Raymond Kurzweil

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Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil at Stanford University in 2006
Born February 12, 1948
Queens, New York, United States
Occupation Author, Scientist, & Futurist
Spouse Sonya Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced: [kɚz-waɪl]) (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the technological singularity. His work often leads into the realm of futurism.

Contents

[edit] Life, inventions, and awards

Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York. In his youth, he was an avid consumer of science fiction literature. By the age of twelve he had written his first computer program. Shortly after his discovery of programming, he appeared on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he had built. In 1968, at the age of twenty, he sold a company he created that matched high schoolers with prospective colleges by answering a 200 question survey. He earned a SB in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from MIT.

Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.

He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen “revolutionaries who made America” [1], along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

Kurzweil's musical keyboards company Kurzweil Music Systems produces among the most sophisticated and realistic (and expensive) synthesized-sound creation instruments. Ray sold Kurzweil Music Systems in the early 1990s to Korean piano manufacturer Young Chang. He has no current involvement with Young Chang or Kurzweil Music Systems.

Kurzweil has also created his own twenty five year old female rock star alter ego, "Ramona", who he regularly performs as through virtual reality technology [2] to illustrate the as-yet untapped possibilities of computers to enhance and alter our interpersonal interactions. This project inspired the plot of the movie S1m0ne.

In 2005, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called Ray Kurzweil "the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence". [3]

Kurzweil has been associated with the National Federation of the Blind, many of whose members use his products. After speaking at their convention in 2005, he received a special award, an honor received by few sighted people.

He currently works out of his office in Wellesley, Massachusetts [4].

He is on the Army Science Advisory Board and has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology.

A 1998 discussion at a bar with Bill Joy inspired Joy's unease at the rapid evolution of NBIC technologies, which he wrote about in his famous Wired Magazine article "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" [5].

[edit] The Law of Accelerating Returns and Transhumanism

A logarithmic chart Kurzweil produced to depict his Law of Accelerating Returns
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A logarithmic chart Kurzweil produced to depict his Law of Accelerating Returns

In his 2001 essay, "The Law of Accelerating Returns", [6], Ray Kurzweil proposes an extension of Moore's law that forms the basis of many people's beliefs regarding a "Technological Singularity". Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Kurzweil extended this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of computation. He declared that, whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He predicts that such paradigm shifts will become more and more common as time goes on. He believes that the exponential growth of Moore's law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the "Singularity", which he defines as a technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.

Kurzweil writes:

"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive linear' view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the twenty first century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The 'returns,' such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."
Another of Kurzweil's charts shows exponential growth in supercomputer power and marks points at which he predicts human simulation will be possible.
Enlarge
Another of Kurzweil's charts shows exponential growth in supercomputer power and marks points at which he predicts human simulation will be possible.

Kurzweil is also an enthusiastic advocate of using technology to achieve immortality. He advocates using nanobots to maintain the human body, but given their present non-existence he adheres instead to a strict daily routine involving ingesting "250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea" to extend his life until more effective technology is available. [7]

In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

On May 13, 2006, Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Stanford University Singularity Summit.

In August 2006, Kurzweil made a brief appearance on The Daily Show in a Samantha Bee segment entitled "Future Shock", in which she jestingly asked him when people will be able to have sex with robots.

Futurism, as a philosophical or academic study, looks at the medium to long-term future in an attempt to predict based on current trends. Raymond Kurzweil states his belief that the future of humanity is being determined by an exponential expansion of knowledge, and that the very rate of the change of this exponential growth is driving our collective destiny irrespective of our narrow sightedness, clinging archaisms, or fear of change. Our biological evolution, according to Kurzweil, is on the verge of being superseded by our technological evolution. An evolution conjoined of cogent biological manipulation with a possible emerging self-aware, self-organizing machine intelligence. The rate of the change of the exponential explosion of knowledge and technology not only envelops us, but it also irreversibly transforms us.

Accordingly, in Kurzweil's predictions, we are currently (as of the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first century) exiting the era in which our human biology is closed to us, and entering into the posthuman era, in which our extensive knowledge of biochemistry, neurology and cybernetics will allow us to rebuild our bodies and our minds from the ground up.

Kurzweil is generally considered to be amongst the most personally optimistic of futurists. However, the ultimate future he envisions often leaves some of his less technophilic colleagues cringing at the overtones of a future which has often been portrayed in science fiction as dystopian: one in which humans are fused with or dominated by machines and technology so thoroughly that human meaning and the "human spirit" are lost completely.

[edit] Published books

Kurzweil's most recent book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), deals with the fields of genetics, nanotech, robotics, and the rapidly changing definition of humanity.

Other works by Kurzweil:

  • The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990)
  • The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life (1994)
  • The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)
  • Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004)
  • The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)
  • The Ray Kurzweil Reader: The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as "How to Build a Brain"), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine" and "Human Body Version 2.0."
  • Kurzweil is the co-author (and subject) of the 2002 book Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I.. He also wrote the introduction to the 2003 artificial personality book Virtual Humans and collaborated with the Canadian band Our Lady Peace for their 2000 album Spiritual Machines.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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