Austin, Texas | March 9 - 13, 2012
Here is the second half of our two-part interview with inventor and thought leader Ray Kurzweil (you can see part one here.) Kurzweil, of course, is the technology icon known among many other things for his Law of Accelerating Returns, which maintains that society is moving at exponentially increasing speed toward the “technological singularity,” which is a time when human beings and artificially intelligent machines will sync up to push innovation forward at an unprecedentedly fast rate. We were delighted to have the opportunity to sit down with Kurzweil in Austin, Texas this week while he was attending South By Southwest Interactive — his first time at the conference.
There are so very many things to possibly discuss with Kurzweil, and I urge you to read his books and check out other interviews with him for a more complete look at the man and his ideas. We decided to use our brief time with Ray to get his insights on entrepreneurship and the current web/startup ecosystem — the world that TechCrunch and its readers live and breathe.
In the above video, Kurzweil discusses why sleep is so important (but it’s OK to party and program all night once in a while), why facts are better off on Wikipedia than being drilled into students’ brains, the neuroscience research he’s fascinated by right now, and how you are what you think.
Ray Kurzweil is a noted futurist, author, inventor, and executive. He has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flatbed scanner,...
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