Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.

Ray Kurzweil's latest graphs show that technology's breakneck advances will only accelerate -- recession or not. He unveils his new project, Singularity University, to study oncoming tech and guide it to benefit humanity.

Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become. Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power ...

Ray Kurzweil is an engineer who has radically advanced the fields of speech, text and audio technology. He's revered for his dizzying -- yet convincing -- writing on the advance of technology, the limits of biology and the future of the human species.

Computers are being taught to learn, reason and recognize emotions. In these talks, look for insights -- as well as warnings.

Visions of the future of everything from cars to the Internet to the human species.

Our hyper-connected lives have been rewired for the digital age. These talks explore how the Internet and social media are shaping our relationships, personal lives and sense of self.

Head of TED Chris Anderson speaks with fascinating individuals to dig into some of the most provocative and powerful ideas of our time.

These brilliant people have shaped their fields -- from inventing the World Wide Web to changing the world of dance. They share their work in their own words.

Ray Kurzweil returns to the TED stage to explain his new (kind of old) theory of the mind. He first wrote his theory as a paper 50 years ago, but today there’s a plethora of new evidence to support it. First, a refresher on the story of the neocortex, which means “new rind.” Two hundred million years ago the thin layer covering the brains...

Here onstage at TED2018, futurist Ray Kurzweil has just formally announced a new way to query the text inside books using something called semantic search -- which is a search on ideas and concepts, rather than specific words. Called TalkToBooks, the beta-stage product uses an experimental AI to query a database of 120,000 books in about a h...

Whatever you may think of the singularity, it’s fun to think what we might do with the cloud-based brain power that Ray Kurzweil proposes in his TED talk. My guess is, as a first step, we'll use our hybrid brain power to put a namebadge on everything we forgot the name of. In his science-fiction novel Blindsight, Peter Watts uses “subtitle” a...

TED2014 begins in five short days, and we have added even more new speakers to look forward to. Below, a bit about each one: Cellist and beatboxer Kevin Olusola from Pentatonix (swoon!) will open Session 1: The Next Chapter. And as a bonus in Session 1, we'll be honoring TED's co-founder, Richard Saul Wurman. In Session 6: Wired, planet de...

What does a hacked future look like? What will our bodies -- and minds -- be capable as bioengineering becomes more and more ubiquitous? In Session 8 of TED2014, speakers take on the hacked world of tomorrow. Here are the speakers who appeared in this session. Click below to read a full recap of each speaker’s talk: Edward Snowden's Q&am...

With just one week left to go until TED2014, our speakers are putting the final touches on their talks. But that’s hardly all they’ve been up to. This week, check out which speaker has a bold prediction about artificial intelligence, which one put out a call for a more creative condom design, which one wrote about the science of goat arousal and...

TED is launching a new way for curious audiences to immerse themselves more deeply in some of the most compelling ideas on our platform: The TED Interview, a long-form TED original podcast series. Beginning October 16, weekly episodes of The TED Interview will feature head of TED Chris Anderson deep in conversation with TED speakers about th...

At TED2014, we challenged attendees to vote on 10 potential drivers of change in the next 30 years, via that enormously sophisticated piece of technology: the sticky note. As we could likely have predicted, there wasn't much consensus among those in Vancouver, but the range of opinions was vast and intriguing. And what do you think? Take the...

TED returns with the second season of The TED Interview, a long-form podcast series that features Chris Anderson, head of TED, in conversation with leading thinkers. The podcast is an opportunity to reconnect with renowned speakers and dive deeper into their ideas within a different global climate. This season’s guests include Bill Gates, Mo...

Three sessions of memorable TED Talks covering life, death and the future of humanity made the penultimate day of TED2018 a remarkable space for tech breakthroughs and dispatches from the edges of culture. Here are some of the themes we heard echoing through the opening day, as well as some highlights from around the conference venue in Vanco...

TED2014 is our 30th-anniversary conference, and the speaker lineup is -- in a word -- thrilling. Speakers will touch on topics ranging from technology, entertainment, design and education to climate change, architecture, music, physics, parenting, typography, fireflies and the Golden Gate Bridge. Randall Munroe of xkcd will talk about his passio...

When Ron McCallum was a child, he loved story time. But he was sad not to be able to read a book on his own. It was the 1940s, and McCallum was blind since birth. As his mom told him, "You can't feel the pictures, and you can't feel the print on the page." "Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would ma...

About this event: On Jan.17th, 2015, we will launch TEDxFactory798 at Pavilion, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. The theme this time is Singularity. Singularity is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of human intelligence. Once Singularity has been reached, new rule will dominate the world. Ray Kurzweil...

For most of us, trying to picture the future is a futile exercise that leads at best to some bad ideas that should likely never be shared out loud. For people like TED Fellow Chris Woebken, it's why the present exists. Along with Elliott Montgomery, Woebken runs The Extrapolation Factory, a studio devoted to imagining future scenarios. One re...

In this excerpt from the brand-new podcast The TED Interview, the beloved writer tells us how she is learning to live with loss. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert has reached the heights of fame -- her two TED Talks (2009’s “Your elusive creative genius” and 2014’s “Success, failure and the drive to keep creating”) have together gotten more than 24 mill...

In 1985, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, you could see Back to the Future in the theater for less than three bucks, and a 30-year-old Steve Jobs was being forced out of Apple. Doug Menuez was a 28-year-old photographer who had become obsessed with Jobs' story. So he asked a somewhat ridiculous question and got an equally ridicu...

At TED2014, we asked speakers and attendees to riff off the conference's theme ("The Next Chapter") and tell us what might radically change society, life, technology and so on in the next 30 years. From funny and wry to deeply insightful, the answers will surprise you. "One of the things about learning how to read -- we have been doing a lot ...

Months after he was born, in 1948, Ron McCallum became blind. In this charming, moving talk, he shows how he reads -- and celebrates the progression of clever tools and adaptive computer technologies that make it possible. With their help, and the help of volunteers, he's become a lawyer, an academic, and, most of all, a voracious reader. Welcom...

Onstage at TED2012, Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism -- that we'll invent, innovate and create ways to solve the challenges that loom over us. "I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems; we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.”

Diane Benscoter spent five years as a "Moonie." She shares an insider's perspective on the mind of a cult member, and proposes a new way to think about today's most troubling conflicts and extremist movements.

If you read a poem and feel moved by it, but then find out it was actually written by a computer, would you feel differently about the experience? Would you think that the computer had expressed itself and been creative, or would you feel like you had fallen for a cheap trick? In this talk, writer Oscar Schwartz examines why we react so strongly...