Transcurve

It's not an accredited university, and it doesn't actually teach the singuarity, the supposed superintelligence that will result when man merges with machine, due (according to prolific inventor and author Ray Kurzweil) sometime around 2045. Still, the official welcome at Singularity University's (SU)…

There is a dangerous idea gaining ground in our culture. It spreads with every headline that promises a cure for cancer or celebrates the discovery of a "gene for longevity". The idea is that science and technology can make us live forever.

Wired readers will be familiar with the prophets of…

TOKYO CITY SYMPHONY from roppongi hills on Vimeo.

Two years ago Stanford professor Andrew Ng joined Google’s X Lab, the research group that’s given us Google Glass and the company’s driverless cars. His mission: to harness Google’s massive data centers and build artificial intelligence systems on an unprecedented scale.

He ended up working with one of…

Michael Archer, currently a Professor and head of the Evolution of Earth & Life Sciences Research Group at University of New South Wales, became obsessed with fossils at the age of 11. His previous education and accomplishments include receiving his undergraduate education at Princeton University, then receiving his PhD in the University of Western Australia,…

Computational intelligence is the manifest destiny of computer science.

- Ed Feigenbaum

Is the mind computable? Can we build sentient machines? What are the implications for humanity if we can?

The human race may be singular, unique across all of time and space. It may be just one of multitudes. Most likely, however, it is an extremely rare…

Janna Levin on her book Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the story of two great mathematicians, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing. They were men who had the capacity to think about the most abstract of mathematical truths but had very limited abilities when it came to confronting the mundane aspects of life. Both committed suicide.

HAZEL – as we'll call her – knew something was wrong when, in her mid-50s, she started to feel short of breath at the slightest exertion. Over the next few months, she felt increasingly achy, but several medical visits and an X-ray suggested only arthritis. More troubling symptoms appeared: a…

A provocative new paper is proposing that complex intelligent behavior may emerge from a fundamentally simple physical process. The theory offers novel prescriptions for how to build an AI — but it also explains how a world-dominating superintelligence might…

Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work, SURFACES AND ESSENCES: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Working from the simplest forms to infinitely complex constructions, they show how analogies are the tools our…