Machine intelligence is improving rapidly, to the point that the scientist of the future may not even be human! In fact, in more and more fields, learning machines are already outperforming humans. As noted in this transcript of a talk at TEDxLausanne on Jan. 20, 2012, artificial intelligence expert Jürgen Schmidhuber isn’t able to predict the future accurately, but he explains how machines are getting creative, why 40‚000 years of Homo sapiens-dominated history are about to end soon, and how we can try to make the best of what lies ahead. Read on

European researchers have used
immersive virtual reality in the
first experiment to show that body
ownership can be transferred to a
virtual body. A first-person
perspective of a life-sized virtual
human female body that appears to
substitute the male subjects' own
bodies was sufficient to generate a
body transfer illusion. Read on

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). Every presentation is available as a high quality video stream. This site is well worth a visit!

Bill Gates, Al Gore, Richard Branson, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins and many more great thinkers of our time have presented at TED. All their presentations are available.

Click here to go to TED.com