Prophets of Technology: The OG influencers

This message comes from Capital One with the Quicksilver card. Earn unlimited 1.5% cashback on every purchase every day. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com for details. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And behind every new device or innovation that seems to pop up out of nowhere At the time, people really thought we were crazy. Are decades of research, countless hours of computation and vigorous debates. But if we got the technology right and it was Over how an invention may completely change what it means to be human. There is no such thing as just a tool. For better or worse. And it's making and shaping and changing us. And now, as AI is becoming part of every aspect of our lives It just paves the way for future applications of Who are some of the people behind this huge inflection point? That's the world that we're moving into. What makes their brains tick? And there's a kind of a hunger and foolishness to it. And what keeps them up at night? And that's the part that I fear that what it means to be human, what it means to flourish as a human, may suddenly not be our own. Today, the first in our three part series with the prophets of technology, the inventors and scientists who predicted the digital world we live in today and who have been part of crafting it, what they've gotten right and wrong, and where they think we're headed next. People talk about human intelligence and then computer intelligence as if they're two different things, But it's we're actually going to merge. We're kicking off part one with the futurist Ray Kurzweil. I'm an inventor foremost, kind of futurism really as a thing that enables me to create inventions. Today at 77, Ray is best known for his prediction that technology will eventually be able to extend our lives indefinitely. Yes, avoid dying. That idea is built on a lifetime of invention. He has spent over six decades developing groundbreaking tools that paved the way for the technology we use today. He was one of the first people to forecast how AI would turbocharge human potential. To understand his theories about the accelerating pace of technological change and what it might accomplish, we need to rewind to the early 1960s when Ray was a teenager just trying to get access to a computer. …