toccon-bug.gifFinal keynote of the day is a conversation between Kurzweil and O’Reilly.

Kurzweil presentation on Blio: enabling factors in place for ebooks. Blio is free ereader with free and for pay books. With audiobooks combine audiobook with the text book. Can synchronize highlighting on the text with the audiobook. Can use text to speech to do the same thing if don’t have an audiobook. For textbooks include auxiliary website material directly into the book. Connect directly from a book to Wikipedia, dictionary definitions, highlight material, take notes.

Conversation: For Blio what is the authoring environment: have an authoring tool that makes it easy to put stuff in. Underlying format is web based. Will be a lot of magazines doing it and ads can change after publication sold.

Are there performance rights with TTS: expect few problems because publishers afraid TTS will take away from audiobook sales and here can combine the audiobook with the regular book. May be premium versions of books, just like with DVDs. Their DRM contract will allow user to use the book with multiple devices. Talking to some retail chains, manufacturers and publishers about incorporating Blio into books, themselves.

What’s your position on DRM: It’s up to the publisher. Blio will not take the lead on that. What will ebooks do in the future: will be radically new business models in the future. Blio has powerful ways to search for free material.

How about the pace of technology: Technology will continue to increase faster and faster and the pace will always increase. It is very predictable. Our intuition about the future is that it is linear, but the progression to the future is exponential. By 2020 the cost of a computer that can simulate the entire human brain will be $1,000.

Does the status of the book change when we have access to vast amounts of information in 20 years: book is not a matter of paper, but a way of thinking and presenting thought. That art form will continue for a long time.

What are your personal reading habits: favorite novelist is Gabriel Garcia Marquez who is a great example of hierarchical thinking. Read the classics in my field.

What’s it going to look like in 5 years: web will take over everything including our minds. Virtual reality will come to the forefront. Ultimately will be able to do virtual reality within our nervous systems using nanobots. Augmented reality happening now. Will routinely be on line all the time.

What are you thoughts on artificial intelligence if don’t understand regular intelligence: the exponential growth of knowledge about the human brain will give us the understanding we need fairly quickly. Hundreds examples of AI already exist – diagnosis, stock trading, JIT inventory contol. Started working on AI exactly 50 years ago. Health and medicine has become an information technology. Will soon be able to update the software in our genes. Medicine has been progressing linearly but now will be able to progress exponentially.

What about data gotten from ebooks: allow the capture of tremendous amounts of data about people and how they interact with reading. Books will be integrated into the body and will no longer be carrying devices around. Will happen in 5 to 10 years.

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