Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. 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, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, 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.
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I.J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence is a non-fiction book by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil about artificial intelligence and the future course of humanity. First published in hardcover on January 1, 1999 by Viking, it has received attention from The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. In the book Kurzweil outlines his vision for how technology will progress during the 21st century.
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to use. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 and came to bear his name.
Max Erik Tegmark is a Swedish-American physicist, cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute. He is also a scientific director at the Foundational Questions Institute and a supporter of the effective altruism movement.
Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku is the author of several books about physics and related topics and has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film. He is also a regular contributor to his own blog, as well as other popular media outlets. For his efforts to bridge science and science fiction, he is a 2021 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Awardee.
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is a 2005 non-fiction book about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.
The Age of Intelligent Machines is a non-fiction book about artificial intelligence by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. This was his first book and the Association of American Publishers named it the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990. It was reviewed in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor. The format is a combination of monograph and anthology with contributed essays by artificial intelligence experts such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, and Marvin Minsky.
Alien Planet is a 2005 docufiction TV special created for the Discovery Channel. Based on the 1990 book Expedition by the artist and writer Wayne Barlowe, Alien Planet explores the imagined extraterrestrial life of the fictional planet Darwin IV in the style of a nature documentary. Although closely following Barlowe's depiction of Darwin IV, Alien Planet features a team of scientists and science fiction figures discussing Darwin IV as if it had actually been discovered. Among the people featured are Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Jack Horner, James B. Garvin and George Lucas.
A wetware computer is an organic computer composed of organic material "wetware" such as "living" neurons. Wetware computers composed of neurons are different than conventional computers because they are thought to be capable in a way of "thinking for themselves", because of the dynamic nature of neurons. While a wetware computer is still largely conceptual, there has been limited success with construction and prototyping, which has acted as a proof of the concept's realistic application to computing in the future. The most notable prototypes have stemmed from the research completed by biological engineer William Ditto during his time at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work constructing a simple neurocomputer capable of basic addition from leech neurons in 1999 was a significant discovery for the concept. This research acted as a primary example driving interest in the creation of these artificially constructed, but still organic brains.
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos is a popular science book by Michio Kaku first published in 2004.
Transcendent Man is a 2009 documentary film by American filmmaker Barry Ptolemy about inventor, futurist and author Ray Kurzweil and his predictions about the future of technology in his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near. In the film, Ptolemy follows Kurzweil around his world as he discusses his thoughts on the technological singularity, a proposed advancement that will occur sometime in the 21st century when progress in artificial intelligence, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics will result in the creation of a human-machine civilization.
2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future is a 1981 book by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill. The book is an attempt to predict the social and technological state of humanity 100 years in the future. O'Neill's positive attitude towards both technology and human potential distinguished this book from gloomy predictions of a Malthusian catastrophe by contemporary scientists. Paul R. Ehrlich wrote in 1968 in The Population Bomb, "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death". The Club of Rome's 1972 Limits to Growth predicted a catastrophic end to the Industrial Revolution within 100 years from resource exhaustion and pollution.
Visions of the Future is a 2007 documentary television series aired on the BBC Four television channel. The series stars theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku as he documents cutting edge science.
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel is a book by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. Kaku uses discussion of speculative technologies to introduce topics of fundamental physics to the reader. The topic of invisibility becomes a discussion on why the speed of light is slower in water than in vacuum, that electromagnetism is similar to ripples in a pond, and Kaku discusses newly developed composite materials. The topic of Star Trek "phasers" becomes a lesson on how lasers work and how laser-based research is conducted. The cover of his book depicts a TARDIS, a device used in the British science fiction television show Doctor Who to travel in space and time, in its disguise as a police box, continuously passing through a time loop. With each discussion of science fiction technology topics he also "explains the hurdles to realizing these science fiction concepts as reality".
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind is a popular science book by the futurist and physicist Michio Kaku. The book was initially published on February 25, 2014 by Doubleday.
Beyond: Our Future in Space is a non-fiction book by astronomer and professor Chris Impey that discusses the history of space travel and the future trajectory of human exploration of space. Impey's third popular science book for Norton was published as a hardcover in 2015.
Jamais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area–based author and futurist.
A planetary civilization or global civilization is a civilization of Type I on the Kardashev scale. This type of civilization is likely to be reliant on renewable energy sources such as stellar power, as well as powerful non-renewable sources such as nuclear fusion. A Type I civilization's energy consumption level is roughly equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth (between 1016 and 1017 watts) ─ around 3 orders of magnitude higher than that of contemporary humanity (around 2×1013 as of 2020).
The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth is a popular science book by the futurist and physicist Michio Kaku. The book was initially published on February 20, 2018 by Doubleday. The book was on The New York Times Best Seller list for four weeks.
