pianist, a noted conductor and a music educator. His mother, Hannah, was a visual artist. He is the elder of two children; his sister Enid, an accountant in Santa Barbara ,

9215-399: Was in electronic music technology. After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder , in which Wonder lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of synthesizers that could duplicate the sounds of real instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year, and in 1984,

9312-557: Was not the case. In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines , which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. In it, he says that with radical life extension will come radical life enhancement. He says he is confident that within 10 years we will have the option to spend some of our time in 3D virtual environments that appear just as real as real reality, but these will not yet be made possible via direct interaction with our nervous system. He expounds on his prediction about nanorobotics , making

9409-418: Was published in 1990. The nonfiction work discusses the history of computer artificial intelligence (AI) and forecasts future developments. Other experts in the field of AI contribute heavily to the work in the form of essays. The Association of American Publishers awarded it the status of Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990. In 1993, Kurzweil published a book on nutrition, The 10% Solution for

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