The Coolidge Corner Theatre

This show is SOLD OUT!!

"By the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." - Bill Gates

We wrap the 2008-09 season of Science on Screen with a special program, An Evening with Ray Kurzweil. The celebrated futurist, inventor and entrepreneur will give a multi-media presentation based on his best-selling book The Singularity is Near and show a trailer of the upcoming film of the same name. Audience members will also be treated to a sneak peak of director Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man, a documentary charting Kurzweil’s journey to bring the ideas from The Singularity is Near to a world audience. A question-and-answer session with Kurzweil will follow the program.

According to Kurzweil, the onset of the 21st century ushers in an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. 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 in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are a billion times more intelligent...all within the next three to four decades.

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. As 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. His web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, 18 honorary doctorates, awards from three US 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. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into nine languages and was the #1 best-selling science book on Amazon. His latest book TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, co-authored with Terry Grossman, M.D., was published in April 2009.