Ray Kurzweil — Immortality By 2045 / Global Future 2045 Congress'2013

Global Future 2045 Congress: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution / New York City, 2013 http://gf2045.com/ Ray Kurzweil Singularitarian Immortalist Director of Engineering at Google, famous inventor, author of How to Create a Mind. Immortality by 2045 The onset of the 21st century will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy, and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies—DNA sequencing, for example—brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an ever faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level ‘strong’ AI well before 2030. The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a process well under way. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, we will ultimately merge with our machines, live indefinitely, and be a billion times more intelligent... all within the next three to four decades. BIOGRAPHY A world-class prolific inventor and leading futurist author, “the restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) points to 2045 for the technological singularity when A.I. will surpass human intelligence in his New York Times best seller The Singularity is Near, Amazon’s #1 book in science and philosophy. Predicts imminent physical immortality in global media and, with Dr. Terry Grossman, M.D., explains why and how in his books Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004) and Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009). Details how to engineer synthetic minds in latest book How to Create a Mind (Nov. 2012). Ranked #8 among U.S. entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison”. Named by PBS as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America”. Principal inventor of the 1st CCD flat-bed scanner, the 1st omni-font optical character recognition, the 1st print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the 1st text-to-speech synthesizer, the 1st music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the 1st commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Recipient of National Medal of Technology, the U.S.'s highest honor in technology, 19 honorary doctorates and awards from 3 U.S. Presidents. Inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame by the US Patent Office.