Prepare to have your mind blown!
It's funny, I was about to write "One of my favorite authors..." But I've never actually read one of his books before! I've got to get on that. Anyway, I've read magazine articles by this guy, and I saw him give a speech before (on TV), and he just boggled my mind. He is what I would call a futurist. Someone who is aware of current technology and then predicts what may be ahead for all of us in the near and not too distant future. C-span will have a 3 hour long interview with him this sunday on their "BookTV" show. I know... 3 hours!!? But I suspect the time will fly. If not set your VCR/DVR to record so you can pause and watch it later. I will be. Two items that Ray reports as being right around the corner... A computer(s) that will soon equal or surpass the processing and memory power of the human brain. I know, this sounds lame right? but stop and think about it... what this means is that it will be no different than a human as far as thinking. It will be able to "learn" just like a two year old! Well, as long as someone can figure out how to write the correct programs. The other mind blowing thing he demo'd at the speech I saw was a cellphone like device that could translate and create a transcript of any language in real time, using spoken word!
I will be looking forward to this interview. (I hope it's not mind numbing geekspeak though).
Here's the description and link I got from my booktv email update>>>
A monthly LIVE author interview, featuring your calls
Sunday 12 PM-3 PM ET, re-airs Sunday at midnight ET
Join us for a conversation with author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Mr. Kurzweil is the author of several books on the subject of artificial intelligence, including The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and his most recent work, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. He was awarded the 1999 National Medal of Technology by President Clinton due to his major breakthroughs in print, sound and speech recognition technologies.
You can join this three-hour conversation by e-mailing your question to
booktv@c-span.org or by calling in during the program: East/Central: 202-737-0001 or Mountain/Pacific: 202-737-0002.
>>>
PS> Barack Obama will be on too at 7pm
No comments:
Post a Comment