Raymond Kurzweil is an American 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 point in time at which technological growth will become radically faster and uncontrollable, 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.
John Charles Dvorak is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing. His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a regular columnist in a variety of magazines. He was vice president of Mevio, and has been a host on TechTV and TWiT.tv. He is currently a co-host of the No Agenda podcast.
Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that a technological singularity—the creation of superintelligence—will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans.
"Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" is an article written by Bill Joy in the April 2000 issue of Wired magazine. In the article, he argues that "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species." Joy warns:
The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.
Marc Stiegler is an American science fiction author and software developer. He co-authored Valentina: Soul in Sapphire (1984) with Joseph H. Delaney. The computer program, Valentina, was one of science fiction's earliest examples of sentient computer software, completely unlike mainframe AIs such as HAL and Colossus.
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction, who has written for the periodicals Popular Science and Wired. From 1999 to 2008 Newitz wrote a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation, and from 2000 to 2004 was the culture editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2004 Newitz became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With Charlie Jane Anders, they also co-founded Other magazine, a periodical that ran from 2002 to 2007. From 2008 to 2015 Newitz was editor-in-chief of Gawker-owned media venture io9, and subsequently its direct descendant Gizmodo, Gawker's design and technology blog. As of 2019, Newitz is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.
Michael Chorost is an American book author, essayist, and public speaker. Born with severe loss of hearing due to rubella, his hearing was partially restored with a cochlear implant in 2001 and he had his other ear implanted in 2007.
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.
The Nexus Trilogy is a postcyberpunk thriller novel trilogy written by American author Ramez Naam and published between 2012-2015. The novel series follows the protagonist Kaden Lane, a scientist who works on an experimental nano-drug, Nexus, which allows the brain to be programmed and networked, connecting human minds together. As he pursues his work, he becomes entangled in government and corporate intrigue. The story takes place in the year 2040.
CodeDay is a non-profit organization which promotes STEM education for high school and college students.
Oren Etzioni is an American entrepreneur, Professor Emeritus of computer science, and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). On June 15, 2022, he announced that he will step down as CEO of AI2 effective September 30, 2022. After that time, he will continue as a board member and advisor. Etzioni will also take the position of Technical Director of the AI2 Incubator. Oren joined the University of Washington faculty in 1991, where he became the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In May 2005, he founded and became the director of the university's Turing Center. The center investigated problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics. Etzioni coined the term machine reading and helped to create the first commercial comparison shopping agent.
Zoltan Istvan Gyurko, professionally known as Zoltan Istvan, is an American transhumanist, journalist, entrepreneur, political candidate, and futurist.
Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur in the field of expression recognition research and technology development, which is a subset of facial recognition designed to identify the emotions expressed by the face. El Kaliouby's research moved beyond the field's dependence on exaggerated or caricatured expressions modeled by laboratory actors, to focus on the subtle glances found in real situations. She is the co-founder, with Rosalind Picard, and CEO of Affectiva.
Tali Sharot is an Israeli/British/American neuroscientist and professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. Sharot began studying at Tel Aviv University, receiving a B.A. in economics in 1999, and an M.A. in psychology from New York University in 2002. She received her Ph.D in psychology and neuroscience from New York University. Sharot is known for her research on the neural basis of emotion, decision making and optimism. Sharot hopes to better understand these processes to enhance overall well-being.
Yu Pan is an engineer and entrepreneur mentioned in one source as one of the original six people who started PayPal and the first employee at YouTube, as an early software engineer. He is a former Google employee and also a co-founder of Kiwi Crate, Inc.
Semantic Scholar is an artificial intelligence–powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI and publicly released in November 2015. It uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial-intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, Human-Computer interaction, and information retrieval.
The Allen Institute is a non-profit, bioscience research institute located in Seattle. It was founded by billionaire philanthropist Paul G. Allen in 2003. The Allen Institute conducts large-scale basic science research studying the brain, cells and immune system in effort to accelerate science and disease research. The organization practices open science, in that they make all their data and resources publicly available for researchers to access.
Calum Chace is an English writer and speaker, focusing on the likely future impact of Artificial Intelligence on people and societies.
Vivienne L’Ecuyer Ming is an American theoretical neuroscientist and artificial intelligence expert. She was named as one of the BBC 100 Women in 2017, and as one of the Financial Times' "LGBT leaders and allies today".
