clippingsfrom | the New York TimesThe stories feat. Ray Kurzweil.
July 1, 2022
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— clippings by year —
2020
date: Oct. 7, 2020
story: Metallica’s Kirk Hammett: Eddie Van Halen ‘Blew open everyone’s minds’
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The guitarist remembers the multitalented musician, who died this week at 65.
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date: May 8, 2020
story: A techno group wary of technology
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The pioneering German group Kraftwerk sounded the alarms early on.
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2019
date: Jan. 15, 2019
story: Alan R. Pearlman, synthesizer pioneer, dies at 93
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Alan R. Pearlman, the engineer who founded the synthesizer company ARP Instruments and designed its pioneering equipment, died on Jan. 5 in Newton, Mass. He was 93.
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2018
date: Dec. 7, 2018
story: The big question: have we left something important behind?
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As modern life moves forward, has our society left something important behind? Can it, or should it, be retrieved? We asked the thinkers, artists and opinion leaders below for their thoughts.
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date: Dec. 6, 2018
story: Books about losing faith that will give you hope
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NONFICTION
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date: Aug. 16, 2018
story: Review: ‘Do you trust this computer?’ the quick answer: nope
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“We’ve opened Pandora’s box: We’ve unleashed forces that we can’t control, and we can’t stop. We’re in the midst of essentially creating a new life form on Earth.”
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date: Aug. 11, 2018
story: There will never be an age of artificial intimacy
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Robots may be better than nothing, but they still won’t be enough.
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2017
date: Nov. 13, 2017
story: In Berlin, a design studio puts luxury into 3-d
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Is 3-D printing the shape of fashion to come?
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date: Oct. 2, 2017
story: A trust buster for the new ‘knowledge monopoly’
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WORLD WITHOUT MIND
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date: March 14, 2017
story: Ray Kurzweil on how we’ll end up merging with our technology
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NONFICTION
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date: Feb. 9, 2017
story: 600 miles in a coffin-shaped bus, campaigning against death itself
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Zoltan Istvan ran for president with a modest goal in mind: human immortality.
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2016
date: Dec. 5, 2016
story: What lies ahead for luxury in 2017
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In 2017 the luxury industry will be faced with a precarious balancing act on multiple fronts. Brands will be forced to find an equilibrium between an exponential growth in technology and their traditional emphasis on the human hand; between understanding their customers’ behavior and surveilling it; between their global presence and their local consumer groups; and between the poles of a customer spectrum that stretches not just around the world, but over decades, from Generation Z to the silver dollar.
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date: Dec. 5, 2016
story: Fashion’s future, printed to order
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3-D printing may radically change our relationship to shopping and our clothes a lot sooner than we think.
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date: Nov. 30, 2016
story: The dawn of the ‘tryborg’
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The existence of “the tryborg,” as a category of person, is so obvious that once I point it out, you will immediately recognize a dozen tryborgs you know or whose work you have read. It is possible you are a tryborg.
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date: Nov. 10, 2016
story: Review: ‘Uncle Kent 2,’ how’s your tolerance for hipster milquetoasts?
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“Nobody Saw the First One. So He’s Back for a Second.” That tag line appears on a poster for “Uncle Kent 2,” and it’s not entirely accurate. As it happens, I saw the somber and weirdly self-congratulatory 2011 film “Uncle Kent,” directed by Joe Swanberg and starring Kent Osborne as the title character. “Uncle Kent 2,” directed (for the most part) by Todd Rohal from Mr. Osborne’s script, is a funnier and more imaginative film than its predecessor, but it’s still what you might call a niche proposition.
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date: April 7, 2016
story: When is the singularity? Probably not in your lifetime
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Misconception: Computers will outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes.
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date: Jan. 25, 2016
story: Marvin Minsky, pioneer in artificial intelligence, dies at 88
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Marvin Minsky, who combined a scientist’s thirst for knowledge with a philosopher’s quest for truth as a pioneering explorer of artificial intelligence, work that helped inspire the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, died on Sunday night in Boston. He was 88.
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2015
date: Sept. 21, 2015
story: How i learned to stop worrying and love A.I.
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The distinction between man and machine is under siege. The technology wizard Ray Kurzweil speaks with casual confidence of achieving electromagnetic immortality with our once-human selves eternally etched onto universal servers. For me, the possibility that machines will acquire the equivalent of human feelings and emotions is pure fantasy. And yet, as a neurologist, I cannot ignore advancing machine intelligence’s implications about the human mind.
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date: Sept. 12, 2015
story: A dying young woman’s hope in cryonics and a future
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Cancer claimed Kim Suozzi at age 23, but she chose to have her brain preserved with the dream that neuroscience might one day revive her mind.
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date: Sept. 9, 2015
story: Intel to end sponsorship of science talent search
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SAN FRANCISCO — Intel, the world’s largest maker of semiconductors, is dropping its longtime support of the most prestigious science and mathematics competition for American high school students.
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date: Aug. 31, 2015
story: Can we improve?
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Human beings have made progress in various areas, though it is often fitful, double-edged and reversible. But are we capable of substantial moral improvement? Could we someday be much better ethically than we are now? Is it likely that members of our species could become, on average, more generous or more honest, less self-deceptive or less self-interested? I have known individual people who have improved morally in various ways (and many who have made the opposite journey) but I’m not sure that as a species as a whole we are any better than we were 100 or even 10,000 years ago.
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2014
date: Sept. 5, 2014
story: Future footprints
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For the first time in history, a sentient species, Homo sapiens, has become a force of such magnitude that our impacts are being written into the fossil record. We have decisively changed the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the rate of extinction. We have created new atomic isotopes and plastiglomerates that may persist for millions of years. We have built megacities that will leave a durable footprint long after they have vanished. We have altered the pH of the oceans and have moved so many life-forms around the globe — inadvertently and intentionally — that we are creating novel ecosystems everywhere. Since the late-18th-century industrialization that marks the Anthropocene’s beginnings, humans have shaken Earth’s life systems with a profundity that the paleontologist Anthony Barnosky has likened to an asteroid strike.
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date: July 8, 2014
story: Silicon Valley sharknado
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WASHINGTON — Mostly, this July, I’m worrying about the jumping sharks jumping the shark.
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date: June 11, 2014
story: Intelligence too big for a single machine
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Ever since the computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence in 1955, the field has gone through cycles of boundless optimism and sobering disillusion. Yet until recently, the supercomputer was the go-to operator of machine intelligence — both in science fiction (HAL, in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”) and in reality (Watson, IBM’s “Jeopardy!” champ).
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date: June 10, 2014
story: Reading list | The top 100 best-selling education books of 2014 (so far)
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In December 2013, we published the first New York Times best-seller list of education titles. As we wrote at the time, the collection was intended to get people talking and thinking about the many ways we discuss education, how we present sometimes arcane subjects, and how we think about teaching and learning at all ages and in many contexts.
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date: April 1, 2014
story: A revolution in money
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Imagine it’s 2040.
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date: March 7, 2014
story: Dreaming in code
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In June of this year, the World Cup in Brazil will begin not with a flashy musical number or a team of flying acrobats but with a simple scientific demonstration. A paralyzed teenager will make the ceremonial first kick. This feat will be accomplished through an “exoskeleton” directly controlled by the teenager’s thoughts and read through a helmet-mounted EEG machine. That kick, guided by an extraordinary brain-to-machine interface, may be our initiation into our post-human future. In that brave new world our memories will be recorded and swapped like old videotapes, self-aware robots will be our companions, and our consciousness, downloaded onto machines, will live forever. It’s a future Michio Kaku, the string theorist turned popular scientist, believes is inevitable and closer than we think.
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date: March 2, 2014
story: The philosophy of ‘Her’
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You know, I actually used to be so worried about not having a body, but now I truly love it … I’m not tethered to time and space in the way that I would be if I was stuck inside a body that’s inevitably going to die. — Samantha, in “Her”
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2013
date: Dec. 16, 2013
story: The top 75 New York Times best-selling education books of 2013
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What strikes you about the books on this list? Tell us, below.
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date: Dec. 16, 2013
story: After 45 years, as incendiary as ever
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Perhaps “White Light/White Heat” can’t be the surprise it was when it arrived in 1968. The second album by the Velvet Underground, “White Light/White Heat” has been canonized, analyzed, annotated, emulated and contextualized as a cornerstone of punk and experimental rock. Generations of listeners have been aware of the insistent, relentless drone of its extended songs, the outbursts of scrabbling dissonance and earsplitting distortion from Lou Reed’s lead guitar, the equally insistent presence of John Cale’s electric viola and keyboards, the deadpan tales of drugs and sex and death in Mr. Reed’s lyrics and the pithy drive, amid the cacophony, of Sterling Morrison’s rhythm guitar and Maureen Tucker’s steadfast drums.
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date: Nov. 20, 2013
story: Techies striving for the next big thing
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“Betas” represents such an amalgam of digital story lines — it’s about a Silicon Valley start-up, and it’s bankrolled and hosted by an Internet behemoth, Amazon — that it’s tempting to review it as if it were a new app rather than an online comedy. Such as: While it lacks some features found in big-budget television sitcoms, and it can be glitchy when it comes to racial and sexual humor, it provides a better user experience than a majority of online series. A solid three-and-a-half stars.
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date: Nov. 15, 2013
story: Trying to outrace scientific advances
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Before he created the futuristic TV cop show “Almost Human,” J. H. Wyman faced a recurring challenge as producer of the sci-fi series “Fringe.” Actual scientists continually spawned projects that rivaled the wildest imaginary ones dreamed up in the writers’ room.
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date: July 23, 2013
story: Driving sideways
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The driverless car, like other utopian pursuits, seems always to be just out of reach. It’s captured the imagination of many for at least a century: in 1918, the Oakland Tribune reported (in a section I wish all newspapers would bring back called “New and Interesting Facts from Science and Life”) that “the new car will be all glass-enclosed and controlled entirely by a set of push buttons. It will have no clutch, gears or transmission, will sit low, have small clearance and punctureless tires.”
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date: June 1, 2013
story: This man is not a cyborg. Yet.
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GET right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like — you will not pick up even the faintest hint of crazy. He is soft-spoken and a bit shy, but expansive once he gets talking, and endearingly mild-mannered. He never seems ruffled, no matter what question you ask. Even if you ask the obvious one, which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started “this project,” as he sometimes calls it.
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date: May 3, 2013
story: Science Chronicle
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HOW TO CREATE A MIND
The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.
By Ray Kurzweil.
Viking, $27.95.
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date: March 9, 2013
story: Keep calm and carry on… buying
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OUR fully automated, meme-conscious information economy might seem a paradise of reason and rationality. But it also has a seamier, surreal side. Just consider how the phrase “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot” came to appear on T-shirts sold on Amazon.co.uk.
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date: Jan. 25, 2013
story: The 1.27.13 issue
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TALK: RAY KURZWEIL
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date: Jan. 25, 2013
story: Ray Kurzweil says we’re going to live forever
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Interview
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date: Jan. 10, 2013
story: Unpacking the pandora’s box of technology
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Melding futurist theorizing and parental musings, Avi Zev Weider’s overambitious, misshapen documentary “Welcome to the Machine” is a strange beast. Experts at describing our collective tomorrow share screen time in the film with the admonitory writings of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Mr. Weider, meanwhile, stays up nights worrying aloud about his prematurely born triplets, the products of in vitro fertilization.
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2011
date: Dec. 17, 2011
story: Life goes on, and on …
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A FRIEND calls from her car: “I’m on my way to Cape Cod to scatter my mother’s ashes in the bay, her favorite place.” Another, encountered on the street, mournfully reports that he’s just “planted” his mother. A third e-mails news of her mother’s death with a haunting phrase: “the sledgehammer of fatality.” It feels strange. Why are so many of our mothers dying all at once?
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date: June 8, 2011
story: ‘On the media’: Comics edition
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Remember that great episode of NPR’s “On the Media” about the Goldilocks number? Brooke Gladstone ruthlessly disassembled a claim by the NBC reporter Chris Hansen, on a “To Catch a Predator” episode of “Dateline,” that at any given moment, 50,000 child predators are online, skeevily perving out on your child.
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date: April 23, 2011
story: The promise of rapture for the high-tech elite
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Ray Kurzweil, the influential technologist, came to the Palace of Fine Arts theater in San Francisco a few days ago to promote his vision of “the Singularity.” One attendee admiringly described it as “the cult Rapture of the Nerds.”
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date: March 15, 2011
story: What to expect: X-ray vision, doubled life spans and lots of robots
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Reading a dull, charmless nonfiction book is almost always better than reading a dull, charmless novel. With a nonfiction book, you might at least learn something.
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date: Feb. 5, 2011
story: What is artificial intelligence?
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IN the category “What Do You Know?”, for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything in existence and it means to give a couple of the world’s quickest humans a run for their money at their own game.
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date: Jan. 7, 2011
story: High-tech help
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YOU might say it all started with spell-check. In the 1980s, with the introduction of word processing programs like WordPerfect, it became apparent that computerized proofreaders could come to the rescue of struggling spellers and bad typists. Thirty years later, an ever-growing array of assistive technology is available to help students read, write term papers and take tests. From pens that can remember to text that can talk, such technologies are now being held up as important tools for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia, dysgraphia (trouble writing) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
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date: Jan. 5, 2011
story: Cyberspace when you’re dead
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Suppose that just after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the fate of the worldly goods you leave behind: financial assets, personal effects, belongings likely to have sentimental value to others and artifacts of your life like photographs, journals, letters. Even if you haven’t made such arrangements, all of this will get sorted one way or another, maybe in line with what you would have wanted, and maybe not.
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date: Jan. 4, 2011
story: The future is now: Analyzing and making predictions
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What did historical figures imagine our lives would look like today? How can we make informed predictions about the future? In this lesson, students consider and discuss predictions about life in 2011 that were written in 1931 by prominent thinkers of the day, and then draw on New York Times articles to develop their own predictions about the future.
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2010
date: Dec. 10, 2010
story: The final conflict
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This is a big “big book.” To accomplish his ambitious goal of both understanding the evolution of mankind’s past development and prognosticating the future of the continuing East-West horse race, Ian Morris starts around 15 millenniums ago. That’s a lot of history.
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date: June 18, 2010
story: Ray Kurzweil vows to right e-reader wrongs
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There’s Amazon.com’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad and a bevy of iPad and Kindle clones. Still, Ray Kurzweil, the famed inventor, thinks people deserve yet another option when it comes to reading books and magazines with an electronic device.
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date: June 14, 2010
story: A case against transhumanism
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As a supplement to Ashlee Vance’s entertaining survey of the Singularity enthusiasts from last Friday’s Times, I recommend Roger Scruton’s brief for human beings as they actually exist: … hope springs eternal in the human breast, and false hope is no exception.
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date: June 12, 2010
story: Merely human? That’s so yesterday
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ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.
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2009
date: July 25, 2009
story: Scientists worry machines may outsmart man
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A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.
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date: March 31, 2009
story: Guest column: Computers vs. brains
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Inventor Ray Kurzweil, in his 2005 futurist manifesto “The Singularity Is Near,” extrapolates current trends in computer technology to conclude that machines will be able to out-think people within a few decades. In his eagerness to salute our robotic overlords, he neglects some key differences between brains and computers that make his prediction unlikely to come true.
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date: Jan. 19, 2009
story: Me and my machine
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Technology
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2008
date: Oct. 13, 2008
story: Machines of mass destruction
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OMAHA, Nebraska — ‘Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street.
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date: Oct. 11, 2008
story: The rise of the machines
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“BEWARE of geeks bearing formulas.” So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street. Years ago, Mr. Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction” an apt metaphor considering that the Manhattan Project’s math and physics geeks bearing formulas brought us the original weapon of mass destruction, at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
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date: Oct. 10, 2008
story: Science advice for the next president
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Science
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date: June 16, 2008
story: Malthus vs. the singularity
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Before any other readers post another comment about “overpopulation” and doomsday scenarios, I suggest they take a look at my colleague Donald McNeil’s excellent article on Malthusian mistakes. As he notes, the current forecasts of energy and food disasters sound just like the ones made during the 1970s. Similar apocalyptic forecasts were made in the 1940s (in books like “Our Plundered Planet”) and in other eras by prophets following in Malthus’ tradition.
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date: June 10, 2008
story: When do post-humans show up?
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Will the Singularity arrive within a few decades? Unlikely, according to most of experts writing in a fascinating issue of IEEE Spectrum examining the idea that we’re approaching a revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software. The skeptics take issue with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, described in my Findings column, that computers will be powerful enough before the middle of the century to reverse-engineer the human brain.
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date: June 5, 2008
story: Why not perpetual progress?
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Why should we believe Ray Kurzweil’s visions of accelerating technological progress? In response to my Findings column about him and a post about his graphs, some readers were skeptical. Francis and others insisted it’s naive to assume exponential progress can go on — that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit.
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date: June 3, 2008
story: Does evolution go fast-forward?
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Countdown to Singularity
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date: June 3, 2008
story: The future is now? Pretty soon, at least
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Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.
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date: May 30, 2008
story: For five days, New York will be science city
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Relax. There won’t be any exam. The only test is whether you are curious.
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date: April 14, 2008
story: Despite Silicon Valley optimism, a disease resists cure
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SAN FRANCISCO: In Silicon Valley, an unshakable optimism holds that the right combination of money, brains and computing power can solve any problem.
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date: Jan. 11, 2008
story: God and small things
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There may not be a lot of agreement among the world’s religions on exactly what constitutes humans “playing God,” but you never hear a preacher or rabbi suggesting such behavior is wise or laudable. So you would think they might have a lot to say about nanotechnology. After all, nanotech involves rearranging not just DNA and the other building blocks of life — already a source of controversy in biotechnology — but the very atoms and molecules that make up all matter. If that is not messing around in God’s closet, what is?
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2007
date: June 16, 2007
story: How great leaders juggle ideas
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WHEN we look for ways to improve our life at work, how we can make better decisions, for example, or try to figure out the next step in our career, invariably one thing we do is look at what great leaders have done. This is why books like “Straight From the Gut,” by John F. Welch Jr., and those by Lee A. Iacocca sell so well.
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2006
date: Nov. 24, 2006
story: A smarter computer to pick stocks
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Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and new hedge fund manager, is describing the future of stock-picking, and it isn’t human.
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date: Nov. 24, 2006
story: Viewpoints: Putting a value on the human factor – Business – International Herald Tribune
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The plot of the 1983 film “WarGames,” in which a teenager almost starts World War III by hacking into a computerized missile-launching system, turns on a distrust of the human factor in decision-making: The U.S. military, thinking that a person would not have the discipline or dispassion to push the button that would launch a nuclear attack, redesigns its system to put the computer in charge, and to lock out all human involvement – including the ability to override a launch decision made in error.
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date: Nov. 23, 2006
story: Artificial intelligence applied heavily to picking stocks – Business – International Herald Tribune
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NEW YORK: — Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and new hedge fund manager, is describing the future of stock-picking, and it isn’t human.
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date: July 13, 2006
story: Gadgets of the week: Building your rover just got easier – Business – International Herald Tribune
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Products on the cutting edge.
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date: July 13, 2006
story: A scanner-reader to take along anywhere
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Speech-synthesis software that reads Web pages and on-screen documents aloud has been helping people with visual impairments use computers for years. A new portable device developed by the inventor Ray Kurzweil, however, eliminates the need to be near a computer. The device can turn all types of printed text into speech, anywhere.
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date: July 10, 2006
story: Transhumanism: Yearning to transcend biology – Editorials & Commentary – International Herald Tribune
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BOSTON — With everything else that’s happening in the world today, debates about whether humanity should embrace as yet nonexistent technologies that could enhance our physical and intellectual abilities and someday make us “more than human” may seem frivolous.
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date: Feb. 5, 2006
story: Do robots dream of electric lovborgs?
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ISAAC ASIMOV’S First Law of Robotics, as any science fiction fan can tell you, states, “A robot may not injure a human being.” Perhaps Hans, a gleaming, barrel-chested automaton, hasn’t read Asimov. At a recent rehearsal for Les Freres Corbusier’s coming play “Heddatron,” he defies his radio-controlled commands and zips downstage, thwacking notebooks and coffee cups, as well as the director Alex Timbers and the playwright Elizabeth Meriwether.
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2005
date: Dec. 22, 2005
story: No! No! I’m not a baby boomer
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BOSTON — I’ve been having this recurring nightmare. I am trapped in a tiny room full of very dull people. They look a little bit like me – played out, slightly decrepit. They can’t stop talking about themselves and how tough things are for them. Their aging parents are a burden. Their children don’t appreciate them. The talk is about money, money, money.
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date: Oct. 23, 2005
story: Beyond human
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Many of the fans milling into this year’s postseason baseball games have been wearing authentic major league uniforms, with GUERRERO, say, or OSWALT, stitched on the back. True, society has traditionally encouraged kids to fantasize about what they’ll be as adults. But most of the people I’ve seen in $200 regulation shirts are adults. What they’re fantasizing about is an alternative adult identity for themselves.
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date: Oct. 20, 2005
story: Turning a flu virus into a weapon
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To the Editor
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date: Oct. 17, 2005
story: Recipe for destruction
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AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.
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date: Oct. 4, 2005
story: The heaven scenario
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Check out Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of Ray Kurzweil’s new book, “The Singularity Is Near”.
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date: Oct. 3, 2005
story: Will the future be a trillion times better?
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The Singularity Is Near When Humans Transcend Biology By Ray Kurzweil 652 pages. Viking. $29.95.
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date: Sept. 29, 2005
story: Corrections
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A picture in The Arts yesterday with the Books of The Times review, about “Born to Kvetch,” by Michael Wex, was published in error. It showed Ray Kurzweil, author of another new book, “The Singularity Is Near.”
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date: Sept. 28, 2005
story: To provoke in yiddish, try ‘how are you?’
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Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods By Michael Wex 303 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95.
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date: July 3, 2005
story: ‘Radical evolution’ and ‘more than human’: The Incredibles
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RADICAL EVOLUTION The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human. By Joel Garreau. 384 pp. Doubleday. $26.
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date: June 15, 2005
story: Meanwhile: Overwrought about overweight
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BROOKLINE, Massachusetts — This is probably as good a moment as any to rewrite the definition of schadenfreude. It’s not just the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. It’s the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others who are thinner than you are.
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2004
date: Dec. 27, 2004
story: Just how old can he go?
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Ray Kurzweil began his dinner with a pill. “A starch blocker,” he explained, “one of my 250 supplements a day.”
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date: Jan. 10, 2004
story: CONNECTIONS; Finding the universal laws that are there, waiting . . .
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Nature abhors a vacuum. Gravitational force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects. Over the course of evolution, each species develops larger body sizes. If something can go wrong, it will.
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2003
date: Nov. 29, 2003
story: Computers as poets
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As a poet, I’m troubled by Ray Kurzweil’s invention of software that creates poetry (Patents, Nov. 24).
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date: Nov. 24, 2003
story: BUSINESS DIGEST
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Developing Nations Join Wireless World, U.N. Says
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date: Nov. 24, 2003
story: Patents; Investor creates software that can turn a computer into a cyberpoet.
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INVENTING is about catching the wave,” said Ray Kurzweil, who addressed a national convention of inventors in Philadelphia last Monday. ”Most inventions fail not because the inventor can’t get them to work but because the invention comes at the wrong time.”
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2002
date: Oct. 7, 2002
story: New Economy; Intriguing possibilities in sensors, an on-ramp for electronics and biotechnology.
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TRADE shows do not get much more obscure than Sensors Expo and Conference. The semiannual gathering assembles scores of little companies — or little-known divisions of large ones like General Electric — that make devices to measure heat, pressures, speed, voltage, acceleration and scores of other conditions that are vital to machines and people.
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date: Sept. 1, 2002
story: Word for word/wanna bet?; Taking the long view and wagering on what’s to come
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WITH the de facto end of summer upon us, there is a natural tendency for the pulse to quicken, for the mind to snap out of repose and for debate to begin on the immediate burning questions of the fall. Will an invasion of Iraq come before Christmas? Which fashion fad will we succumb to first — pencil skirts or rugby shirts?
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date: Aug. 7, 2002
story: BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A boy’s essence uploaded and adrift in cyberspace
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MIND CATCHER
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date: July 16, 2002
story: They’ve seen the future and intend to live it
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Dr. Ralph C. Merkle is celebrated as an inventor of the encryption technology that allows secure transactions over the Internet. But that was a long time ago. These days, he is better known as a leading theorist of molecular nanotechnology, the still unperfected art of building machines that are little bigger than atoms.
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2001
date: Oct. 4, 2001
story: Defusing catastrophes
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Re “In the Next Chapter, Is Technology an Ally?” (Sept. 27):
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date: Sept. 27, 2001
story: In the next chapter, is technology an ally?
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OVER the last two weeks, computer scientists and others who think about technology have wondered aloud about its likely role in countering terrorism — or in carrying it out. Have the limitations and dangers of technology been overlooked? Where, on the other hand, might technological innovation emerge or be redirected as a result of recent events?
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date: June 11, 2001
story: The end user / a voice for the consumer: Aaron vs. Picasso
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Now comes Aaron, a program that creates original paintings on your screen, one after another, each one different from all the others everywhere. What’s more, each one could be a real painting by a real person. Aaron is an amazing program that has made me think again about what computers can and cannot do and about what we mean by creativity. That and the monkeys. I’ll get to them in a moment.
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2000
date: Dec. 28, 2000
story: Still a long way from checkmate
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JUST what constitutes artificial intelligence has always been a matter of some dispute. And the terms of the argument change with each new advance in computer science.
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date: July 31, 2000
story: TECHNOLOGY; Virtual reality comes back in new guise: collaboration
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Peter Braccio bent to look inside the work area of a three-dimensional printer, as though peering through an oven window. Inside, things were baking nicely.
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date: March 18, 2000
story: CONNECTIONS; Even techies are getting nervous about technology
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There is no originality in imagining science’s horrors. Since the Romantic era, it has been difficult to imagine anything else: Science creates machinery of destruction. It spawns mutants. It spews radiation. Its objective pose is a cover for callous indifference. Scientists murder (as Wordsworth once said of Newton) to dissect.
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date: March 13, 2000
story: TECHNOLOGY; Technologists get a warning and a plea from one of their own
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An unlikely prophet is voicing a plea for reason and restraint in the increasingly chaotic stampede toward the technological future.
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1999
date: Dec. 26, 1999
story: Ideas & Trends; Forget the millennium. Try to predict one week.
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SIX shopping days left until the century cusp, and the average shopper has stopped ordering bulk shipments of mineral water and started making lunch dates for January. Pundits who spent the fall debating portents of doom have begun making predictions about the next hundred years and the next thousand.
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date: Nov. 28, 1999
story: The next big dialectic
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I’ve always been skeptical of people who predict the future professionally, of the Alvin Tofflers and John Naisbitts as well as the Jeane Dixons and Pat Robertsons. For one thing, it’s pretty much impossible to make confident predictions without sounding portentous and creepy. And purporting to describe the warp and woof of life 100 years from now is an extreme folly. On the other hand, the time frame insures that no one will be able to tell me I was wrong if, in 2100, it turns out I was wrong.
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date: Nov. 9, 1999
story: Corrections
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An article in Arts & Ideas on Saturday about the possibility of physically linking the human brain to computers misstated the medical condition of Ray Kurzweil, the author of a book on the subject. He wrote a previous book about nutrition because his family has a history of heart disease; it is not he who has congenital heart disease.
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date: Nov. 6, 1999
story: The soul of the next new machine: Humans; How the wedding of brain and computer could change the universe
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When Ray Kurzweil discusses human destiny, it is not always clear whether he’s talking about technology or theology.
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date: Aug. 1, 1999
story: Robokitty
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The security guards at the night entrance seemed to be just about the only people left inside the fluorescent catacombs of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, in the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto. But then Hugo de Garis emerged from a cubicle and strode quickly down the deserted hallways. Lanky and intense, dressed in green shorts and a pale short-sleeve shirt, de Garis confidently led me to the research laboratory’s innermost sanctum, stepped inside and let the door wheeze shut behind us. Grinning exultantly, he reached out his hand and began stroking his brain.
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date: Feb. 28, 1999
story: When the eyes fail, a magnifying device sends a ray of light
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WHEN Jack Garvey lay down John Grisham’s ”Partner” before falling asleep several years ago, he had no hint that his novel-reading days were over. But when the letters started floating on the page the next morning, he learned that he had macular degeneration, an irreversible condition that affects more than 10 million Americans 55 and older. Mr. Garvey, who said he was older than 60, and who owns a real estate business here, bought himself a machine that could magnify letters 35 times, but his disease outpaced the machine’s ability to help him. Even now, his blue eyes give no hint of trouble as he describes the frustration of not being able to read on his own.
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date: Jan. 3, 1999
story: Hello, HAL
deck:
THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES
When Computers Exceed
Human Intelligence.
By Ray Kurzweil.
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1995
date: Dec. 28, 1995
story: TELEVISION REVIEW; Eccentricity as the mother of invention
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This is the week in which the dreary side of television gets even drearier. Viewer levels are traditionally low as a good many people spend time with one another instead of dozing in front of a piece of furniture, and network schedules are stuffed with reruns and throwaways. For children, there are animated features made decades ago. Grown-ups can find a version of Handel’s “Messiah” on public television that was taped at Westminster Abbey in 1982.
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date: June 26, 1995
story: Sorry, ma’am, no listing for ‘enry ‘iggins; voice recognition is improving, but don’t stop the elocution lessons
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What if I say “tomahto” and you say “tomayto?” What if some say “probably” and still others say “prolly” and what about all the different ways there are to signify assent: “yes,” “yup,” “uh-huh,” “O.K.,” “sure” and “roger?” What’s a simple computer supposed to make of it all?
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1991
date: Aug. 14, 1991
story: BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Computers that hear and respond
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The airport in El Borma, Tunisia, is fogbound. A dispatcher must reroute military traffic for the United States Transportation Command. He looks down at his computer screen, but instead of typing at the keyboard he speaks into a microphone.
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date: June 1, 1991
story: COMMENCEMENTS; At Wellesley, advice to seek creative path
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Madeleine L’Engle, the author of “A Wrinkle in Time” and other books praised for their unusual blend of fantasy, science and autobiography, advised graduating seniors at Wellesley College’s 113th commencement exercises yesterday to be aware of the integration of characteristics necessary to become “great human beings.”
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date: Feb. 24, 1991
story: Technology; Toward the voice-literate computer
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Kazuhiko Sumiya spoke softly but clearly into a telephone handset. “Teikiatugaari,” he said, looking at the Sun Microsystems workstation perched on a nearby desk. In seconds, the Japanese phrase appeared on the screen in phonetic English, followed by several rows of Japanese kanji characters. “Taikio,” Mr. Sumiya added. Again, the Japanese characters appeared on the screen. The two phrases taken together mean, “There is a low pressure system that makes the atmosphere unstable.” The voice recognition system had correctly identified the spoken Japanese on the first try, but also offered several choices in case it had misunderstood some words.
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1988
date: Dec. 4, 1988
story: THE EXECUTIVE COMPUTER; Like having another set of eyes
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Pausing at a critical moment in the operation, when the slightest slip could have devastating results, the surgeon monitors the patient’s vital signs as they scroll across a corner of the computer screen. ”Show me the latest sequence of CT scans,” he asks, and the technician at the computer on the other side of the operating room types in the appropriate commands. A series of high-resolution images of the patient’s cranium flashes across the screen, revealing the location and size of the tumor.
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1987
date: Sept. 23, 1987
story: BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Corporate help grows for entrepreneurs
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WHEN Raymond Kurzweil asked the Xerox Corporation for venture capital in 1982 to develop a computer that could transcribe spoken English, the company did not take long to respond.
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1986
date: Nov. 16, 1986
story: MUSIC VIEW; A Revolution on the keyboard is in the making
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When the pianist Rebecca La Brecque performs at Merkin Concert Hall tonight some listeners may simply shrug their shoulders, but others will surely hail the evening as the latest benchmark of what seems to be a revolution in the making. Ms. La Brecque will be playing pieces for the unusual combination of piano and electronic keyboard synthesizer – instruments that have come to represent warring camps in the battle for the hearts, minds and dollars of the musical consumer.
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1984
date: Jan. 6, 1984
story: Electronic system to guide the blind meets some opposition
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Blind students at the University of New Mexico have started testing a new electronic travel system that its inventors say could significantly improve the mobility of people with little or no eyesight.
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1981
date: May 3, 1981
story: Xerox stalks the automated office
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W HEN C. Peter McColough, chairman and chief executive officer of the Xerox Corporation, addressed financial analysts last week, he barely mentioned a seemingly important subject – copiers.
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1980
date: May 25, 1980
story: Long Island Journal
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SOME people tell Pamela Barr they think that “Ray” has a Swedish accent, and it can take up to two hours to understand everything “he” says. But once that initial period is up, “Ray” can become a friend for the blind or visually disabled who never tires of reading to them.
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date: April 13, 1980
story: Machine opens new worlds to blind
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FOR Paul Migliorelli, a blind ninth-grader at Pelham Manor High School, this month signifies a new world of opportunity: Access for the first time to “Ray,” a new optical scanner and computer, at the White Plains Public Library.
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1978
date: March 26, 1978
story: New library device reads to the blind
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Optical Scanner Machine Is Called Most Valuable Rehabilitation Aid Since Invention of Braille.
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