The long awaited movie about the Singularity is near  A new film, Transcendent Man, is about to be released on Ray Kurzweil, a leading futurist who is the author of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The documentary will be screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in April. |
Kurzweil is co-founder of the new Singularity University, which will begin operations at NASA Ames this summer. The new university is a collaboration of NASA Ames, the International Space University, and Google. |
The compelling feature-length documentary film–a first for Director Barry Ptolemy–chronicles the life and controversial ideas of luminary Ray Kurzweil. For more than three decades, inventor, futurist, and NY Times best-selling author Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. |
| In TRANSCENDENT MAN, Ptolemy follows Kurzweil around the globe as he presents the daring arguments from his best-selling book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.Read more at www.parabolicarc.com |
If they have the number right, its only a thousand fold short of the brain computation power and memory. Almost there…
Computers are lauded for their speed and accuracy, but they don't hold a candle to the human brain when it comes to tackling complex mathematical problems, Dharmendra Modha, director of cognitive computing at the IBM Almaden Research Center, said at today's event. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research arm, last year gave Modha and his colleagues $4.9 million for a project called “SyNAPSE,” through which they are trying to reverse-engineer the brain's computational abilities to better understand its ability to sense, perceive, act, interact, and understand different stimuli. |
“We have no computers today that can begin to approach the awesome power of the human mind,” Modha said. A computer comparable to the human brain, he added, would need to be able to perform more than 38 thousand trillion operations per second [[http://www.petaflop.info/]] and hold about 3,584 terabytes of memory. (IBM's BlueGene supercomputer, one of the worlds' most powerful, has a computational capability of 92 trillion operations per second and 8 terabytes of storage.) |
Although the brain is still not well understood, Modha said, “there is enough quantitative data for us to be able to begin putting together the pieces.” He predicted that by 2018 computers will be able to simulate the workings of the human brain, a breakthrough that will provide researchers with unprecedented insight into how the complex organ operates. |
In addition to boosting computer performance, enhanced understanding of the brain will enable people to communicate directly with machines, whether they are robots or mechanized prosthetic limbs. Primates have already proved that such brain-machine interfaces are possible, Miguel Nicolelis, co-director of Duke University Medical Center's Center for Neuroengineering, said during the conference. The researcher and his colleagues last year successfully implanted electrodes in the brain of a monkey in North Carolina that enabled him to control a robot on a treadmill in Kyoto, Japan. |
Nicolelis and his team have developed a microchip they expect will allow human brains to communicate with robots using only brain signals and enables the bots to return messages directly to the brain, without the use of sight or touch. Nicolelis said that he hopes the technology will be sophisticated enough to implant into a human brain by 2012 and enable a completely quadriplegic patient to walk again. Read more at www.sciam.com |
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