Raymond Kurzweil

Kurzweil is a prominent transhumanist who gives lectures about his optimistic outlook on the possibility of life extension via nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology. Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He received the $500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize in 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. He has 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".

Raymond Kurzweil studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Martin Van Buren High School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is futures studies, computer programming and optical character recognition. Residence is recorded at United States. Employment is recorded with Google. Works named in the authority record are predictions made by Ray Kurzweil. Distinctions recorded are Grace Murray Hopper Award, Lemelson–MIT Prize, National Medal of Technology and Innovation and National Inventors Hall of Fame.

• Name — Ray Kurzweil • Birth Name — Raymond Kurzweil • Born — 12 February 1948 • Birthplace — Queens, New York City, U.S. • Children — 2; including Amy • Occupation — * Computer scientist • Author • Entrepreneur • Futurist • Inventor • Known for — *His predictions • His books, especially The Singularity Is Near • The Law of Accelerating Returns • Co-founding Kurzweil Music Systems • Education — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) • Employer — Google • Awards — * Grace Murray Hopper Award (1978) • National Medal of Technology (1999) People

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. Through Unitarian Universalism he was exposed to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. His father, Fredric, was a concert pianist, a conductor and a music educator. His mother, Hannah, was a visual artist. He is the elder of two children; his sister Enid, an accountant in Santa Barbara, is six years his junior. As a boy, Kurzweil had an inventory of parts from various construction toys he had been given and old electronic gadgets he had collected from neighbors. In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction. At age eight, nine, and ten, he read the entire Tom Swift Jr. series. At age seven or eight, he built a robotic puppet theater and robotic game. He was involved with computers by age 12 (in 1960), when only a dozen computers existed in New York City, and built computing devices and statistical programs for the predecessor of Head Start. His parents were involved with the arts, and he is quoted in the documentary Transcendent Man as saying that the household always discussed the future and technology. Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught Kurzweil the basics of computer science. In 1963, at 15, he wrote his first computer program. Kurzweil created pattern-recognition software that analyzed the works of classical composers, 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, where he performed a piano piece composed by a computer he had built. Later in the year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; his submission to Westinghouse Talent Search of his first computer program alongside several other projects resulted in his being one of the contest's national winners, for which President Lyndon B. Johnson personally congratulated him during a White House ceremony. The experiences impressed upon Kurzweil the belief that nearly any problem could be overcome.

While in high school, Kurzweil had corresponded with Marvin Minsky and was invited to visit him at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he did. Kurzweil also visited Frank Rosenblatt, a psychologist at Cornell. He attended MIT to study with Minsky, obtaining a B.Sc. degree in computer science and literature in 1970. Kurzweil took all the computer programming courses (eight or nine) MIT offered in his 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 each student applicant submitted. Around that time he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000 plus royalties. In 1974, he 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 been able to read text in only a few fonts. He decided that the technology's best application would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand text by having a computer read it to them aloud. But the 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 like Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device was large and covered an entire tabletop. Stevie Wonder heard about the demonstration of this new machine on The Today Show, and later became the user of the first production Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a long-term association with Kurzweil. 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 to its nascent online databases. He sold Kurzweil Computer Products to Xerox, where it was first known as Xerox Imaging Systems and later as Scansoft; he was 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 electronic music technology. After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder, in which Wonder lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of synthesizers that could duplicate the sounds of real instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year, and in 1984, the Kurzweil K250 was unveiled. The machine could imitate a number of instruments, and according to Kurzweil's press packet, musicians could not tell the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode and a grand piano, though reviewers who actually attempted it questioned that. The machine's recording and mixing abilities coupled with its ability to imitate different instruments made it possible for a single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece. South Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang bought Kurzweil Music Systems in 1990. As with Xerox, Kurzweil remained as a consultant for several years. Hyundai acquired Young Chang in 2006, and in 2007 appointed Kurzweil as Chief Strategy Officer of Kurzweil Music Systems. Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems, he 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.

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, a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills. Kurzweil sold KESI to Lernout & Hauspie. After the legal and bankruptcy problems of the latter, he and other KESI employees bought back the company. KESI was eventually sold to Cambium Learning Group, Inc. • Illustration — Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in 2006 During the 1990s, Kurzweil founded the Medical Learning Company. In 1999, Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat" (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies), which began trading in 2006. He has said 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". In his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicted that computers would one day be better than humans 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, Google hired Kurzweil in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing". Google co-founder Larry Page personally hired him. Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google". Kurzweil received a Technical Grammy Award on February 8, 2015, specifically for his invention of the Kurzweil K250. Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. After his death, he has a plan 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 revive him.

Kurzweil is agnostic about the existence of a soul. Of the possibility of divine intelligence, Kurzweil has said: "Does God exist? I would say 'Not yet. He married Sonya Rosenwald Kurzweil in 1975. Sonya is a psychologist in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts; she works with women, children, parents, and families. She holds faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and William James College in graduate education in psychology. Her research interests and publications are in psychotherapy practice. She also serves as an active overseer at Boston Children's Museum. Ray and Sonya Kurzweil have a son, Ethan, a venture capitalist, and a daughter, Amy, a cartoonist.

Kurzweil has said: "I realize that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can't get them to work, but because the timing is wrongnot 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." For the past several decades, Kurzweil's most effective and common approach to doing creative work has been conducted during a lucid dreamlike state immediately preceding his waking state. He claims to have constructed inventions, solved algorithmic, business strategy, organizational, and interpersonal problems, and written speeches in this state.

On December 12, 2000, Columbia Records released the Canadian alternative rock band Our Lady Peace's album Spiritual Machines. Although not initially so intended, the project evolved into a conceptual interpretation of Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. The band emailed Kurzweil to ask permission to use the title of his book for their project. Kurzweil's excitement at the prospect prompted them to invite him to record spoken excerpts from his book for the album. As a result, short tracks of spoken dialog by Kurzweil are interspersed among the album's songs. The Kurzweil K250 keyboard is also used on the album.

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. His 2001 essay "The Law of Accelerating Returns" proposes an extension of Moore's law to a wide variety of technologies and argues in favor of John von Neumann's concept of a technological singularity.

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 a bioterrorist could use the same technologies that empower us to reprogram biology away from cancer and heart disease to reprogram a virus to be more deadly, communicable, and stealthy. But he suggests we have the scientific tools to defend against such an attack, much as we defend against computer software viruses. Kurzweil has testified before Congress on nanotechnology, saying that it has the potential to solve serious global problems such as poverty, disease, and climate change: "Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill". In media appearances, Kurzweil has stressed nanotechnology's extreme potential dangers 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 said: "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."

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). He then found a doctor, Terry Grossman, with whom he developed an unconventional 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 of green tea" every day and drinking several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry. By 2008, he had reduced the number of supplement pills to 150. By 2015, Kurzweil further reduced his daily pill regimen to 100 pills. Kurzweil asserts that in the future, everyone will live forever. 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". 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.

Kurzweil's standing as a futurist and transhumanist has led to his involvement in several singularity-themed organizations. In 2004, he joined the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. In 2005, he joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation. On May 13, 2006, Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In 2013, he was the keynote speaker at the Research, Innovation, Start-up and Employment (RISE) international conference in Seoul. In 2009, Kurzweil, 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 believes that understanding all their functions could be the key to building truly sentient AI.

Kurzweil advocates universal basic income (UBI), arguing that progress in science and technology will lead to an abundance of virtually free resources, enabling every citizen to live without the need to work: "We are clearly headed toward a situation where everyone can live very well". According to him, the major hurdle to introducing UBI is not its feasibility, but political will, which is slowly emerging. In a 2018 TED Talk, he predicted that "in the early 2030s, we'll have universal basic income in the developed world, and worldwide by the end of the 2030s. You'll be able to live very well on that. The primary concern will be meaning and purpose."

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 of the flow of information. In the book, Kurzweil also extrapolates trends in improving computer chess software performance, predicting that computers will beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer defeated World Champion Garry Kasparov in a well-publicized match. Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. When The Age of Intelligent Machines was published, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content. He also said that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content, 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 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, analyzing the predictions he made in his books The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and The Singularity is Near. Of the 147 predictions, Kurzweil claimed that 115 were "entirely correct", 12 were "essentially correct", 17 were "partially correct", and three were "wrong". Combining the "entirely" and "essentially" correct, Kurzweil's claimed accuracy rate comes to 86%. In Newsweek magazine, Daniel Lyons criticized Kurzweil for some of his incorrect predictions for 2009, such as that the economy would continue to boom, that a U.S. company would have a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion, that a supercomputer would achieve 20 petaflops, that speech recognition would be in widespread use, and that cars would drive themselves using sensors installed in highways. To the charge that a 20-petaflop supercomputer had not been produced, Kurzweil responded that he considered Google a giant supercomputer, and that it was indeed capable of 20 petaflops. Forbes magazine claimed that Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate, with seven incorrect, four partially correct, and one correct. For example, Kurzweil predicted, "The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition", which was not the case.

In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which explains his futurist ideas in more depth. In it, he says 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 reality, but that they will not yet be able to directly interact with our nervous system. He expounds on his prediction about nanorobotics, claiming that within 20 years millions of blood-cell sized devices, called nanobots, will fight disease inside our bodies and improve our memory and cognitive abilities. Kurzweil also believes a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029. He says that humans will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence that becomes increasingly dominated by its non-biological component. In Transcendent Man, he writes, "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." In 2008, Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all of humanity's energy needs in 20 years. According to him, we need to capture only 1 part in 10,000 of the energy from the Sun that hits Earth's surface to meet all of humanity's energy needs.

• 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 with Dr. Terry Grossman) • The Singularity Is Near (2005) • Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009 – co-authored with Dr. Terry Grossman) • How to Create a Mind (2012) • The Singularity Is Nearer (2024)

• Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine (2019)

The authorities additionally record the headings Ray Kurzweil, the ultimate thinking machine, Edison's rightful heir, RK and restless genius. His recorded language was English. His recorded confession was atheism. One child is recorded: Amy Kurzweil.

Raymond Kurzweil worked in futures studies, computer programming, optical character recognition, speech synthesis and speech recognition. He was employed by Google. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Association for Computing Machinery. He worked at United States.

Raymond Kurzweil is recorded as having studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Martin Van Buren High School.