Check out a new feature called Sunday Science Sermon where we drop some knowledge on you via the good folks at TED Talks…
By Trevor Dueck — Staff Writer
Many people go to church on Sundays so we at the Nerdcore Movement have decided to bring you our own sermon of Science. Every Sunday we will post a TED Talk of our liking that will get you excited about scientific discovery. We highly recommend bookmarking or checking out the TED Talks website and their Youtube page. Our talk of choice this week is courtesy of the visionary Ray Kurzweil as he talks about the accelerating power of technology.
TED Background: Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.
Ray Kurzweil is an engineer who has radically advanced the fields of speech, text, and audio technology. He’s also one of our finest thinkers, revered for his dizzying — yet convincing — writing on the advance of technology, the limits of biology, and the future of the human species.
TED BIO: Inventor, entrepreneur, visionary, Ray Kurzweil’s accomplishments read as a startling series of firsts — a litany of technological breakthroughs we’ve come to take for granted. Kurzweil invented the first optical character recognition (OCR) software for transforming the written word into data, the first print-to-speech software for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and many electronic instruments.
Yet his impact as a futurist and philosopher is no less significant. In his best-selling books, which include The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (which is set to become a movie in 2008), Kurzweil depicts in detail a portrait of the human condition over the next few decades, as accelerating technologies forever blur the line between human and machine.
In 2009, he unveiled Singularity University, an institution that aims to “assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies.”
