The Coolidge Corner Theatre concludes the 2008-2009 season of its popular Science on Screen series with a special program, An Evening with Ray Kurzweil. The celebrated futurist, inventor and entrepreneur gives a multimedia presentation based on his best-selling book, The Singularity is Near, and shows a trailer of the upcoming film of the same name. Audience members also get a sneak peek at director Barry Ptolemy's Transcendent Man, a documentary charting Kurzweil's journey to bring the ideas from The Singularity is Near to a worldwide audience. A question-and-answer session with Kurzweil follows the program.
According to Kurzweil, the onset of the 21st century is the beginning of an era in which the very nature of what is means to be human will be both enriched and challenged. As our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy, we will achieve inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the 21st century will see 20,000 years of progress at todays rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies, and knowledge of the human brain are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level "strong" artificial intelligence well before 2030. The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse engineering of the human brain, a process well under way. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, Kurzweil will present an inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny. Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal. One of the leading inventors of our time, he was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. Kurzweil is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, 18 honorary doctorates, awards from three U.S. presidents, seven national and international film awards, and many other honors. He has written five books, of which four have been national best sellers. The Singularity is Near was a New York Times best seller and was the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. Tickets: Museum of Science members and students: $7.75; general admission: $9.75; Coolidge Corner Theatre members: free. Tickets are available in advance at www.coolidge.org or at the theatre box office, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline. Science on Screen is co-presented by the Museum of Science, Boston and New Scientist magazine. For more information, visit www.coolidge.org/science. _______________________________________________ Sci-tech-public mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/sci-tech-public
