Ray Kurzweil ~ Humanity+ Summit @ Harvard

What does it mean to understand the brain? Where are we on the roadmap to this goal? What are the effective routes to progress - detailed modeling, theoretical effort, improvement of imaging and computational technologies? What predictions can we make? What are the consequences of materialization of such predictions - social, ethical? Kurzweil will address these questions and examine some of the most common criticisms of the exponential growth of information technology including criticisms from hardware ("Moore's Law will not go on forever"), software ("software is stuck in the mud"), the brain ("the brain is too complicated to understand or replicate"), ontology ("software is not capable of thinking or of consciousness"), and promise versus peril ("biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are too dangerous").

Ray Kurzweil gave the keynote talk "The Democratization of Disruptive Change: The Power of Hierarchical Thinking" at the Humanity+ Summit at Harvard on June 13, 2010. He gave some fascinating insights into what he sees in store for the future of humanity. I suggest you follow Humanity+ on Twitter and check out the tweetstream from the #HPlus hashtag. They will be posting more material at their website at http://humanityplus.org/

You can watch the archive of the LiveStream video and the presentation is below:

The original presentation can be downloaded here:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/pps/kurzweilpowerpoint/