Transhumanists

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 66. Chapters: Marvin Minsky, Alvin Toffler, Kevin Warwick, Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, Eliezer Yudkowsky, FM-2030, Greg Bear, K. Eric Drexler, Robert Freitas, David Brin, Steve Mann, Hugo de Garis, Max Tegmark, Keith Henson, Aubrey de Grey, Peter Thiel, Cory Doctorow, Donna Haraway, Robert Ettinger, Gregory Stock, Martine Rothblatt, W. Daniel Hillis, Jamais Cascio, Charles Stross, Natasha Vita-More, David Pearce, Charles Platt, Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, Damien Broderick, Stephen Euin Cobb, Glenn Reynolds, Nick Bostrom, Mixter, Bruce Cordell, Russell Blackford, Ben Goertzel, Sebastian Thrun, William Sims Bainbridge, James Hughes, George Dvorsky, John Smart, Alex Lightman, Patri Friedman, David Gobel, Joel Garreau, Marshall Brain, Ronald Bailey, Hans Moravec, Giulio Prisco, Julian Savulescu, Stelarc, Peter Norvig, Lee Daniel Crocker, Max More, Andy Miah, Steve Jurvetson, Linda MacDonald Glenn, Alexander Chislenko, Mark Alan Walker, David Orban, Danila Medvedev, Anders Sandberg, Antonei Csoka, Joseph Fletcher, Khannea Suntzu, Stuart Copeland, Ramez Naam, Riccardo Campa. Excerpt: Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (pronounced ; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. His father was a musician and composer and his mother was a visual artist. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Ray the basics of computer science. In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction literature. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Later in high school he created a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. The capabilities of this invention were so impressive that, in 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built. Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; he was also recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search and was personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony. In 1968, during his sophomore year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called the Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers submitted by each student applicant. When he was 20, he sold the comp