[Sci-tech-public] An Evening with Ray Kurzweil - May 11 at the Coolidge

[cheryl@coolidge.org]

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 today’s
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.