Ray Kurzweil

scientist · 18 mentions across 6 readings

In this course

Kurzweil is a futurist best known for popularizing the concept of the Singularity—a hypothetical moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and fundamentally transforms or renders obsolete human civilization as we know it. In these readings, he functions as the foremost contemporary advocate for technological transcendence narratives, enabling discussions about how speculative AI futures shape our present fantasies about intelligence, obsolescence, and what it means to be human. His work anchors the course's engagement with how AI discourse often operates in the register of existential prophecy rather than empirical prediction.

Mentioned in 6 readings

Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres

The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence

11

Singularitarianism. Around the same time that the WTA was founded, another variant of transhumanism emerged: singularitarianism, whose leading advocates included Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky. This emphasized the coming “technological …Eschatology. The TESCREAL bundle shares certain “eschatological” (relating to “last things”) convictions. As with religions like Christianity, these take two forms: utopian and apocalyptic, which are inextricably bound up together. For exam…The apocalyptic aspect of the TESCREAL bundle arises from two considerations unique to the methodology of second-wave eugenics: first, transhumanists in the late 1990s realized that the very same technologies needed to create a posthuman ut…

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Isabel Millar

from The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence

2

Through the reconceptualization of Intelligence, the Artificial Object and the Sexual Abyss we conjure a figure who exists on the boundary of psychoanalysis and AI, straddling our fantasy worlds and our speculations about the possibilities …this hypothetical moment of an intelligence explosion, a point-of-no-return, at which AI will decisively surpass human intelligence, rendering the human species as we know it obsolete, if not actually extinct.[^3] Its foremost advocate, Kur…

Andreessen Horowitz

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

2

We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward. Comparative advantage increases specialization and trade. Prices fall, freeing up purchasing power, creating demand. Fallin…Milton Friedman Neven Sesardic Nick Land Paul Collier Paul Johnson Paul Romer Ray Kurzweil Richard Feynman Rose Wilder Lane Stephen Wolfram Stewart Brand TABLE OF CONTENTS Thomas Sowell Vilfredo Pareto Virginia Postrel Willia…

I.J. Good

Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine

1

THE FIRST ULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE

Nick Bostrom

ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

1

--- <sup>1</sup>: See e.g. K. E. Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, London, Forth Estate, 1985; N. Bostrom, “How Long Before Superintelligence?” International Journal of Futures Studies, vol. 2, (1998); R. Kurzw…

Steven J. Dick

Cosmic Evolution, from Cosmos and Culture

1

50. The details of where the atoms of our bodies originate and how they are recycled are detailed in John Gribbin, Stardust: Supernovae and Life—The Cosmic Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). The sentiment is found several …

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