Jump to content

Ray Kurzweil

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 67.164.64.247 (talk) at 03:40, 15 May 2006 (→Transhumanism and future studies: Singularity Summit at Stanford University.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Raymond Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced /'kɚtz.waɪl/) (b. 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 is often in the realms of futurology.

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 12 he had programmed his first computer. Shortly after his discovery of programming, he appeared on the CBS television programme I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he had built. In 1968 he sold a company he created that matched high schoolers with prospective colleges by answering a 200 question survey. He earned a B.Sc 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, 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 eleven honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.

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 25 year old female rock star alter ego, "Ramona", who he regularly performs as through virtual reality technology [1]. 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". [2]

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.

Transhumanism and future studies

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

In his 2001 essay, The Law of Accelerating Returns, [3], Ray Kurzweil proposed a generalization 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 21st 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.

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." [4]

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

On Saturday May 13th, 2006, Kurzweil attanded the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. He was the first speaker at the event.

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.

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.

See also

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ray_Kurzweil&oldid=53257367"