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Wikipedia

Ray Kurzweil

January 29, 2023

Raymond Kurzweil (/ˈkɜːrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyle; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Ray Kurzweil
Kurzweil in 2005
Born
Raymond Kurzweil

(1948-02-12) February 12, 1948 (age 74)
New York City, U.S.
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S.)
Occupations
  • Author
  • Entrepreneur
  • Futurist
  • Inventor
EmployerGoogle
Awards
WebsiteOfficial website

Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from then President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human-machine communication. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received 21 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him No. 8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".

Life, inventions, and business career

Early life

Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York City. He attended NYC Public Education Kingsbury Elementary School PS188. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had emigrated from Austria just before the onset of World War II. He was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing.[1][2] His Unitarian church had the philosophy of many paths to the truth – his religious education consisted of studying a single religion for six months before moving on to the next.[3] His father, Fredric, was a concert pianist, a noted conductor, and a music educator. His mother, Hannah was a visual artist. He has one sibling, his sister Enid.

Kurzweil decided he wanted to be an inventor at the age of five.[4] As a young boy, Kurzweil had an inventory of parts from various construction toys he had been given and old electronic gadgets he'd collected from neighbors. In his youth, Kurzweil was an avid reader of science fiction literature. At the age of eight, nine, and ten, he read the entire Tom Swift Jr. series. At the age of seven or eight, he built a robotic puppet theater and robotic game. He was involved with computers by the age of 12 (in 1960), when only a dozen computers existed in all of New York City, and built computing devices and statistical programs for the predecessor of Head Start.[5] At the age of fourteen, Kurzweil wrote a paper detailing his theory of the neocortex.[6] His parents were involved with the arts, and he is quoted in the documentary Transcendent Man[7] as saying that the household always produced discussions about the future and technology.

Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School. During class, he often held onto his class textbooks to seemingly participate, but instead, focused on his own projects which were hidden behind the book. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Kurzweil the basics of computer science.[8] In 1963, at age 15, he wrote his first computer program.[9] He created pattern-recognition software that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. In 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret,[10] where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built.[11] Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention;[12] Kurzweil's submission to Westinghouse Talent Search of his first computer program alongside several other projects resulted in him being one of its national winners, which allowed him to be personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony. These activities collectively impressed upon Kurzweil the belief that nearly any problem could be overcome.[13]

Mid-life

While in high school, Kurzweil had corresponded with Marvin Minsky and was invited to visit him at MIT, which he did. Kurzweil also visited Frank Rosenblatt at Cornell.[14]

He obtained a B.S. in computer science and literature in 1970 at MIT. He went to MIT to study with Marvin Minsky. He took all of the computer programming courses (eight or nine) offered at MIT in the first year and a half.

In 1968, during his second year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called the Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers submitted by each student applicant. Around this time, he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000 (roughly $748,000 in 2020 dollars) plus royalties.[15]

In 1974, Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions such as Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device covered an entire tabletop.

Kurzweil's next major business venture began in 1978, when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents onto its nascent online databases.

Kurzweil sold his Kurzweil Computer Products to Xerox, where it was known as Xerox Imaging Systems, later known as Scansoft, and he functioned as a consultant for Xerox until 1995. In 1999, Visioneer, Inc. acquired ScanSoft from Xerox to form a new public company with ScanSoft as the new company-wide name. Scansoft merged with Nuance Communications in 2005.

Kurzweil's next business venture was in the realm of electronic music technology. After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder, in which the latter lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of music synthesizers capable of accurately duplicating the sounds of real instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year, and in 1984, the Kurzweil K250 was unveiled. The machine was capable of imitating a number of instruments, and in tests musicians were unable to discern the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano.[16] The recording and mixing abilities of the machine, coupled with its abilities to imitate different instruments, made it possible for a single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece.

Kurzweil Music Systems was sold to South Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang in 1990. As with Xerox, Kurzweil remained as a consultant for several years. Hyundai acquired Young Chang in 2006 and in January 2007 appointed Raymond Kurzweil as Chief Strategy Officer of Kurzweil Music Systems.[17]

Later life

Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems, Kurzweil created the company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, which debuted in 1987, was an early speech recognition program. KAI was sold to Lernout & Hauspie in 1997.[18]

Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems (KESI) in 1996 to develop new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in school. Products include the Kurzweil 1000 text-to-speech converter software program, which enables a computer to read electronic and scanned text aloud to blind or visually impaired users, and the Kurzweil 3000 program, which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills.

Kurzweil sold KESI to Lernout & Hauspie. Following the legal and bankruptcy problems of the latter, he and other KESI employees purchased the company back. KESI was eventually sold to Cambium Learning Group, Inc.

 
Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in 2006

During the 1990s, Kurzweil founded the Medical Learning Company.[19]

In 1999, Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat" (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies), which began trading in 2006. He has stated that the ultimate aim is to improve the performance of FatKat's A.I. investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends."[20] He predicted in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, that computers will one day prove superior to the best human financial minds at making profitable investment decisions. In June 2005, Kurzweil introduced the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader)—a pocket-sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit. Like the Kurzweil Reading Machine of almost 30 years before, the K-NFB Reader is designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud. The newer machine is portable and scans text through digital camera images, while the older machine is large and scans text through flatbed scanning.

In December 2012, Kurzweil was hired by Google in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing".[21] He was personally hired by Google co-founder Larry Page.[22] Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google".[23]

He received a Technical Grammy on February 8, 2015, specifically for his invention of the Kurzweil K250.[24]

Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his declared death, Kurzweil plans to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him.[25]

Personal life

Kurzweil is agnostic about the existence of a soul.[26] On the possibility of divine intelligence, Kurzweil has said, "Does God exist? I would say, 'Not yet.'"[27]

Kurzweil married Sonya Rosenwald Kurzweil in 1975 and has two children.[28] Sonya Kurzweil is a psychologist in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts, working with women, children, parents and families. She holds faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and William James College for Graduate Education in Psychology. Her research interests and publications are in the area of psychotherapy practice. Kurzweil also serves as an active Overseer at Boston Children's Museum.[29]

He has a son, Ethan Kurzweil, who is a venture capitalist,[30] and a daughter, Amy Kurzweil, a cartoonist.[31][32]

Creative approach

See also: Wait calculation

Kurzweil said "I realize that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can't get them to work, but because the timing is wrong‍—‌not all of the enabling factors are at play where they are needed. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment."[33][34]

For the past several decades, Kurzweil's most effective and common approach to doing creative work has been conducted during his lucid dreamlike state which immediately precedes his awakening state. He claims to have constructed inventions, solved difficult problems, such as algorithmic, business strategy, organizational, and interpersonal problems, and written speeches in this state.[14]

Books

Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published in 1990. The nonfiction work discusses the history of computer artificial intelligence (AI) and forecasts future developments. Other experts in the field of AI contribute heavily to the work in the form of essays. The Association of American Publishers awarded it the status of Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990.[35]

In 1993, Kurzweil published a book on nutrition called The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life. The book's main idea is that high levels of fat intake are the cause of many health disorders common in the U.S., and thus that cutting fat consumption down to 10% of the total calories consumed would be optimal for most people.

In 1999, Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines, which further elucidates his theories regarding the future of technology, which themselves stem from his analysis of long-term trends in biological and technological evolution. Much emphasis is on the likely course of AI development, along with the future of computer architecture.

Kurzweil's next book, published in 2004, returned to human health and nutrition. Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever was co-authored by Terry Grossman, a medical doctor and specialist in alternative medicine.

The Singularity Is Near, published in 2005, was made into a movie starring Pauley Perrette from NCIS. In February 2007, Ptolemaic Productions acquired the rights to The Singularity Is Near, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage, including the rights to film Kurzweil's life and ideas for the documentary film Transcendent Man,[7] which was directed by Barry Ptolemy.

Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever,[36] a follow-up to Fantastic Voyage, was released on April 28, 2009.

Kurzweil's book How to Create a Mind was released on November 13, 2012.[37] In it Kurzweil describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind, the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and argues that emulating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence.[38]

Kurzweil's latest book and first fiction novel, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, follows a girl who uses her intelligence and the help of her friends to tackle real-world problems. It follows a structure akin to the scientific method. Chapters are organized as year-by-year episodes from Danielle's childhood and adolescence.[39] The book comes with companion materials, A Chronicle of Ideas, and How You Can Be a Danielle that provide real-world context. The book was released in April 2019.[40]

In an article on his website kurzweilai.net, Ray Kurzweil announced his new book The Singularity Is Nearer for release in 2022.[41]

Movies

In 2010, Kurzweil wrote and co-produced a movie directed by Anthony Waller called The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future, which was based in part on his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. Part fiction, part non-fiction, the film blends interviews with 20 big thinkers (such as Marvin Minsky) with a narrative story that illustrates some of his key ideas, including a computer avatar (Ramona) who saves the world from self-replicating microscopic robots. In addition to his movie, an independent, feature-length documentary was made about Kurzweil, his life, and his ideas, called Transcendent Man.[7]

In 2010, an independent documentary film called Plug & Pray premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival, in which Kurzweil and one of his major critics, the late Joseph Weizenbaum, argue about the benefits of eternal life.[42]

The feature-length documentary film The Singularity by independent filmmaker Doug Wolens (released at the end of 2012), showcasing Kurzweil, has been acclaimed as "a large-scale achievement in its documentation of futurist and counter-futurist ideas" and "the best documentary on the Singularity to date."[43]

Views

The Law of Accelerating Returns

Main article: The Law of Accelerating Returns

In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil proposed "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially.[44] He gave further focus to this issue in a 2001 essay entitled "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which proposed an extension of Moore's law to a wide variety of technologies, and used this to argue in favor of John von Neumann's concept of a technological singularity.[45]

Stance on the future of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics

Kurzweil was working with the Army Science Board in 2006 to develop a rapid response system to deal with the possible abuse of biotechnology. He suggested that the same technologies that are empowering us to reprogram biology away from cancer and heart disease could be used by a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly, communicable, and stealthy. However, he suggests that we have the scientific tools to successfully defend against these attacks, similar to the way we defend against computer software viruses. He has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology, advocating that nanotechnology has the potential to solve serious global problems such as poverty, disease, and climate change. "Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill".[46]

In media appearances, Kurzweil has stressed the extreme potential dangers of nanotechnology[11] but argues that in practice, progress cannot be stopped because that would require a totalitarian system, and any attempt to do so would drive dangerous technologies underground and deprive responsible scientists of the tools needed for defense. He suggests that the proper place of regulation is to ensure that technological progress proceeds safely and quickly, but does not deprive the world of profound benefits. He stated, "To avoid dangers such as unrestrained nanobot replication, we need relinquishment at the right level and to place our highest priority on the continuing advance of defensive technologies, staying ahead of destructive technologies. An overall strategy should include a streamlined regulatory process, a global program of monitoring for unknown or evolving biological pathogens, temporary moratoriums, raising public awareness, international cooperation, software reconnaissance, and fostering values of liberty, tolerance, and respect for knowledge and diversity."[47]

Health and aging

Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was found to suffer from a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease). Kurzweil then found a doctor, Terry Grossman, who shared his unconventional beliefs and helped him to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine, and various other methods to attempt to extend his lifespan. In 2007, Kurzweil was ingesting "250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea" every day and drinking several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry.[48] By 2008, he had reduced the number of supplement pills to 150.[26] By 2015. Kurzweil further reduced his daily pill regimen down to 100 pills.[49]

Kurzweil asserts that in the future, everyone will live forever.[50] In a 2013 interview, he said that in 15 years, medical technology could add more than a year to one's remaining life expectancy for each year that passes, and we could then "outrun our own deaths". Among other things, he has supported the SENS Research Foundation's approach to finding a way to repair aging damage, and has encouraged the general public to hasten their research by donating.[23][51]

Encouraging futurism and transhumanism

Kurzweil's standing as a futurist and transhumanist has led to his involvement in several singularity-themed organizations. In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.[52] In October 2005, Kurzweil joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation.[53] On May 13, 2006, Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.[54] In May 2013, Kurzweil was the keynote speaker at the 2013 proceeding of the Research, Innovation, Start-up and Employment (RISE) international conference in Seoul.

In February 2009, Kurzweil, in collaboration with Google and the NASA Ames Research Center, announced the creation of the Singularity University training center for corporate executives and government officials. The university's self-described mission is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges". Using Vernor Vinge's Singularity concept as a foundation, the university offered its first nine-week graduate program to 40 students in 2009.

Kurzweil views the human body as a system of thousands of "programs" and that understanding all of their functions could hold the key towards building a truly sentient AI.[55][56]

Predictions

Past predictions

Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, presents his ideas about the future. Written from 1986 to 1989, it was published in 1990. Building on Ithiel de Sola Pool's "Technologies of Freedom" (1983), Kurzweil claims to have forecast the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information.[57] In the book, Kurzweil also extrapolates trends in improving computer chess software performance, predicting that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000".[58] In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated chess World Champion Garry Kasparov in a well-publicized chess match.[59]

Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time when The Age of Intelligent Machines was published, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world,[60] and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content. He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services". Additionally, Kurzweil claims to have correctly foreseen that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and estimated that this development would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.

In October 2010, Kurzweil released his report, "How My Predictions Are Faring" in PDF format,[61] analyzing the predictions he made in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005). Of the 147 predictions, Kurzweil claimed that 115 were "entirely correct", 12 were "essentially correct", 17 were "partially correct", and only 3 were "wrong". Combining the "entirely" and "essentially" correct, Kurzweil's claimed accuracy rate comes to 86%.

Daniel Lyons, writing in Newsweek magazine, criticized Kurzweil for some of his predictions that turned out to be wrong, such as the economy continuing to boom from the 1998 dot-com through 2009, a US company having a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion by 2009, a supercomputer achieving 20 petaflops, speech recognition being in widespread use and cars that would drive themselves using sensors installed in highways; all by 2009.[62] To the charge that a 20 petaflop supercomputer was not produced in the time he predicted, Kurzweil responded that he considers Google a giant supercomputer, and that it is indeed capable of 20 petaflops.[62]

Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate, with 7 failed predictions, 4 partially true predictions, and one correct one. For example, Kurzweil predicted, "The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition", which was not the case.[63]

Annihilation of the human species

On a Lex Fridman September 17, 2022, YouTube Podcast Kurzweil explained his worries about technology being used for violence. When asked about nuclear armaggedon and the Russo-Ukrainian War, Kurzweil stated: "I don't think (nuclear war) is going to happen despite the terrors of that war. It is a possibility but it's unlikely. Even with the tensions we've had with (the Zaporizhzhia) nuclear power plant that's been taken over. It's very tense but I don't actually see a lot of people worrying that's going to happen. I think we'll avoid that. We had two nuclear bombs go off in (1945) so now we're 77 years later... we've never had another one go off through anger... there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons."[64]

Future predictions

In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. In it, he states that with radical life extension will come radical life enhancement. He says he is confident that within 10 years we will have the option to spend some of our time in 3D virtual environments that appear just as real as real reality, but these will not yet be made possible via direct interaction with our nervous system. He expounded on his prediction regarding nanorobotics, making the claim of within 20 years having millions of blood-cell sized devices, known as nanobots, inside our bodies fighting diseases, and improving our memory and cognitive abilities. Kurzweil also claims that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029. Kurzweil states that humans will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence that becomes increasingly dominated by its non-biological component.[65] In Transcendent Man Kurzweil states "We humans are going to start linking with each other and become a metaconnection; we will all be connected and omnipresent, plugged into a global network that is connected to billions of people and filled with data."[7]

In 2008, Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years. According to Kurzweil, we only need to capture 1 part in 10,000 of the energy from the Sun that hits Earth's surface to meet all of humanity's energy needs.[66]

Reception

Praise

Kurzweil was called "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes[67] and a "restless genius"[68] by The Wall Street Journal. PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America"[69] along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him Number 8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the US and called him "Edison's rightful heir".[70] Bill Gates called him "the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence".[71]

Criticism

Although technological singularity is a popular concept in science fiction, some authors such as Neal Stephenson[72] and Bruce Sterling have voiced skepticism about its real-world plausibility. Sterling expressed his views on the singularity scenario in a talk at the Long Now Foundation entitled The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole.[73][74] Other prominent AI thinkers and computer scientists such as Daniel Dennett,[75] Rodney Brooks,[76] David Gelernter[77] and Paul Allen[78] have also criticized Kurzweil's projections.

In the cover article of the December 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum, John Rennie criticizes Kurzweil for several predictions that failed to become manifest by the originally predicted date. "Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable."[79]

Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, agrees with Kurzweil's timeline of future progress, but thinks that technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and advanced biotechnology will create a dystopian world.[80] Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."[20]

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has said of Kurzweil's and Hans Moravec's books: "It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."[81]

Biologist P.Z. Myers has criticized Kurzweil's predictions as being based on "New Age spiritualism" rather than science and says that Kurzweil does not understand basic biology.[82][83] VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has described Kurzweil's ideas as "cybernetic totalism" and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil's predictions in an essay for Edge Foundation entitled One Half of a Manifesto.[43][84] Physicist and futurist Theodore Modis claims that Kurzweil's thesis of a "technological singularity" lacks scientific rigor.[85]

British philosopher John Gray argued that contemporary science is what magic was for ancient civilizations. It gives a sense of hope for those who are willing to do almost anything to achieve eternal life. He quotes Kurzweil's Singularity as another example of a trend which has almost always been present in the history of mankind.[86]

HP Newquist wrote in The Brain Makers "Born with the same gift for self-promotion that was a character trait of people like P.T. Barnum and Ed Feigenbaum, Kurzweil had no problems talking up his technical prowess...Ray Kurzweil was not noted for his understatement."[87]

In a 2015 paper, William D. Nordhaus of Yale University used a variety of econometric methods to run six supply-side tests and one demand-side test to track the macroeconomic viability of the required steep rises in information technology. Only two indicated that a Singularity was economically possible and both predicted at least 100 years before it would occur.[88]

Ted Kaczynski criticized the idea of technological immortality proposed by Ray Kurzweil in his 2016 book Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.[89]

Awards and honors

  • First place in the 1965 International Science Fair[12] for inventing the classical music synthesizing computer.
  • The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The award is given annually to one "outstanding young computer professional" and is accompanied by a $35,000 prize.[90] Kurzweil won it for his invention of the Kurzweil Reading Machine.[91]
  • In 1986, Kurzweil was named Honorary chairman for Innovation of the White House Conference on Small Business by President Reagan.
  • In 1987, Kurzweil received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music.[92]
  • In 1988, Kurzweil was named Inventor of the Year by MIT and the Boston Museum of Science.[93]
  • In 1990, Kurzweil was voted Engineer of the Year by the over one million readers of Design News Magazine and received their third annual Technology Achievement Award.[93][94]
  • The 1995 Dickson Prize in Science
  • The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[95]
  • The 1999 National Medal of Technology.[96] This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering new technologies, and the President dispenses the award at his discretion.[97] Bill Clinton presented Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil's development of computer-based technologies to help the disabled.
  • In 2000, Kurzweil received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[98]
  • The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.[99] Two other individuals also received the same honor that year. The award is presented yearly to people who "exemplify the life, times and standard of contribution of Tesla, Westinghouse and Nunn."
  • The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help the disabled and to enrich the arts.[100] Only one is awarded each year – it is given to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A$500,000 award accompanies the prize.[101]
  • Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine.[102] The organization "honors the women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible."[103] Fifteen other people were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year.[104]
  • The Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20, 2009, for lifetime achievement as an inventor and futurist in computer-based technologies.[105]
  • In 2011, Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.[106]
  • In 2013, Kurzweil was honored as a Silicon Valley Visionary Award winner on June 26 by SVForum.[107]
  • In 2014, Kurzweil was honored with the American Visionary Art Museum's Grand Visionary Award on January 30.[108][109][110]
  • In 2014, Kurzweil was inducted as an Eminent Member of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu.
  • Kurzweil has received 20 honorary doctorates in science, engineering, music and humane letters from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Hofstra University and other leading colleges and universities, as well as honors from three U.S. presidents – Clinton, Reagan and Johnson.[111][112]
  • Kurzweil has received seven national and international film awards including the CINE Golden Eagle Award and the gold medal for Science Education from the International Film and TV Festival of New York.[93]
  • He gave a 2007 keynote speech to the Protestant United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut, alongside Barack Obama, who was then a Presidential candidate.[113][114]

Bibliography

Non-fiction

Fiction

  • Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine (2019)

See also

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References

  1. ^ Press, Xiphias (September 1, 2016). The Universal Mind: The Evolution of Machine Intelligence and Human Psychology. Xiphias Press.
  2. ^ "featured | Reinvent Yourself: the Playboy interview with Ray Kurzweil | Kurzweil". www.kurzweilai.net. Retrieved November 26, 2018.
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External links

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Ray Kurzweil.
 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ray Kurzweil.
  • Official website  
  • Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Raymond Kurzweil at IMDb
  • "Ray Kurzweil". Interview. Oral History. NAMM. January 20, 2007.
  • Official Danielle Superheroine website

January 29, 2023
kurzweil, raymond, kurzweil, ɜːr, kurz, wyle, born, february, 1948, american, computer, scientist, author, inventor, futurist, involved, fields, such, optical, character, recognition, text, speech, synthesis, speech, recognition, technology, electronic, keyboa. Raymond Kurzweil ˈ k ɜːr z w aɪ l KURZ wyle born February 12 1948 is an American computer scientist author inventor and futurist He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition OCR text to speech synthesis speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments He has written books on health artificial intelligence AI transhumanism the technological singularity and futurism Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology robotics and biotechnology Ray KurzweilKurzweil in 2005BornRaymond Kurzweil 1948 02 12 February 12 1948 age 74 New York City U S Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology B S OccupationsAuthor Entrepreneur Futurist InventorEmployerGoogleAwardsGrace Murray Hopper Award 1978 National Medal of Technology 1999 WebsiteOfficial websiteKurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation the United States highest honor in technology from then President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony He was the recipient of the 500 000 Lemelson MIT Prize for 2001 He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human machine communication In 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame established by the U S Patent Office He has received 21 honorary doctorates and honors from three U S presidents The Public Broadcasting Service PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 revolutionaries who made America along with other inventors of the past two centuries Inc magazine ranked him No 8 among the most fascinating entrepreneurs in the United States and called him Edison s rightful heir Contents 1 Life inventions and business career 1 1 Early life 1 2 Mid life 1 3 Later life 1 4 Personal life 1 5 Creative approach 2 Books 3 Movies 4 Views 4 1 The Law of Accelerating Returns 4 2 Stance on the future of genetics nanotechnology and robotics 4 3 Health and aging 4 4 Encouraging futurism and transhumanism 5 Predictions 5 1 Past predictions 5 2 Annihilation of the human species 5 3 Future predictions 6 Reception 6 1 Praise 6 2 Criticism 7 Awards and honors 8 Bibliography 8 1 Non fiction 8 2 Fiction 9 See also 10 References 11 External linksLife inventions and business career EditEarly life Edit Kurzweil grew up in Queens New York City He attended NYC Public Education Kingsbury Elementary School PS188 He was born to secular Jewish parents who had emigrated from Austria just before the onset of World War II He was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing 1 2 His Unitarian church had the philosophy of many paths to the truth his religious education consisted of studying a single religion for six months before moving on to the next 3 His father Fredric was a concert pianist a noted conductor and a music educator His mother Hannah was a visual artist He has one sibling his sister Enid Kurzweil decided he wanted to be an inventor at the age of five 4 As a young boy Kurzweil had an inventory of parts from various construction toys he had been given and old electronic gadgets he d collected from neighbors In his youth Kurzweil was an avid reader of science fiction literature At the age of eight nine and ten he read the entire Tom Swift Jr series At the age of seven or eight he built a robotic puppet theater and robotic game He was involved with computers by the age of 12 in 1960 when only a dozen computers existed in all of New York City and built computing devices and statistical programs for the predecessor of Head Start 5 At the age of fourteen Kurzweil wrote a paper detailing his theory of the neocortex 6 His parents were involved with the arts and he is quoted in the documentary Transcendent Man 7 as saying that the household always produced discussions about the future and technology Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School During class he often held onto his class textbooks to seemingly participate but instead focused on his own projects which were hidden behind the book His uncle an engineer at Bell Labs taught young Kurzweil the basics of computer science 8 In 1963 at age 15 he wrote his first computer program 9 He created pattern recognition software that analyzed the works of classical composers and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles In 1965 he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I ve Got a Secret 10 where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built 11 Later that year he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention 12 Kurzweil s submission to Westinghouse Talent Search of his first computer program alongside several other projects resulted in him being one of its national winners which allowed him to be personally congratulated by President Lyndon B Johnson during a White House ceremony These activities collectively impressed upon Kurzweil the belief that nearly any problem could be overcome 13 Mid life Edit While in high school Kurzweil had corresponded with Marvin Minsky and was invited to visit him at MIT which he did Kurzweil also visited Frank Rosenblatt at Cornell 14 He obtained a B S in computer science and literature in 1970 at MIT He went to MIT to study with Marvin Minsky He took all of the computer programming courses eight or nine offered at MIT in the first year and a half In 1968 during his second year at MIT Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges The program called the Select College Consulting Program was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers submitted by each student applicant Around this time he sold the company to Harcourt Brace amp World for 100 000 roughly 748 000 in 2020 dollars plus royalties 15 In 1974 Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products Inc and led development of the first omni font optical character recognition system a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font Before that time scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud However this device required the invention of two enabling technologies the CCD flatbed scanner and the text to speech synthesizer Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions such as Bell Labs and on January 13 1976 the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine the device covered an entire tabletop Kurzweil s next major business venture began in 1978 when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program LexisNexis was one of the first customers and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents onto its nascent online databases Kurzweil sold his Kurzweil Computer Products to Xerox where it was known as Xerox Imaging Systems later known as Scansoft and he functioned as a consultant for Xerox until 1995 In 1999 Visioneer Inc acquired ScanSoft from Xerox to form a new public company with ScanSoft as the new company wide name Scansoft merged with Nuance Communications in 2005 Kurzweil s next business venture was in the realm of electronic music technology After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder in which the latter lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of music synthesizers capable of accurately duplicating the sounds of real instruments Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year and in 1984 the Kurzweil K250 was unveiled The machine was capable of imitating a number of instruments and in tests musicians were unable to discern the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano 16 The recording and mixing abilities of the machine coupled with its abilities to imitate different instruments made it possible for a single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece Kurzweil Music Systems was sold to South Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang in 1990 As with Xerox Kurzweil remained as a consultant for several years Hyundai acquired Young Chang in 2006 and in January 2007 appointed Raymond Kurzweil as Chief Strategy Officer of Kurzweil Music Systems 17 Later life Edit Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems Kurzweil created the company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence KAI to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use The first product which debuted in 1987 was an early speech recognition program KAI was sold to Lernout amp Hauspie in 1997 18 Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems KESI in 1996 to develop new pattern recognition based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD in school Products include the Kurzweil 1000 text to speech converter software program which enables a computer to read electronic and scanned text aloud to blind or visually impaired users and the Kurzweil 3000 program which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading writing and study skills Kurzweil sold KESI to Lernout amp Hauspie Following the legal and bankruptcy problems of the latter he and other KESI employees purchased the company back KESI was eventually sold to Cambium Learning Group Inc Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in 2006 During the 1990s Kurzweil founded the Medical Learning Company 19 In 1999 Kurzweil created a hedge fund called FatKat Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies which began trading in 2006 He has stated that the ultimate aim is to improve the performance of FatKat s A I investment software program enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in currency fluctuations and stock ownership trends 20 He predicted in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines that computers will one day prove superior to the best human financial minds at making profitable investment decisions In June 2005 Kurzweil introduced the Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader K NFB Reader a pocket sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit Like the Kurzweil Reading Machine of almost 30 years before the K NFB Reader is designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud The newer machine is portable and scans text through digital camera images while the older machine is large and scans text through flatbed scanning In December 2012 Kurzweil was hired by Google in a full time position to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing 21 He was personally hired by Google co founder Larry Page 22 Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one sentence job description to bring natural language understanding to Google 23 He received a Technical Grammy on February 8 2015 specifically for his invention of the Kurzweil K250 24 Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation a cryonics company In the event of his declared death Kurzweil plans to be perfused with cryoprotectants vitrified in liquid nitrogen and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him 25 Personal life Edit Kurzweil is agnostic about the existence of a soul 26 On the possibility of divine intelligence Kurzweil has said Does God exist I would say Not yet 27 Kurzweil married Sonya Rosenwald Kurzweil in 1975 and has two children 28 Sonya Kurzweil is a psychologist in private practice in Newton Massachusetts working with women children parents and families She holds faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and William James College for Graduate Education in Psychology Her research interests and publications are in the area of psychotherapy practice Kurzweil also serves as an active Overseer at Boston Children s Museum 29 He has a son Ethan Kurzweil who is a venture capitalist 30 and a daughter Amy Kurzweil a cartoonist 31 32 Creative approach Edit See also Wait calculation Kurzweil said I realize that most inventions fail not because the R amp D department can t get them to work but because the timing is wrong not all of the enabling factors are at play where they are needed Inventing is a lot like surfing you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment 33 34 For the past several decades Kurzweil s most effective and common approach to doing creative work has been conducted during his lucid dreamlike state which immediately precedes his awakening state He claims to have constructed inventions solved difficult problems such as algorithmic business strategy organizational and interpersonal problems and written speeches in this state 14 Books EditKurzweil s first book The Age of Intelligent Machines was published in 1990 The nonfiction work discusses the history of computer artificial intelligence AI and forecasts future developments Other experts in the field of AI contribute heavily to the work in the form of essays The Association of American Publishers awarded it the status of Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990 35 In 1993 Kurzweil published a book on nutrition called The 10 Solution for a Healthy Life The book s main idea is that high levels of fat intake are the cause of many health disorders common in the U S and thus that cutting fat consumption down to 10 of the total calories consumed would be optimal for most people In 1999 Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines which further elucidates his theories regarding the future of technology which themselves stem from his analysis of long term trends in biological and technological evolution Much emphasis is on the likely course of AI development along with the future of computer architecture Kurzweil s next book published in 2004 returned to human health and nutrition Fantastic Voyage Live Long Enough to Live Forever was co authored by Terry Grossman a medical doctor and specialist in alternative medicine The Singularity Is Near published in 2005 was made into a movie starring Pauley Perrette from NCIS In February 2007 Ptolemaic Productions acquired the rights to The Singularity Is Near The Age of Spiritual Machines and Fantastic Voyage including the rights to film Kurzweil s life and ideas for the documentary film Transcendent Man 7 which was directed by Barry Ptolemy Transcend Nine Steps to Living Well Forever 36 a follow up to Fantastic Voyage was released on April 28 2009 Kurzweil s book How to Create a Mind was released on November 13 2012 37 In it Kurzweil describes his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers and argues that emulating this architecture in machines could lead to an artificial superintelligence 38 Kurzweil s latest book and first fiction novel Danielle Chronicles of a Superheroine follows a girl who uses her intelligence and the help of her friends to tackle real world problems It follows a structure akin to the scientific method Chapters are organized as year by year episodes from Danielle s childhood and adolescence 39 The book comes with companion materials A Chronicle of Ideas and How You Can Be a Danielle that provide real world context The book was released in April 2019 40 In an article on his website kurzweilai net Ray Kurzweil announced his new book The Singularity Is Nearer for release in 2022 41 Movies EditIn 2010 Kurzweil wrote and co produced a movie directed by Anthony Waller called The Singularity Is Near A True Story About the Future which was based in part on his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near Part fiction part non fiction the film blends interviews with 20 big thinkers such as Marvin Minsky with a narrative story that illustrates some of his key ideas including a computer avatar Ramona who saves the world from self replicating microscopic robots In addition to his movie an independent feature length documentary was made about Kurzweil his life and his ideas called Transcendent Man 7 In 2010 an independent documentary film called Plug amp Pray premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in which Kurzweil and one of his major critics the late Joseph Weizenbaum argue about the benefits of eternal life 42 The feature length documentary film The Singularity by independent filmmaker Doug Wolens released at the end of 2012 showcasing Kurzweil has been acclaimed as a large scale achievement in its documentation of futurist and counter futurist ideas and the best documentary on the Singularity to date 43 Views EditThe Law of Accelerating Returns Edit Main article The Law of Accelerating Returns In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines Kurzweil proposed The Law of Accelerating Returns according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems including the growth of technologies tends to increase exponentially 44 He gave further focus to this issue in a 2001 essay entitled The Law of Accelerating Returns which proposed an extension of Moore s law to a wide variety of technologies and used this to argue in favor of John von Neumann s concept of a technological singularity 45 Stance on the future of genetics nanotechnology and robotics Edit Kurzweil was working with the Army Science Board in 2006 to develop a rapid response system to deal with the possible abuse of biotechnology He suggested that the same technologies that are empowering us to reprogram biology away from cancer and heart disease could be used by a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly communicable and stealthy However he suggests that we have the scientific tools to successfully defend against these attacks similar to the way we defend against computer software viruses He has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology advocating that nanotechnology has the potential to solve serious global problems such as poverty disease and climate change Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill 46 In media appearances Kurzweil has stressed the extreme potential dangers of nanotechnology 11 but argues that in practice progress cannot be stopped because that would require a totalitarian system and any attempt to do so would drive dangerous technologies underground and deprive responsible scientists of the tools needed for defense He suggests that the proper place of regulation is to ensure that technological progress proceeds safely and quickly but does not deprive the world of profound benefits He stated To avoid dangers such as unrestrained nanobot replication we need relinquishment at the right level and to place our highest priority on the continuing advance of defensive technologies staying ahead of destructive technologies An overall strategy should include a streamlined regulatory process a global program of monitoring for unknown or evolving biological pathogens temporary moratoriums raising public awareness international cooperation software reconnaissance and fostering values of liberty tolerance and respect for knowledge and diversity 47 Health and aging Edit Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35 when he was found to suffer from a glucose intolerance an early form of type II diabetes a major risk factor for heart disease Kurzweil then found a doctor Terry Grossman who shared his unconventional beliefs and helped him to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills chemical intravenous treatments red wine and various other methods to attempt to extend his lifespan In 2007 Kurzweil was ingesting 250 supplements eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea every day and drinking several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to reprogram his biochemistry 48 By 2008 he had reduced the number of supplement pills to 150 26 By 2015 Kurzweil further reduced his daily pill regimen down to 100 pills 49 Kurzweil asserts that in the future everyone will live forever 50 In a 2013 interview he said that in 15 years medical technology could add more than a year to one s remaining life expectancy for each year that passes and we could then outrun our own deaths Among other things he has supported the SENS Research Foundation s approach to finding a way to repair aging damage and has encouraged the general public to hasten their research by donating 23 51 Encouraging futurism and transhumanism Edit Kurzweil s standing as a futurist and transhumanist has led to his involvement in several singularity themed organizations In December 2004 Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute 52 In October 2005 Kurzweil joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation 53 On May 13 2006 Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto California 54 In May 2013 Kurzweil was the keynote speaker at the 2013 proceeding of the Research Innovation Start up and Employment RISE international conference in Seoul In February 2009 Kurzweil in collaboration with Google and the NASA Ames Research Center announced the creation of the Singularity University training center for corporate executives and government officials The university s self described mission is to assemble educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply focus and guide these tools to address humanity s grand challenges Using Vernor Vinge s Singularity concept as a foundation the university offered its first nine week graduate program to 40 students in 2009 Kurzweil views the human body as a system of thousands of programs and that understanding all of their functions could hold the key towards building a truly sentient AI 55 56 Predictions EditPast predictions Edit Kurzweil s first book The Age of Intelligent Machines presents his ideas about the future Written from 1986 to 1989 it was published in 1990 Building on Ithiel de Sola Pool s Technologies of Freedom 1983 Kurzweil claims to have forecast the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information 57 In the book Kurzweil also extrapolates trends in improving computer chess software performance predicting that computers would beat the best human players by the year 2000 58 In May 1997 IBM s Deep Blue computer defeated chess World Champion Garry Kasparov in a well publicized chess match 59 Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s At the time when The Age of Intelligent Machines was published there were only 2 6 million Internet users in the world 60 and the medium was unreliable difficult to use and deficient in content He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well eventually granting users access to international networks of libraries data bases and information services Additionally Kurzweil claims to have correctly foreseen that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems and estimated that this development would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century In October 2010 Kurzweil released his report How My Predictions Are Faring in PDF format 61 analyzing the predictions he made in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines 1990 The Age of Spiritual Machines 1999 and The Singularity is Near 2005 Of the 147 predictions Kurzweil claimed that 115 were entirely correct 12 were essentially correct 17 were partially correct and only 3 were wrong Combining the entirely and essentially correct Kurzweil s claimed accuracy rate comes to 86 Daniel Lyons writing in Newsweek magazine criticized Kurzweil for some of his predictions that turned out to be wrong such as the economy continuing to boom from the 1998 dot com through 2009 a US company having a market capitalization of more than 1 trillion by 2009 a supercomputer achieving 20 petaflops speech recognition being in widespread use and cars that would drive themselves using sensors installed in highways all by 2009 62 To the charge that a 20 petaflop supercomputer was not produced in the time he predicted Kurzweil responded that he considers Google a giant supercomputer and that it is indeed capable of 20 petaflops 62 Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil s predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate with 7 failed predictions 4 partially true predictions and one correct one For example Kurzweil predicted The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition which was not the case 63 Annihilation of the human species Edit On a Lex Fridman September 17 2022 YouTube Podcast Kurzweil explained his worries about technology being used for violence When asked about nuclear armaggedon and the Russo Ukrainian War Kurzweil stated I don t think nuclear war is going to happen despite the terrors of that war It is a possibility but it s unlikely Even with the tensions we ve had with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant that s been taken over It s very tense but I don t actually see a lot of people worrying that s going to happen I think we ll avoid that We had two nuclear bombs go off in 1945 so now we re 77 years later we ve never had another one go off through anger there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons 64 Future predictions Edit In 1999 Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas In it he states that with radical life extension will come radical life enhancement He says he is confident that within 10 years we will have the option to spend some of our time in 3D virtual environments that appear just as real as real reality but these will not yet be made possible via direct interaction with our nervous system He expounded on his prediction regarding nanorobotics making the claim of within 20 years having millions of blood cell sized devices known as nanobots inside our bodies fighting diseases and improving our memory and cognitive abilities Kurzweil also claims that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029 Kurzweil states that humans will be a hybrid of biological and non biological intelligence that becomes increasingly dominated by its non biological component 65 In Transcendent Man Kurzweil states We humans are going to start linking with each other and become a metaconnection we will all be connected and omnipresent plugged into a global network that is connected to billions of people and filled with data 7 In 2008 Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth s people in 20 years According to Kurzweil we only need to capture 1 part in 10 000 of the energy from the Sun that hits Earth s surface to meet all of humanity s energy needs 66 Reception EditThis section may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints Please improve the article or discuss the issue on the talk page May 2022 Praise Edit Kurzweil was called the ultimate thinking machine by Forbes 67 and a restless genius 68 by The Wall Street Journal PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 revolutionaries who made America 69 along with other inventors of the past two centuries Inc magazine ranked him Number 8 among the most fascinating entrepreneurs in the US and called him Edison s rightful heir 70 Bill Gates called him the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence 71 Criticism Edit Although technological singularity is a popular concept in science fiction some authors such as Neal Stephenson 72 and Bruce Sterling have voiced skepticism about its real world plausibility Sterling expressed his views on the singularity scenario in a talk at the Long Now Foundation entitled The Singularity Your Future as a Black Hole 73 74 Other prominent AI thinkers and computer scientists such as Daniel Dennett 75 Rodney Brooks 76 David Gelernter 77 and Paul Allen 78 have also criticized Kurzweil s projections In the cover article of the December 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum John Rennie criticizes Kurzweil for several predictions that failed to become manifest by the originally predicted date Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil s brand of tech punditry On close examination his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable 79 Bill Joy cofounder of Sun Microsystems agrees with Kurzweil s timeline of future progress but thinks that technologies such as AI nanotechnology and advanced biotechnology will create a dystopian world 80 Mitch Kapor the founder of Lotus Development Corporation has called the notion of a technological singularity intelligent design for the IQ 140 people This proposition that we re heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different it s fundamentally in my view driven by a religious impulse And all of the frantic arm waving can t obscure that fact for me 20 Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has said of Kurzweil s and Hans Moravec s books It s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas and it s very hard to disentangle the two because these are smart people they re not stupid 81 Biologist P Z Myers has criticized Kurzweil s predictions as being based on New Age spiritualism rather than science and says that Kurzweil does not understand basic biology 82 83 VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has described Kurzweil s ideas as cybernetic totalism and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil s predictions in an essay for Edge Foundation entitled One Half of a Manifesto 43 84 Physicist and futurist Theodore Modis claims that Kurzweil s thesis of a technological singularity lacks scientific rigor 85 British philosopher John Gray argued that contemporary science is what magic was for ancient civilizations It gives a sense of hope for those who are willing to do almost anything to achieve eternal life He quotes Kurzweil s Singularity as another example of a trend which has almost always been present in the history of mankind 86 HP Newquist wrote in The Brain Makers Born with the same gift for self promotion that was a character trait of people like P T Barnum and Ed Feigenbaum Kurzweil had no problems talking up his technical prowess Ray Kurzweil was not noted for his understatement 87 In a 2015 paper William D Nordhaus of Yale University used a variety of econometric methods to run six supply side tests and one demand side test to track the macroeconomic viability of the required steep rises in information technology Only two indicated that a Singularity was economically possible and both predicted at least 100 years before it would occur 88 Ted Kaczynski criticized the idea of technological immortality proposed by Ray Kurzweil in his 2016 book Anti Tech Revolution Why and How 89 Awards and honors EditFirst place in the 1965 International Science Fair 12 for inventing the classical music synthesizing computer The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery The award is given annually to one outstanding young computer professional and is accompanied by a 35 000 prize 90 Kurzweil won it for his invention of the Kurzweil Reading Machine 91 In 1986 Kurzweil was named Honorary chairman for Innovation of the White House Conference on Small Business by President Reagan In 1987 Kurzweil received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee College of Music 92 In 1988 Kurzweil was named Inventor of the Year by MIT and the Boston Museum of Science 93 In 1990 Kurzweil was voted Engineer of the Year by the over one million readers of Design News Magazine and received their third annual Technology Achievement Award 93 94 The 1995 Dickson Prize in Science The 1998 Inventor of the Year award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 95 The 1999 National Medal of Technology 96 This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering new technologies and the President dispenses the award at his discretion 97 Bill Clinton presented Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil s development of computer based technologies to help the disabled In 2000 Kurzweil received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement 98 The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology 99 Two other individuals also received the same honor that year The award is presented yearly to people who exemplify the life times and standard of contribution of Tesla Westinghouse and Nunn The 2001 Lemelson MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help the disabled and to enrich the arts 100 Only one is awarded each year it is given to highly successful mid career inventors A 500 000 award accompanies the prize 101 Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine 102 The organization honors the women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make human social and economic progress possible 103 Fifteen other people were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year 104 The Arthur C Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20 2009 for lifetime achievement as an inventor and futurist in computer based technologies 105 In 2011 Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council 106 In 2013 Kurzweil was honored as a Silicon Valley Visionary Award winner on June 26 by SVForum 107 In 2014 Kurzweil was honored with the American Visionary Art Museum s Grand Visionary Award on January 30 108 109 110 In 2014 Kurzweil was inducted as an Eminent Member of IEEE Eta Kappa Nu Kurzweil has received 20 honorary doctorates in science engineering music and humane letters from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Hofstra University and other leading colleges and universities as well as honors from three U S presidents Clinton Reagan and Johnson 111 112 Kurzweil has received seven national and international film awards including the CINE Golden Eagle Award and the gold medal for Science Education from the International Film and TV Festival of New York 93 He gave a 2007 keynote speech to the Protestant United Church of Christ in Hartford Connecticut alongside Barack Obama who was then a Presidential candidate 113 114 Bibliography EditNon fiction Edit The Age of Intelligent Machines 1990 The 10 Solution for a Healthy Life 1993 The Age of Spiritual Machines 1999 Fantastic Voyage Live Long Enough to Live Forever 2004 co authored by Terry Grossman The Singularity Is Near 2005 Transcend Nine Steps to Living Well Forever 2009 How to Create a Mind 2012 Fiction Edit Danielle Chronicles of a Superheroine 2019 See also EditListen to this article 36 minutes source source This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 25 November 2011 2011 11 25 and does not reflect subsequent edits Audio help More spoken articles Technological singularity Paradigm shift Simulated realityReferences Edit Press Xiphias September 1 2016 The Universal Mind The Evolution of Machine Intelligence and Human Psychology Xiphias Press featured Reinvent Yourself the Playboy interview with Ray Kurzweil Kurzweil www kurzweilai net Retrieved November 26 2018 Kurzweil Ray 2005 The Singularity Is Near When Humans Transcend Biology United States Viking pp Prologue ISBN 978 0 670 03384 3 Interview Ray Kurzweil Glen Rifken March 18 1991 Computerworld Google Books Retrieved September 15 2014 On TV Ray Kurzweil Tells Me How to Build a Brain Ray Kurzweil How to Create a Mind The Secret of Human Thought Revealed The Diane Rehm Show from WAMU and NPR Retrieved September 15 2014 a b c d Answering all your questions about The Technological Singularity Retrieved October 3 2017 Inventor of the Week Web mit edu Archived from the original on January 2 2014 Retrieved April 21 2011 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link KurzweilAI net KurzweilAI net Archived from the original on February 22 2005 Retrieved April 21 2011 Ray Kurzweil Biography and Interview www achievement org American Academy of Achievement a b In Depth with Ray Kurzweil Book TV November 5 2006 Retrieved April 22 2015 a b Alumni Honors Society for Science and the Public Archived from the original on July 29 2012 Retrieved May 18 2010 Doug Aamoth April 2 2010 An Interview With Ray Kurzweil Time Time Inc Retrieved September 25 2014 a b Nerd of the Week Ray Kurzweil KurzweilAI Retrieved September 15 2014 Biography of Ray Kurzweil Kurzweiltech com January 13 1976 Retrieved March 27 2011 Donald Byrd and Christopher Yavelow 1986 The Kurzweil 250 Digital Synthesizer Computer Music Journal 10 1 64 86 doi 10 2307 3680298 JSTOR 3680298 Hyundai names Kurzweil Chief Strategy Officer of Kurzweil Music Systems Kurzweilai net February 1 2007 Archived from the original on May 13 2009 Retrieved April 27 2012 LERNOUT amp HAUSPIE TO BUY KURZWEIL APPLIED INTELLIGENCE The New York Times List of Private Companies Worldwide BusinessWeek Businessweek com Retrieved September 15 2014 a b O Keefe Brian May 2 2007 The Smartest or the Nuttiest Futurist on Earth CNN Retrieved July 26 2016 Letzing John December 14 2012 Google Hires Famed Futurist Ray Kurzweil The Wall Street Journal Retrieved February 13 2013 Exclusive Interview Ray Kurzweil Discusses His First Two Months at Google March 19 2013 a b Will Google s Ray Kurzweil Live Forever WSJ April 12 2013 Retrieved September 15 2014 The Bee Gees Pierre Boulez Buddy Guy George Harrison Flaco Jimenez Louvin Brothers and Wayne Shorter honored with the Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award grammy org December 18 2014 Archived from the original on June 11 2016 Retrieved February 11 2015 Philipkoski Kirsten November 18 2002 Ray Kurzweil s Plan Never Die Wired Retrieved February 11 2013 a b CNN Transcript CNN May 30 2008 Retrieved January 5 2016 The Immortal Ambitions of Ray Kurzweil A Review of Transcendent Man Scientific American John Rennie February 15 2011 Ray Kurzweil Founder Chairman amp CEO Kurzweil Technologies CRN com CRN December 9 2005 Retrieved September 15 2014 Ask Ray Article on integrating digital media into children s lives by my wife Sonya Kurzweil PhD KurzweilAI Retrieved September 15 2014 Efrati Amir March 6 2013 Father and Son Peer Into the Future of Tech The Wall Street Journal Retrieved October 28 2014 An Oral History Interview with Ray Kurzweil Part 1 of 4 American Foundation for the Blind Retrieved October 28 2014 Kurzweil A 2016 Flying couch A graphic memoir Catapult The University of Akron Speeches amp Statements Archived from the original on April 19 2014 Nanotechnology Ray Kurzweil Interviewed by Sander Olson Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Retrieved September 15 2014 Colin Johnson December 28 1998 Era of Smart People is Dawning Electronic Engineering Times Transcend Nine Steps to Living Well Forever Rayandterry com Retrieved October 26 2014 Ray Kurzweil s How to Create a Mind published KurzweilAInet November 17 2012 Retrieved October 26 2014 Kurzweil Ray 2012 How to Create a Mind The Secret of Human Thought Revealed New York Viking Books ISBN 978 0 670 02529 9 Review of Danielle www forewordreviews com Retrieved November 20 2019 Ready to change the world Retrieved August 14 2018 Kurzweil Ray January 1 2020 celebrating 15 year anniversary of the book the Singularity Is Near kurzweilai net Retrieved October 10 2020 Plug amp Pray December 8 2010 Retrieved October 17 2021 a b The Singularity A Documentary by Doug Wolens Ieet org Retrieved October 22 2013 Ray Kurzweil The Age of Spiritual Machines Viking 1999 p 30 and p 32 The Law of Accelerating Returns Retrieved September 15 2014 Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill PDF July 2006 Archived from the original on October 23 2013 Retrieved June 16 2011 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses KurzweilAI Retrieved July 28 2013 Never Say Die Live Forever WIRED Archived from the original on February 24 2007 Retrieved September 15 2014 a href Template Cite magazine html title Template Cite magazine cite magazine a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link The 700 calorie breakfast you should eat if you want to live forever according to a futurist who spends 1 million a year on pills and eating right Business Insider Retrieved March 3 2019 As Humans and Computers Merge Immortality PBS NewsHour July 10 2012 PBS July 3 2012 Archived from the original on January 22 2014 Retrieved July 11 2012 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Ray Kurzweil At SENS 3 Video Exponential Times August 25 2011 Retrieved July 28 2013 Board Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Singularity University Archived from the original on April 21 2010 Retrieved September 15 2014 Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards Retrieved September 15 2014 Printable version Smarter than thou Stanford conference ponders a brave new world with machines more powerful than their creators SFGate May 12 2006 Retrieved September 15 2014 Sentient AI Convincing you it s human is just part of LaMDA s job Healthcare IT News July 5 2022 Retrieved July 7 2022 Kurzweil Ray February 16 2003 Human Body Version 2 0 Kurzweilai et Retrieved July 7 2022 Kurzweil Ray 1990 The Age of Intelligent Machines Cambridge MA MIT Press p 446 ISBN 0 262 11121 7 Kurzweil Ray 1990 The Age of Intelligent Machines Cambridge MA MIT Press p 133 ISBN 0 262 11121 7 Weber Bruce May 12 1997 Swift and Slashing Computer Topples Kasparov The New York Times Retrieved February 13 2013 Fleeing the dot com era decline in Internet usage Archived from the original on June 29 2012 Retrieved September 15 2014 http www kurzweilai net images How My Predictions Are Faring pdf bare URL PDF a b Lyons Daniel May 2009 I Robot Newsweek Archived from the original on April 13 2010 Retrieved May 22 2009 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link via Kurzweil Ray 2012 Ray Kurzweil s Predictions For 2009 Were Mostly Inaccurate Forbes Retrieved January 5 2016 Ray Kurzweil Singularity Superintelligence and Immortality On The War in Ukraine Lex Fridman Podcast 321 September 17 2022 439 132 views 53 51 to 55 54 Lex Fridman Eugenios Jillian June 3 2015 Ray Kurzweil Humans will be hybrids by 2030 CNNMoney Retrieved September 1 2022 Solar Power to Rule in 20 Years Futurists Say LiveScience February 19 2008 Retrieved March 27 2011 Pfeiffer Eric April 6 1998 Start Up Forbes Retrieved on January 25 2013 Bulkeley William June 23 1989 Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc The Wall Street Journal p A3A Among the leaders is Kurzweil a closely held company run by Raymond Kurzweil a restless 41 year old genius who developed both optical character recognition and speech synthesis to make a machine that reads aloud to the blind Who Made America PBS Retrieved February 9 2013 26 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs Inc Retrieved February 9 2013 CNN com Gates Get ready for chip implants Jul 4 2005 July 8 2005 Archived from the original on July 8 2005 Retrieved September 1 2022 Miller Robin October 20 2004 Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor Slashdot Retrieved August 28 2008 My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time software is shit I am paraphrasing his argument And without software to do something useful with all that hardware the hardware s nothing more than a really complicated space heater Brand Stewart June 14 2004 Bruce Sterling The Singularity Your Future as a Black Hole The Long Now Foundation Retrieved June 8 2009 Sterling Bruce The Singularity Your Future as a Black Hole Archived from the original on October 4 2008 It s an end of history notion and like most end of history notions it is showing its age a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Dennett Daniel The Reality Club One Half Of A Manifesto Edge org I m glad that Lanier entertains the hunch that Dawkins and I and Hofstadter and others see some flaw in logic that insulates our thinking from the eschatalogical implications drawn by Kurzweil and Moravec He s right I for one do see such a flaw and I expect Dawkins and Hofstadter would say the same Brooks Rodney The Reality Club One Half Of A Manifesto Edge org Archived from the original on November 7 2015 Retrieved January 5 2016 I do not at all agree with Moravec and Kurzweil s predictions for an eschatological cataclysm just in time for their own memories and thoughts and person hood to be preserved before they might otherwise die Transcript of debate over feasibility of near term AI moderated by Rodney Brooks Gelernter Kurzweil debate machine consciousness KurzweilAI net Archived from the original on November 7 2015 Retrieved January 5 2016 Paul Allen The Singularity Isn t Near MIT Technology Review Retrieved July 25 2022 Kurzweil s reasoning rests on the Law of Accelerating Returns and its siblings but these are not physical laws They are assertions about how past rates of scientific and technical progress can predict the future rate Therefore like other attempts to forecast the future from the past these laws will work until they don t Rennie John December 2010 Ray Kurzweil s Slippery Futurism IEEE Spectrum Retrieved August 13 2012 Joy Bill April 2000 Why the future doesn t need us Wired Retrieved September 21 2008 it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil Ross Greg An interview with Douglas R Hofstadter American Scientist Retrieved August 28 2008 Lyons Daniel May 2009 I Robot Newsweek Archived from the original on April 13 2010 Retrieved July 24 2009 Still a lot of people think Kurzweil is completely bonkers and or full of a certain messy byproduct of ordinary biological functions They include P Z Myers a biologist at the University of Minnesota Morris who has used his blog to poke fun at Kurzweil and other armchair futurists who according to Myers rely on junk science and don t understand basic biology I am completely baffled by Kurzweil s popularity and in particular the respect he gets in some circles since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination writes Myers He says Kurzweil s Singularity theories are closer to a deluded religious movement than they are to science It s a New Age spiritualism that s all it is Myers says Even geeks want to find God somewhere and Kurzweil provides it for them a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link via Myers PZ Singularitarianism Pharyngula blog Archived from the original on May 8 2012 Retrieved February 14 2011 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Lanier Jaron One Half of a Manifesto Edge org Retrieved August 28 2008 Modis T The Singularity Myth Technological Forecasting amp Social Change February 2006 pp 104 112 http www growth dynamics com articles Kurzweil critique pdf Gray John 2011 The Immortalization Commission Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death Farrar Straus and Giroux ISBN 978 0374175061 Newquist HP 1994 The Brain Makers New York NY Macmillan SAMS Press p 269 ISBN 0 672 30412 0 Nordhaus William D Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No 2021 Yale University September 2015 Theodore John Kaczynski Anti Tech Revolution Why and How Fitch amp Madison 2020 pp 77 83 ACM Awards Grace Murray Hopper Award Retrieved September 15 2014 ACM Fellows Award Raymond Kurzweil Archived from the original on April 19 2012 Retrieved September 15 2014 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Curriculum Vitae KurzweilAI Archived from the original on July 1 2014 Retrieved May 9 2014 a b c Ray Kurzweil KurzweilAI Retrieved September 15 2014 Engineer of the Year Hall of Fame 6 12 2007 Archived from the original on January 20 2008 Corporation names new members MIT News June 8 2005 Retrieved September 15 2014 Technology Administration THE NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY RECIPIENTS 1985 2006 Recipients Archived from the original on September 28 2007 Retrieved September 15 2014 Technology Administration THE NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY 2007 Events and Activities Archived from the original on December 18 2007 Retrieved September 15 2014 Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement www achievement org American Academy of Achievement Telluride Tech Festival Archived from the original on October 17 2011 Retrieved September 15 2014 Winners Circle Raymond Kurzweil Archived from the original on January 2 2014 Retrieved September 15 2014 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Lemelson MIT Prize Archived from the original on February 20 2014 Retrieved September 15 2014 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Ray Kurzweil Inventor Profile https web archive org web 20151102094422 http www invent org hall of fame 180 html Invent org February 12 1948 Retrieved on June 16 2011 Hall of Fame Overview https web archive org web 20151124091911 http www invent org hall of fame 1 0 0 hall of fame asp Invent org Retrieved on June 16 2011 Hall of Fame 2002 https web archive org web 20151102094426 http invent org hall of fame 1 1 4 listing induction asp vInduction 2002 Invent org Retrieved on June 16 2011 The Arthur C Clarke Foundation Clarkefoundation org April 20 2009 Archived from the original on April 5 2012 Retrieved March 27 2011 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Design Futures Council Senior Fellows Di net Archived from the original on November 6 2007 Visionary Awardees Kurzweil Warrior Blank Diamandis Hear what they had to say about their achievements Ray Kurzweil to be honored with AVAM s Grand Visionary Award at 2014 Gala Celebration PDF Azam org Retrieved October 26 2014 AVAM s 2014 Gala Celebration Honoring Ray Kurzweil at American Visionary Art Museum CBS Baltimore s Latest Events Events Baltimore Events CBS Baltimore Eventful Archived from the original on October 26 2014 Retrieved September 15 2014 A tour with Ray Adventure in art and dance at the American Visionary Art Museum award gala honoring Ray Kurzweil KurzweilAI Retrieved September 15 2014 Ray Kurzweil biography KurzweilAINetwork Archived from the original on February 5 2014 Retrieved September 25 2014 Raymond Kurzweil Forbes Archived from the original on April 23 2012 Retrieved September 15 2014 The Universal Mind The Evolution of Machine Intelligence and Human Psychology Xiphias Press September 2016 First Congregational Church United Church of Christ Waterville Maine message External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Ray Kurzweil Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ray Kurzweil Official website Appearances on C SPAN Raymond Kurzweil at IMDb Ray Kurzweil Interview Oral History NAMM January 20 2007 Official Danielle Superheroine website Portals Biography Books Business and economics Film Internet Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Ray Kurzweil amp oldid 1119538944 Predictions, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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