In my new book BOLD, one of the interviews that I'm most excited about is with my good friend Ray Kurzweil. Bill Gates calls Ray, "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." Ray is also amazing at predicting a lot more beyond just AI. This post looks at his very incredible predictions for the next 20 years. He has received 20 honorary doctorates, has been awarded honors from three U.S. presidents, and has authored 7 books (5 of which have been national bestsellers). He is the principal inventor of many technologies ranging from the first CCD flatbed scanner to the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. He is also the chancellor and co-founder of Singularity University, and the guy tagged by Larry Page to direct artificial intelligence development at Google. In short, Ray's pretty smart… and his predictions are amazing, mind-boggling, and important reminders that we are living in the most exciting time in human history. But, first let's look back at some of the predictions Ray got right. Then in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. He was right, to say the least.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Like innumerable children with imaginations fired by animated films, Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma grew up watching cartoons featuring the adventures of robots, and dreamt of building his own one day. Unlike most of the others, however, Ma has realized his childhood dream at the age of 42, by successfully constructing a life-sized robot from scratch on the balcony of his home. The fruit of his labors of a year-and-a-half, and a budget of more than 50,000, is a female robot prototype he calls the Mark 1, modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps. It responds to a set of programed verbal commands spoken into a microphone. "I figured I should just do it when the timing is right and realize my dream. If I realize my dream, I will have no regrets in life," said Ma, who had to learn about fields completely new to him before he could build the complex gadget.

I attended the Intelligence Squared artificial intelligence debate at the 92nd St. Y's Seven Day of Genius Festival (March 9th) and felt like I had a seat at the edge of the world. For better or worse, this is arguably the central debate of the 21st century. The motion was "Don't Trust The Promise of AI?" Jaron Lanier and Andrew Keen took the position we shouldn't trust AI, while Martine Rothblatt and James Hughes argued we should. There were transhumanists on both sides of the debate, which made things interesting. For those unfamiliar, "transhumanism is an international and intellectual movement aiming to transform the human condition by developing and creating widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities."

Between smart machines, A.I., and big data, supply chain management is steadily embracing futuristic technology. This is driven by a confluence of factors, including rapid technological development, a more strategic charter being pushed from the C-suite, and the realization that company-wide agility begins at the supply chain level. Data gets buzz in every market, but supply chain management is a field where it can have an immediate impact. David Wilkins, Vice President of Supply Chain at Raytheon sums it up well, "Our customers need us to "do more with less" – that means providing the most advanced capability at the lowest possible price. When roughly 70 percent of a program's cost comes from materials, we know we can reduce costs by sourcing smarter. To do this, we're using data analytics, collaborative technology and internal strategic sourcing."

Predicting the Presidential Election is practically a national sport. However, traditional predictors – especially the talkshow hosts on Fox News – have historically been terrible at calling the next set of numbers. It took Nate Silver's exceptional statistical skill to show us that with public data, you could accurately predict the election down to the last winning percentage – if the mind doing the calculations was good enough. Artificial Intelligence has evolved exponentially over the years. We've gone from Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov to DeepMind mastering Go.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple 40 years ago. On Friday, Apple reaches a major milestone in its history, celebrating 40 years since it was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It was a long road to becoming one of the world's biggest tech names, nearly reaching the edge of a financial collapse before Jobs returned to save the company and launch arguably its most important products. On Apple's 40th birthday, we look back at the 40 biggest moments in company history: While hanging out together as part of the Homebrew Computer Club, the two friends formed Apple from Jobs' garage. "We first met during my college years, while he was in high school," Wozniak said in a 2007 interview with ABC News.

However, most importantly, the restaurant owner has the most scope for extracting valuable snippets of insights from customer reviews with ratings between 3-4/5. I recently had a chance to deliver a talk in a conference titled'Understanding Consumers in the Digital World', held at IIM Lucknow, Noida Campus on 16-17th November 2015. The audience mainly comprised of marketers, market research professionals and academics whose work is primarily focused on obtaining deep insights by understanding the online consumers. My talk was titled'Decoding Ratings for superior service in restaurants – Using text to understand customers'. The focus was quite simple – convince and demonstrate how to read and understand customers from their reviews, not ratings. Our product, Lunchbox, a complete restaurant management solution was showcased as well.

The impressive machine dispatched the reigning (living and breathing) Go champion 4-1 in the best-of-5 series. The Go board game, which originated in China, requires complex strategic thinking with the number of possible outcomes dwarfing that in chess. AlphaGo's win demonstrates the emergence of intuition with the abstract strategic thinking not mastered in previous artificial intelligence ventures. AlphaGo's systems include'deep learning' methods, allowing the machine to run thousands of simulated scenarios to build its "experiences" to use when playing the game for real. The use of neural networks allows problem-solving without any prior programming.

BEIJING (By Paul Carsten, Reuters) -- A team from China plans to challenge Google's AlphaGo, the artificial intelligence (AI) program that beat a world-class player in the ancient board game Go, the state-owned Shanghai Securities News reported on Thursday. Scientists from the China Computer Go team will issue a challenge to AlphaGo by the end of 2016, said attendees at an event in Beijing organized by the Chinese Go Association and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, according to the report. It did not elaborate on the nature of the challenge. The event was "The Forum for Understanding the AlphaGo War between Man and Machine and Chinese Artificial Intelligence," Shanghai Securities News reported on its website. AlphaGo, developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind, shocked audiences when it beat South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol in Seoul earlier this month.

It is in line with the company's ambitions, as its President Zhang Yaqin has said artificial intelligence is the foundation to empower traditional industries and make them smart. He told China Daily, "Baidu has made some world-class achievements in the key subfields of artificial intelligence, such as image recognition, voice recognition, machine translation and self-driving cars."