Kurzweil Essays Available as a PDF

From this Slashdot post:

"prostoalex writes 'The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as 'How to Build a Brain'), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to 'The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine' and 'Human Body Version 2.0.'' "

Robotic Life

Taking inspiration and guidance from the science of animal and human behavior, the goal of Robotic Life is to build cooperative robots that can work and learn in partnership with people.

"Not only an engineering endeavour, we hope to gain scientific insight into the mechanisms that underlie this human and animal competence, and to develop a science of human-robot collaboration. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of this endeavor, our research explores a wide variety of topics including:

Novel mechanical designs
New sensing and actuator technologies
Active multi-modal perceptual systems
Natural language and gesture interfaces
Expressive movement and skillful motor control
Social learning
Psychological modeling
Human-robot interaction and collaboration"