This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books. Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference. (Watch to the end.) >>Thanks @timoreilly!

The Singularity – the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal – has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke. In a profile in the current issue of Rolling Stone (not available online), Kurzweil describes how, in the wake of the Singularity, it will become possible not only to preserve living people for eternity (by uploading their minds into computers) but to resurrect the dead.

Kurzweil looks forward in particular to his reunion with his beloved father, Fredric, who died in 1970. “Kurzweil’s most ambitious plan for after the Singularity,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Kushner, “is also his most personal”:

Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation … In a soft voice, he explains how the resurrection would work. “We can find some of his DNA around his grave site – that’s a lot of information right there,” he says. “The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they’ll get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him.”

The comments are the best part.

Google has partnered up with Ray Kurzweil to start up the Singularity University.

Think a moment about that.

There is no way to hide from a slowdown in the economy. Here is the chart prepared by PubMatic indicating a downturn in online ad revenues for the bigger players. And good news for the smaller publishers. 

And the good advice Rafeev Goel gives in this video is just basic marketing 101.

But as usual with any downturn, there are lots of opportunities popping up. This is usually the time when those with the money can grab market share. And often a good time to start a new business.

Some of these folks used to be the renegades of marketing, and media, the ones who had clients quaking in their boots at the audacity of their brash minds. 

And in the blink of an eye they have become the old fogies, seemingly unwilling and unable to change. They are aware that the landscape has radically changed, all the landmarks are unreliable, and more importantly, the cash is not flowing from the usual spigots.

But wait, there’s hope. It appears that ad spending is not doing so badly. At least for the holding companies. Those clever creatures could read the spigots and started to acquire new media agencies to balance the decline of the old media agencies. They call it organic growth — their single digits. While the online media lobs along in plump doubles.

“We felt our audience was shrinking so that we were not relevant,” Clayton Frink, the publisher of The Capital Times, said in an interview two days before the final daily press run. “We are going a little farther, a little faster, but the general trend is happening everywhere.”

You can read the digital version of the New York Times story here. And you can visit the digital Capital Times here.

But what happens when that same person lets these same people use the material on the internet, digitally?

And what about if this happens in a classroom? Well, you could be sued.

Is media dead? Is advertising dead? The captured audience that both were based on has been released from the broadcast prison. This blog is a bit late getting into the fray, but better late than never.