clippingsfrom | the New York TimesThe stories feat. Ray Kurzweil.
July 1, 2022
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2020
story title: Metallica’s Kirk Hammett: Eddie Van Halen ‘Blew Open Everyone’s Minds’
deck: The guitarist remembers the multitalented musician, who died this week at 65.
date: Oct. 7, 2020
author: by Ben Sisario
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story title: A Techno Group Wary of Technology
deck: The pioneering German group Kraftwerk sounded the alarms early on.
date: May 8, 2020
author: by Michael Azerrad
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2019
story title: Alan R. Pearlman, Synthesizer Pioneer, Dies at 93
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 15, 2019
author: Jon Pareles
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2018
story title: The Big Question: Have We Left Something Important Behind?
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 7, 2018
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story title: Books About Losing Faith That Will Give You Hope
deck: NONFICTION
date: Dec. 6, 2018
author: Emily Eakin
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story title: Review: ‘Do You Trust This Computer?’ The Quick Answer: Nope
deck: “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.”
date: Aug. 16, 2018
author: Ken Jaworowski
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story title: There Will Never Be an Age of Artificial Intimacy
deck: Robots may be better than nothing, but they still won’t be enough.
date: Aug. 11, 2018
author: Sherry Turkle
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2017
story title: In Berlin, a Design Studio Puts Luxury Into 3-D
deck: Is 3-D printing the shape of fashion to come?
date: Nov. 13, 2017
author: Elizabeth Paton
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story title: A Trust Buster for the New ‘Knowledge Monopoly’
deck: WORLD WITHOUT MIND
date: Oct. 2, 2017
author: John Herrman
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story title: Ray Kurzweil on How We’ll End Up Merging With Our Technology
deck: NONFICTION
date: March 14, 2017
author: Ray Kurzweil
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story title: 600 Miles in a Coffin-Shaped Bus, Campaigning Against Death Itself
deck: Zoltan Istvan ran for president with a modest goal in mind: human immortality.
date: Feb. 9, 2017
author: Mark O’Connell
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2016
story title: What Lies Ahead for Luxury in 2017
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 5, 2016
author: Vanessa Friedman
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story title: Fashion’s Future, Printed to Order
deck: 3-D printing may radically change our relationship to shopping and our clothes a lot sooner than we think.
date: Dec. 5, 2016
author: Elizabeth Paton
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story title: The Dawn of the ‘Tryborg’
deck: 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.
date: Nov. 30, 2016
author: Jillian Weise
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story title: Review: ‘Uncle Kent 2,’ How’s Your Tolerance for Hipster Milquetoasts?
deck: “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.
date: Nov. 10, 2016
author: Glenn Kenny
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story title: When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime
deck: Misconception: Computers will outstrip human capabilities within many of our lifetimes.
date: April 7, 2016
author: John Markoff
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story title: Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 25, 2016
author: Glenn Rifkin
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2015
story title: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I.
deck: 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.
date: Sept. 21, 2015
author: ROBERT A. BURTON
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story title: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future
deck: 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.
date: Sept. 12, 2015
author: Amy Harmon
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story title: Intel to End Sponsorship of Science Talent Search
deck: 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.
date: Sept. 9, 2015
author: Quentin Hardy
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story title: Can We Improve?
deck: 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.
date: Aug. 31, 2015
author: CRISPIN SARTWELL
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2014
story title: Future Footprints
deck: 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.
date: Sept. 5, 2014
author: Rob Nixon
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story title: Silicon Valley Sharknado
deck: WASHINGTON — Mostly, this July, I’m worrying about the jumping sharks jumping the shark.
date: July 8, 2014
author: Maureen Dowd
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story title: Intelligence Too Big for a Single Machine
deck: 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).
date: June 11, 2014
author: STEVE LOHR
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story title: Reading List | The Top 100 Best-Selling Education Books of 2014 (So Far)
deck: 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.
date: June 10, 2014
author: THE LEARNING NETWORK
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story title: A Revolution in Money
deck: Imagine it’s 2040.
date: April 1, 2014
author: ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
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story title: Dreaming in Code
deck: 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.
date: March 7, 2014
author: Adam Frank
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story title: The Philosophy of ‘Her’
deck: 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”
date: March 2, 2014
author: SUSAN SCHNEIDER
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2013
story title: The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013
deck: What strikes you about the books on this list? Tell us, below.
date: Dec. 16, 2013
author: DEBORAH HOFMANN
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story title: After 45 Years, as Incendiary as Ever
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 16, 2013
author: Jon Pareles, Ben Ratliff and Nate Chinen
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story title: Techies Striving for the Next Big Thing
deck: “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.
date: Nov. 20, 2013
author: Mike Hale
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story title: Trying to Outrace Scientific Advances
deck: 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.
date: Nov. 15, 2013
author: Hugh Hart
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story title: Driving Sideways
deck: 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.”
date: July 23, 2013
author: ALLISON ARIEFF
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story title: This Man Is Not a Cyborg. Yet.
deck: 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.
date: June 1, 2013
author: David Segal
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story title: Science Chronicle
deck: HOW TO CREATE A MIND
The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.
By Ray Kurzweil.
Viking, $27.95.
date: May 3, 2013
author: Christine Kenneally
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story title: Keep Calm and Carry On… Buying
deck: 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.
date: March 9, 2013
author: Evgeny Morozov
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story title: The 1.27.13 Issue
deck: TALK: RAY KURZWEIL
date: Jan. 25, 2013
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story title: Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever
deck: Interview
date: Jan. 25, 2013
author: Andrew Goldman
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story title: Unpacking the Pandora’s Box of Technology
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 10, 2013
author: Nicolas Rapold
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2011
story title: Life Goes On, and On …
deck: 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?
date: Dec. 17, 2011
author: James Atlas
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story title: ‘On the Media’: Comics Edition
deck: 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.
date: June 8, 2011
author: Dan Kois
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story title: The Promise of Rapture for the High-Tech Elite
deck: 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.”
date: April 23, 2011
author: Elizabeth Lesly Stevens
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story title: What to Expect: X-Ray Vision, Doubled Life Spans and Lots of Robots
deck: 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.
date: March 15, 2011
author: Dwight Garner
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story title: What Is Artificial Intelligence?
deck: 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.
date: Feb. 5, 2011
author: Richard Powers
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story title: High-Tech Help
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 7, 2011
author: Lisa Guernsey
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story title: Cyberspace When You’re Dead
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 5, 2011
author: Rob Walker
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story title: The Future Is Now: Analyzing and Making Predictions
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 4, 2011
author: SARAH KAVANAGH AND HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO
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2010
story title: The Final Conflict
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 10, 2010
author: Orville Schell
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story title: Ray Kurzweil Vows to Right E-Reader Wrongs
deck: 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.
date: June 18, 2010
author: ASHLEE VANCE
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story title: A Case Against Transhumanism
deck: 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.
date: June 14, 2010
author: Ross Douthat
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story title: Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday
deck: 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.
date: June 12, 2010
author: Ashlee Vance
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2009
story title: Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man
deck: 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.
date: July 25, 2009
author: John Markoff
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story title: Guest Column: Computers vs. Brains
deck: 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.
date: March 31, 2009
author: SANDRA AAMODT AND SAM WANG
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story title: Me and My Machine
deck: Technology
date: Jan. 19, 2009
author: Tom Kuntz
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2008
story title: Machines of mass destruction
deck: 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.
date: Oct. 13, 2008
author: Richard Dooling
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story title: The Rise of the Machines
deck: “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.
date: Oct. 11, 2008
author: Richard Dooling
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story title: Science Advice for the Next President
deck: Science
date: Oct. 10, 2008
author: Tom Kuntz
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story title: Malthus vs. the Singularity
deck: 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.
date: June 16, 2008
author: JOHN TIERNEY
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story title: When Do Post-Humans Show Up?
deck: 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.
date: June 10, 2008
author: JOHN TIERNEY
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story title: Why Not Perpetual Progress?
deck: 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.
date: June 5, 2008
author: JOHN TIERNEY
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story title: Does Evolution Go Fast-Forward?
deck: Countdown to Singularity
date: June 3, 2008
author: JOHN TIERNEY
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story title: The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
deck: 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.
date: June 3, 2008
author: John Tierney
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story title: For Five Days, New York Will Be Science City
deck: Relax. There won’t be any exam. The only test is whether you are curious.
date: May 30, 2008
author: Dennis Overbye
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story title: Despite Silicon Valley Optimism, a Disease Resists Cure
deck: SAN FRANCISCO: In Silicon Valley, an unshakable optimism holds that the right combination of money, brains and computing power can solve any problem.
date: April 14, 2008
author: Dan Fost
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story title: God and Small Things
deck: 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?
date: Jan. 11, 2008
author: BARNABY J. FEDER
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2007
story title: How Great Leaders Juggle Ideas
deck: 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.
date: June 16, 2007
author: PAUL B. BROWN
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2006
story title: A Smarter Computer to Pick Stocks
deck: Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and new hedge fund manager, is describing the future of stock-picking, and it isn’t human.
date: Nov. 24, 2006
author: Charles Duhigg
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story title: Viewpoints: Putting a value on the human factor – Business – International Herald Tribune
deck: 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.
date: Nov. 24, 2006
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story title: Artificial intelligence applied heavily to picking stocks – Business – International Herald Tribune
deck: NEW YORK: — Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and new hedge fund manager, is describing the future of stock-picking, and it isn’t human.
date: Nov. 23, 2006
author: Charles Duhigg
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story title: Gadgets of the week: Building your rover just got easier – Business – International Herald Tribune
deck: Products on the cutting edge.
date: July 13, 2006
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story title: A Scanner-Reader to Take Along Anywhere
deck: 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.
date: July 13, 2006
author: J. D. Biersdorfer
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story title: Transhumanism: Yearning to transcend biology – Editorials & Commentary – International Herald Tribune
deck: 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.
date: July 10, 2006
author: Cathy Young
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story title: Do Robots Dream of Electric Lovborgs?
deck: 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.
date: Feb. 5, 2006
author: Alexis Soloski
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2005
story title: No! No! I’m not a baby boomer
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 22, 2005
author: Alex Beam
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story title: Beyond Human
deck: 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.
date: Oct. 23, 2005
author: Christopher Caldwell
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story title: Turning a Flu Virus Into a Weapon
deck: To the Editor
date: Oct. 20, 2005
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story title: Recipe for Destruction
deck: 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.
date: Oct. 17, 2005
author: Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy
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story title: The Heaven Scenario
deck: Check out Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of Ray Kurzweil’s new book, “The Singularity Is Near”.
date: Oct. 4, 2005
author: JOHN TIERNEY
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story title: Will the Future Be a Trillion Times Better?
deck: The Singularity Is Near When Humans Transcend Biology By Ray Kurzweil 652 pages. Viking. $29.95.
date: Oct. 3, 2005
author: Janet Maslin
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story title: Corrections
deck: 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.”
date: Sept. 29, 2005
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story title: To Provoke in Yiddish, Try ‘How Are You?’
deck: Born to Kvetch Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods By Michael Wex 303 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95.
date: Sept. 28, 2005
author: William Grimes
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story title: ‘Radical Evolution’ and ‘More Than Human’: The Incredibles
deck: 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.
date: July 3, 2005
author: Annie Murphy Paul
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story title: Meanwhile: Overwrought about overweight
deck: 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.
date: June 15, 2005
author: Ellen Goodman
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2004
story title: Just How Old Can He Go?
deck: Ray Kurzweil began his dinner with a pill. “A starch blocker,” he explained, “one of my 250 supplements a day.”
date: Dec. 27, 2004
author: Steve Lohr
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story title: CONNECTIONS; Finding the Universal Laws That Are There, Waiting . . .
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 10, 2004
author: Edward Rothstein
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2003
story title: Computers as Poets
deck: As a poet, I’m troubled by Ray Kurzweil’s invention of software that creates poetry (Patents, Nov. 24).
date: Nov. 29, 2003
author: ILENE STARGER
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story title: BUSINESS DIGEST
deck: Developing Nations Join Wireless World, U.N. Says
date: Nov. 24, 2003
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story title: Patents; Investor creates software that can turn a computer into a cyberpoet.
deck: 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.”
date: Nov. 24, 2003
author: Teresa Riordan
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2002
story title: New Economy; Intriguing possibilities in sensors, an on-ramp for electronics and biotechnology.
deck: 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.
date: Oct. 7, 2002
author: Barnaby J. Feder
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story title: Word for Word/Wanna Bet?; Taking the Long View And Wagering on What’s to Come
deck: 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?
date: Sept. 1, 2002
author: Amy Harmon
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story title: BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Boy’s Essence Uploaded And Adrift in Cyberspace
deck: MIND CATCHER
date: Aug. 7, 2002
author: Jim Holt
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story title: They’ve Seen the Future and Intend to Live It
deck: 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.
date: July 16, 2002
author: Bruce Schechter
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2001
story title: Defusing Catastrophes
deck: Re “In the Next Chapter, Is Technology an Ally?” (Sept. 27):
date: Oct. 4, 2001
author: PHILIP J. FRANKENFELD
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story title: In the Next Chapter, Is Technology an Ally?
deck: 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?
date: Sept. 27, 2001
author: Katie Hafner
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story title: The End User / A Voice for the Consumer: Aaron vs. Picasso
deck: 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.
date: June 11, 2001
author: Lee Dembart
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2000
story title: Still a Long Way From Checkmate
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 28, 2000
author: Katie Hafner
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story title: TECHNOLOGY; Virtual Reality Comes Back In New Guise: Collaboration
deck: 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.
date: July 31, 2000
author: Rick Lyman
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story title: CONNECTIONS; Even Techies Are Getting Nervous About Technology
deck: 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.
date: March 18, 2000
author: Edward Rothstein
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story title: TECHNOLOGY; Technologists Get a Warning and a Plea From One of Their Own
deck: An unlikely prophet is voicing a plea for reason and restraint in the increasingly chaotic stampede toward the technological future.
date: March 13, 2000
author: John Markoff
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1999
story title: Ideas & Trends; Forget the Millennium. Try to Predict One Week.
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 26, 1999
author: Jenny Lyn Bader
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story title: The Next Big Dialectic
deck: 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.
date: Nov. 28, 1999
author: Kurt Andersen
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story title: Corrections
deck: 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.
date: Nov. 9, 1999
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story title: The Soul of the Next New Machine: Humans; How the Wedding of Brain and Computer Could Change the Universe
deck: When Ray Kurzweil discusses human destiny, it is not always clear whether he’s talking about technology or theology.
date: Nov. 6, 1999
author: Rob Fixmer
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story title: Robokitty
deck: 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.
date: Aug. 1, 1999
author: Nicholas D. Kristof
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story title: When the Eyes Fail, a Magnifying Device Sends a Ray of Light
deck: 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.
date: Feb. 28, 1999
author: Roberta Hershenson
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story title: Hello, HAL
deck: THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES
When Computers Exceed
Human Intelligence.
By Ray Kurzweil.
date: Jan. 3, 1999
author: Colin McGinn
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1995
story title: TELEVISION REVIEW; Eccentricity as the Mother of Invention
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 28, 1995
author: John J. O’Connor
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story title: Sorry, Ma’am, No Listing for ‘enry ‘iggins; Voice Recognition Is Improving, but Don’t Stop the Elocution Lessons
deck: 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?
date: June 26, 1995
author: Michael T. Kaufman
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1991
story title: BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Computers That Hear and Respond
deck: 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.
date: Aug. 14, 1991
author: Glenn Rifkin
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story title: COMMENCEMENTS; At Wellesley, Advice To Seek Creative Path
deck: 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.”
date: June 1, 1991
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story title: Technology; Toward the Voice-Literate Computer
deck: 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.
date: Feb. 24, 1991
author: Glenn Rifkin
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1988
story title: THE EXECUTIVE COMPUTER; Like Having Another Set of Eyes
deck: 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.
date: Dec. 4, 1988
author: Peter H. Lewis
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1987
story title: BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Corporate Help Grows for Entrepreneurs
deck: 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.
date: Sept. 23, 1987
author: Calvin Sims
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1986
story title: MUSIC VIEW; A Revolution on the Keyboard Is in the Making
deck: 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.
date: Nov. 16, 1986
author: Stuart Isacoff
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1984
story title: ELECTRONIC SYSTEM TO GUIDE THE BLIND MEETS SOME OPPOSITION
deck: 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.
date: Jan. 6, 1984
author: Kathleen Teltsch
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1981
story title: XEROX STALKS THE AUTOMATED OFFICE
deck: 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.
date: May 3, 1981
author: Andrew Pollack
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1980
story title: LONG ISLAND JOURNAL
deck: 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.
date: May 25, 1980
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story title: Machine Opens New Worlds to Blind
deck: 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.
date: April 13, 1980
author: Jeanne Clare Feron
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1978
story title: NEW LIBRARY DEVICE READS TO THE BLIND
deck: Optical Scanner Machine Is Called Most Valuable Rehabilitation Aid Since Invention of Braille.
date: March 26, 1978
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