Ray Kurzweil

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Ray Kurzweil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/krzwal/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, inventor, futurist, and is a director of engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in elds such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, articial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, as has been displayed in his vast collection of public talks, wherein he has shared his primarily optimistic outlooks on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the [2] rst CCD atbed scanner, the rst [2] omni-font optical character recognition, the rst print-to-speech reading machine [3] for the blind, the rst commercial [4] text-to-speech synthesizer, the rst music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the rst commercially marketed large-vocabulary [5] speech recognition.
Ray Kurzweil
Born
February 12, 1948 Queens, New York, U.S.
Nationality American Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S.) Occupation Author, entrepreneur, futurist and inventor Employer Spouse(s) Children Awards Google Inc. Sonya Rosenwald Fenster (1975present)[1] Ethan, Amy Grace Murray Hopper Award (1978) National Medal of
Kurzweil received the 1999 National Technology (1999) Medal of Technology and Innovation, America's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He was the recipient of the [6] $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2001, the world's largest for innovation. And in 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Oce. He has received nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors [7] from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has been described as a "restless genius"
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by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" [8] by Forbes. PBS [9] included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him [10] "Edison's rightful heir". Kurzweil has authored seven books, ve of which have been national bestsellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in science. Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near was a New York Times bestseller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. His latest bestseller is How to Create a Mind: The [11] Kurzweil speaks widely to audiences Secret of Human Thought Revealed. public and private and regularly delivers keynote speeches at industry conferences like DEMO, SXSW and TED. His website catalogs his public speaking, [12] He maintains the news website, publications and media appearances. KurzweilAI.net (http://www.kurzweilai.net/), which has over three million readers [13] annually.
Contents
1 Life, inventions, and business career 1.1 Early life 1.2 Mid-life 1.3 Later life 2 Books 3 Views 3.1 Encouraging futurism and transhumanism 3.2 Stance on the future of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics 3.3 The Law of Accelerating Returns 3.4 Health and aging 3.5 Kurzweil's view of the human neocortex 4 Predictions 4.1 Past predictions 4.2 Future predictions 5 Reception 5.1 Praise 5.2 Criticism 6 See also 7 References 8 External links
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Life, inventions, and business career

Early life
Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious [14] and panpsychist.[15] His faiths during his upbringing. Kurzweil is an agnostic father was a musician, a noted conductor, and a music educator. His mother was a visual artist. Kurzweil decided he wanted to be an inventor at the age of 5. In his youth, Kurzweil was an avid reader of science ction literature. At the age of eight, nine, and ten, he read the entire Tom Swift Jr. series. When he was 8 or 9 years old, he built such things as a robotic theater and robotic game. He was involved with computers and built computing devices by the age of 12. At the age of 14, Kurzweil wrote a paper describing his theory of the neocortex, which he later submitted alongside several other projects for the Westinghouse Science [16] Talent Search. 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, [17] In 1963, at age fteen, taught young Kurzweil the basics of computer science. [18] He created a pattern-recognition he wrote his rst computer program. software program 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, where he performed a piano piece [19] Later that year, he won that was composed by a computer he also had built. [20] Kurzweil's rst prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; submission to Westinghouse Talent Search of his rst 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 [21] Kurzweil the belief that nearly any problem could be overcome.
Mid-life
He obtained a B.S. in computer science and literature in 1970 at MIT. He went to MIT to study with Marvin Minsky who became a mentor of sorts. He took all of the computer programming courses oered at MIT in the rst year and a half. In 1968, during his sophomore 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
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thousands of dierent 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 $672,841.95 in 2013 dollars) plus [22] royalties. In 1974, Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the rst 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 technologiesthe CCD atbed 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 nished 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. It gained him mainstream recognition: on the day of the machine's unveiling, Walter Cronkite used the machine to give his signature soundo, "And that's the way it is, January 13, 1976." While listening to The Today Show, musician Stevie Wonder heard a demonstration of the device and purchased the rst production version of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a lifelong friendship 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 rst customers, and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents onto its nascent online databases. Kurzweil sold his company to Lernout & Hauspie. Following the bankruptcy of the latter, the system became a subsidiary of Xerox formerly known as Scansoft and now as Nuance Communications, and he functioned as a consultant for the former until 1995. 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 dierence [23] The between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano. recording and mixing abilities of the machine, coupled with its abilities to imitate dierent instruments made it possible for a single user to compose and play an
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entire orchestral piece. Kurzweil Music Systems was sold to 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 Ocer of Kurzweil Music [24] Systems.
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 rst product, which debuted in 1987, was an early speech recognition program. Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 to develop new patternrecognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia and ADD in school. Products include the Kurzweil 1000 text-tospeech 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. During the 1990s Kurzweil founded the [25] The company's Medical Learning Company. products included an interactive computer education program for doctors and a computersimulated patient. Around the same time, Kurzweil started KurzweilCyberArt.coma website featuring computer programs to assist the creative art process. The site used to oer free downloads of a program called AARONa visual art synthesizer developed by Harold Cohenand of "Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet", which automatically creates poetry. During this period he also started KurzweilAI.net, a website devoted towards showcasing news of scientic developments, publicizing the ideas of high-tech thinkers and critics alike, and promoting futurist-related discussion among the general population through the Mind-X
Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford in 2006
forum. 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.
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investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in [26] He predicted in his 1999 "currency uctuations and stock-ownership trends." book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, that computers will one day prove superior to the best human nancial minds at making protable investment decisions. In 2001, Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace released an album, titled Spiritual Machines, based on Kurzweil's book. Kurzweil's voice was featured in the album, reading excerpts from his book. 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 atbed scanning. Kurzweil made a movie called The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the [27] in 2010 based, in part, on his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. Part Future ction, part non-ction, he interviews 20 big thinkers like Marvin Minsky, plus there is a B-line narrative story that illustrates some of the ideas, where a computer avatar (Ramona) 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. Filmmakers Barry Ptolemy and Felicia Ptolemy followed Kurzweil, documenting his global [27] Transcendent speaking-tour. Premiered in 2009 at the Tribeca Film Festival, Man documents Kurzweil's quest to reveal mankind's ultimate destiny and explores many of the ideas found in his New York Times bestselling book, The Singularity Is Near, including his concept exponential growth, radical life expansion, and how we will transcend our biology. The Ptolemys documented Kurzweil's stated goal of bringing back his late father using AI. The lm also features critics who argue against Kurzweil's predictions. In 2010, an independent documentary lm called Plug & Pray premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival, in which Kurzweil and one of his major critics, [28] the late Joseph Weizenbaum, argue about the benets of eternal life. Kurzweil frequently comments on the application of cell-size nanotechnology to the workings of the human brain and how this could be applied to building AI. While being interviewed for a February 2009 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Kurzweil expressed a desire to construct a genetic copy of his late father, Fredric Kurzweil, from DNA within his grave site. This feat would be achieved by exhumation and extraction of DNA, constructing a clone of Fredric and retrieving [29] memories and recollectionsfrom Ray's mindof his father. In December 2012 Kurzweil was hired by Google in a full-time position to "work [30] Google on new projects involving machine learning and language processing".
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co-founder Larry Page and Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to [31] bring natural language understanding to Google". Kurzweil is married with two children. His wife, Sonya Rosenwald Fenster, whom he married in 1975, is a child psychologist, while his son works as a venture [32] capitalist and his daughter a choreographer.
Books
Kurzweil's rst book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published in 1990. The nonction work discusses the history of computer articial intelligence (AI) and forecasts future developments. Other experts in the eld of AI contribute heavily to the work in the form of essays. The Association of American Publishers' [33] awarded it the status of Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990. 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 [34] In February 2007, Ptolemaic Productions acquired the Perrette from NCIS. rights to The Singularity is Near, The Age of Spiritual Machines and Fantastic Voyage including the rights to lm Kurzweil's life and ideas for the documentary lm Transcendent Man, which was directed by Barry Ptolemy. Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, was released on April 28, 2009.
[35]
a follow-up to Fantastic Voyage,
Kurzweil's latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought [36] In it Kurzweil describes his Pattern Revealed, was released on Nov. 13, 2012. Recognition Theory of Mind, the theory that the neocortex is a hierarchical system of pattern recognizers, and argues that duplicating this architecture in [37] machines could lead to an articial superintelligence.
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Kurzweil is also writing a novel called Danielle, about his imaginary superheroine [38] daughter who solves problems through intelligence.
Views
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 [39] In October advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Articial Intelligence. [40] 2005, Kurzweil joined the scientic advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation. On May 13, 2006, Kurzweil was the rst speaker at the Singularity Summit at [41] In May 2013, Kurzweil was the keynote speaker at the 2013 Stanford. proceeding of the Research, Innovation, Start-up and Employment (RISE) [42] international conference in Seoul, Korea Republic. 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 ocials. 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 [43] Using Vernor Vinge's Singularity concept as a foundation, the challenges". university oered its rst nine-week graduate program to 40 students in June, 2009.
Stance on the future of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics

Kurzweil is working with the Army Science Advisory Board to develop a rapid response system to deal with the possible abuse of biotechnology. He suggests 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. Fortunately, he believes that we have the scientic tools to successfully defend against these attacks, similar to the way we defend against computer software viruses. He has testied 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, viz. "Nanotech Could Give Global Warming [44] In media appearances, Kurzweil has also stressed the extreme a Big Chill". [19] but argues that in practice, progress potential dangers of nanotechnology 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
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place of regulation is to ensure that technological progress proceeds safely and quickly, but does not deprive the world of profound benets. 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 [45] knowledge and diversity."
The Law of Accelerating Returns

Main article: Accelerating change 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 [46] He gave further focus to this issue in a 2001 essay entitled "The exponentially. 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 Vernor Vinge's [47] Kurzweil suggests that this exponential concept of a technological singularity. technological growth is counter-intuitive to the way our brains perceive the world- since our brains were biologically inherited from humans living in a world that was linear and local- and, as a consequence, he believes it has encouraged great skepticism in his future projections.
Health and aging

Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was found to suer 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, M.D.) who shares his non-conventional beliefs to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine and various other methods to attempt to live longer. 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 eort to "reprogram" his [48] Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to biochemistry. [49] 150. Kurzweil joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. In the event of his declared death, Kurzweil will be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitried in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future [50] medical technology will be able to repair his tissues and revive him.
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He has authored three books on the subjects of nutrition, health and immortality: The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live [51] In all, he Forever and Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever. recommends that other people emulate his health practices to the best of their abilities. Kurzweil and his current "anti-aging" doctor, Terry Grossman, MD., now [52] and second book.[53] have two websites promoting their rst He has stated that he believes that in the future, everyone will live forever. [54] In a 2013 interview, Kurzweil 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 been an extreme advocate of SENS Research Foundation for the successful defeating of aging, and has [31][55] encouraged acts of donation to hasten their rejuvenation research.
Kurzweil's view of the human neocortex

According to Kurzweil, technologists will be creating synthetic neocortexes based on the operating principles of the human neocortex with the primary purpose of extending our own neocortexes. He believes that the neocortex of an adult human consists of approximately 300 million pattern recognizers. He draws on the commonly accepted belief that the primary anatomical dierence between humans and other primates that allowed for superior intellectual abilities was the evolution of a larger neocortex. He claims that the six-layered neocortex deals with increasing abstraction from one layer to the next. He says that at the low levels, the neocortex may seem cold and mechanical because it can only make simple decisions, but at the higher levels of the hierarchy, the neocortex is likely to be dealing with concepts like being funny, being sexy, expressing a loving sentiment, creating a poem or understanding a poem, etc. He believes that these higher levels of the human neocortex were the enabling factors to permit the human development of language, technology, art, and science. He stated, "If the quantitative improvement from primates to humans with the big forehead was the enabling factor to allow for language, technology, art, and science, what kind of qualitative leap can we make with another quantitative increase? Why not go [56] from 300 million pattern recognizers to a billion?
Predictions
Main article: Predictions made by Ray Kurzweil
Past predictions
Kurzweil's rst book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, presented his ideas about the future. It was written from 1986 to 1989 and published in 1990. Building on Ithiel de Sola Pool's "Technologies of Freedom" (1983), Kurzweil claims to have
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forecast the demise of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing [57] In the book Kurzweil also state control over the ow of information. extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the [58] In May 1997 chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated year 2000". [59] by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament. Perhaps most signicantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of The Age of [60] Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was unreliable, dicult to use, and decient 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 he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century. Kurzweil also claims to have accurately forecast that, by the end of the 1990s, many documents would exist solely in computers and on the Internet, and that they would commonly be embedded with sounds, animations, and videos that would inhibit their transfer to paper format. Moreover, he claims to have foreseen that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future. Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 were mostly inaccurate, claims Forbes magazine. For example, Kurzweil predicted, "The majority of text is created using continuous [61] speech recognition." This is not the case.
Future predictions
In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. The third and nal part of the book is devoted to predictions over the coming century, from 2009 through 2099. While in The Singularity Is Near he makes fewer concrete short-term predictions, but includes many longer-term visions. He believes that with radical life extension will come radical life enhancement. He is condent 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 believes that 20 to 25 years from now, we will have millions of blood-cell sized devices, known as nanobots, inside our bodies ghting against diseases, improving our memory, and cognitive abilities. He believes that a machine will
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pass the Turing test by 2029, and that around 2045, "the pace of change will be so astonishingly quick that we won't be able to keep up, unless we enhance our own intelligence by merging with the intelligent machines we are creating". He stresses that "AI is not an intelligent invasion from Mars. These are brain extenders that we have created to expand our own mental reach. They are part of our civilization. They are part of who we are. So over the next few decades our human-machine civilization will become increasingly dominated by its [62] non-biological component." 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 [63] needs.
Reception
Praise
Kurzweil was referred to as "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes [8] and as a [7] "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal. PBS included Kurzweil as one of [9] 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among the "most fascinating" [10] entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir". Kurzweil has received many awards and honors, including:
[20] for inventing the First place in the 1965 International Science Fair 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 [64] Kurzweil won it for professional" and is accompanied by a $35,000 prize. [65] his invention of the Kurzweil Reading Machine. In 1986, Kurzweil was named Honorary Chairman for Innovation of the White House Conference on Small Business by President Reagan In 1988, Kurzweil was named Inventor of the Year by MIT and the Boston [66] Museum of Science. In 1990, Kurzweil was voted Engineer of the Year by the over one million readers of Design News Magazine and received their third annual [66][67] Technology Achievement Award The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science. One is awarded every year by Carnegie Mellon University to individuals who have "notably advanced the eld of
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science." Both a medal and a $50,000 prize are presented to winners. [68] The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of [69] Technology. The 1999 National Medal of Technology.[70] 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 [71] Bill Clinton presented Kurzweil with the National Medal of discretion. Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil's development of computer-based technologies to help the disabled. The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.[72] 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 [73] Only one is meted out each year help the disabled and to enrich the arts. to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A $500,000 award accompanies [74] the prize. Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for [75] The organization "honors the inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine. women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make [76] Fifteen other people human, social and economic progress possible." [77] were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year. The Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20, 2009 for lifetime achievement as an inventor and futurist in computer-based [78] technologies. In 2011, Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures [79] Council. In 2013, Kurzweil was honored as a Silicon Valley Visionary Award winner on [80] June 26 by SVForum In 2014, Kurzweil was honored with the American Visionary Art Museums [81][82][83] Grand Visionary Award on January 30. 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. [84][85] presidents - Clinton, Reagan and Johnson. Kurzweil has received seven national and international lm awards including the CINE Golden Eagle Award and the Gold Medal for Science Education [66] from the International Film and TV Festival of New York.
Criticism
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Kurzweil's ideas have generated criticism within the scientic community and in the media. Although the idea of a technological singularity is a popular concept in science [86] and Bruce Sterling have voiced ction, some authors such as Neal Stephenson skepticism about its real-world plausibility. Sterling expressed his views on the singularity scenario in a talk at the Long Now Foundation entitled The [87][88] Other prominent AI thinkers and Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. [89] Rodney Brooks,[90] David computer scientists such as Daniel Dennett, [91] and Paul Allen[92] also criticized Kurzweil's projections. Gelernter Daniel Lyons, writing in Newsweek, 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, a supercomputer achieving 20 petaops, speech recognition being in widespread use and cars that would drive themselves using sensors [93] To the charge that a 20 petaop installed in highways; all by 2009. 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 [93] 20 petaops. 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 [94] loopholes that they border on the unfalsiable." Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, agrees with Kurzweil's timeline of future progress, but thinks that technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and advanced [95] Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus biotechnology will create a dystopian world. 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 dierentit's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic [96] arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me." Some critics have argued more strongly against Kurzweil and his ideas. 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 [97] disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid." 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 [98][99] VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has even described Kurzweil's ideas basic biology.
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as "cybernetic totalism" and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil's predictions in an essay for Edge.org entitled One Half of a [100] Manifesto. In a critical review of Kurzweil's book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, philosopher Colin McGinn refers to "the hype so blatantly brandished in its title" and asks: "He is clearly a man of many partsbut is ultimate theoretician of the mind one of them?" McGinn calls Kurzweil's claim that pattern recognition is the key to mental phenomena "obviously false" and concludes that the book is "interesting in places, fairly readable, moderately [101] informative, but wildly overstated". John Gray, the British philosopher, argues 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 in order to achieve eternal life. He quotes Kurzweil's Singularity as another example of a trend which has almost always been present [102] in the history of mankind.
See also
Accelerating change Paradigm shift Predictive medicine Simulated reality Singularity University Technological singularity Transhumanism Transcendent Man
References
1. ^ Rozen, Leah (1987-03-09). Talk May Be Cheap, but Ray Kurzweil Stands to Make Millions by Yakking to His Voice Computer (http://www.people.com /people/archive/article /0,,20095795,00.html). Retrieved 2013-02-14. 2. ^ a b "Inventor Prole Ray Kurzweil" (http://www.invent.org/Hall_Of_Fame /180.html). Invent Now, Inc. Retrieved 9 February 2013. 3. ^ Ikenson, Ben (2004). Patents: Ingenious Inventions, How they work and How they came to be (http://books.google.com /books?id=-HSwaSyqPBwC& pg=PA139). Black Dog & Leventhal. pp. 139140. ISBN 978-1579123673."Invented in 1976, the Kurzweil Reading Machine is the world's rst computer to transform text into computer-spoken word." 4. ^ Klatt, D. (1987) "Review of Text-toSpeech Conversion for English" Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 82(3):737-93
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5. ^ "Ray Kurzweil Bio" (http://www.kurzweilai.net /ray-kurzweil-bio). KurzweilAI. Retrieved 2013-07-28. 6. ^ "Raymond Kurzweil 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize Winner" (http://web.mit.edu/invent/a-winners /a-kurzweil.html). MIT. Retrieved 10 February 2013. 7. ^ a b Bulkeley, William (1989-06-23). "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." 8. ^ a b Pfeier, Eric (1998-04-06) "Start Up" (http://www.forbes.com/asap/1998 /0406/017.html). Forbes. Retrieved on 2013-01-25. 9. ^ a b "Who Made America?" (http://www.pbs.org /wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade /innovators_hi.html). PBS. Retrieved 9 February 2013. 10. ^ a b "26 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs" (http://www.inc.com /magazine/20050401/26-index.html). Inc. Retrieved 9 February 2013. 11. ^ Kurzweil, Ray (2012). How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. ISBN 0670025291. 12. ^ "Public Speaking General Information" (http://www.kurzweilai.net/publicspeaking-general-info). Retrieved 10 February 2013. 13. ^ http://www.kurzweilai.net /ray-kurzweil-bio 14. ^ http://transcripts.cnn.com /TRANSCRIPTS/0805/30/gb.01.html 15. ^ http://www.mtnmath.com/whatrh /node28.html
16. ^ http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows /2012-11-27/ray-kurzweil-how-createmind-secret-human-thought-revealed /transcript 17. ^ "Inventor of the Week" (http://web.mit.edu/invent /iow/kurzweil.html). Web.mit.edu. Retrieved 2011-04-21. 18. ^ "KurzweilAI.net" (http://www.kurzweilai.net /meme/frame.html?main=/articles /art0467.html). KurzweilAI.net. Retrieved 2011-04-21. 19. ^ a b In Depth: Ray Kurzweil (http://www.booktv.org/Program /7515/In+Depth+Ray+Kurzweil.aspx). Book TV. 2006-11-05. Retrieved 2010-05-18. 20. ^ a b "Alumni Honors" (http://www.societyforscience.org /Page.aspx?pid=261). Society for Science and the Public. Retrieved 2010-05-18. 21. ^ http://techland.time.com/2010/04 /02/an-interview-with-ray-kurzweil/ 22. ^ "Biography of Ray Kurzweil" (http://www.kurzweiltech.com /raybio.html). Kurzweiltech.com. 1976-01-13. Retrieved 2011-03-27. 23. ^ Donald Byrd and Christopher Yavelow (1986). "The Kurzweil 250 Digital Synthesizer". Computer Music Journal 10 (1): 64. doi:10.2307/3680298 (http://dx.doi.org /10.2307%2F3680298). JSTOR 3680298 (//www.jstor.org/stable /3680298). 24. ^ "Hyundai names Kurzweil Chief Strategy Ocer of Kurzweil Music Systems" (http://www.kurzweilai.net /news/frame.html?main=news_single.h tml?id%3D6360). Kurzweilai.net. 2007-02-01. Retrieved 2012-04-27.
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25. ^ List of Private Companies Worldwide, BusinessWeek (http://investing.businessweek.com /businessweek/research/stocks/private /person.asp?personId=542059). Investing.businessweek.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 26. ^ O'Keefe, Brian (May 2, 2007). "The smartest (or the nuttiest) futurist on Earth" (http://money.cnn.com /magazines/fortune/fortune_archive /2007/05/14/100008848/). CNN. Retrieved May 22, 2010. 27. ^ a b Raymond Kurzweil (http://www.imdb.com /name/nm0961244/) at the Internet Movie Database 28. ^ Independent documentary Plug & Pray (http://www.plugandpray-lm.com /en/). Plugandpray-lm.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 29. ^ Transcendent Man (http://www.hulu.com/watch/295707 /transcendent-man) makes comments substantiating this at about mark 00:50 mentions resurrecting dead at about 1:10. 30. ^ Letzing, John (2012-12-14). "Google Hires Famed Futurist Ray Kurzweil" (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12 /14/google-hires-famed-futuristray-kurzweil/?mod=WSJBlog& utm_source=twitterfeed& utm_medium=twitter& source=email_rt_mc_body&ifp=0). The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2013-02-13. 31. ^ a b Will Google's Ray Kurzweil Live Forever? (http://online.wsj.com/article /SB1000142412788732450470457841 2581386515510.html), interview at WSJ, April 12, 2013.
32. ^ Ray Kurzweil, Founder, Chairman & CEO, Kurzweil Technologies | CRN.com (http://www.crn.com/news/channelprograms/174907129/ray-kurzweilfounder-chairman-ceo-kurzweiltechnologies.htm;jsessionid=NL5Tvlov 5t9uG2oJX2Tohg**.ecappj02). Retrieved on 2012-03-27. 33. ^ Colin, Johnson (1998-12-28). "Era of Smart People is Dawning". Electronic Engineering Times. 34. ^ "The Singularity Is Near: IMDB" (http://www.imdb.com/title /tt1049412/). Retrieved 2012-02-10. 35. ^ "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" (http://www.rayandterry.com /transcend/). 36. ^ "Ray Kurzweils How to Create a Mind published" (http://www.kurzweilai.net /ray-kurzweils-how-to-create-a-mindpublished). KurzweilAI. November 17, 2012. 37. ^ Kurzweil, Ray (2012). How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. New York: Viking Books. ISBN 978-0-670-02529-9. 38. ^ Fernandez, Jay A. (March 8, 2012). "SXSW Preview: Damon Lindelof Interviews Ray Kurzweil About What Hollywood Gets Wrong (Q&A)" (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com /risky-business/sxsw-2012-damonlindelof-ray-kurzweil-297218). The Hollywood Reporter. 39. ^ Board | Singularity Institute for Articial Intelligence (http://www.singinst.org/aboutus /board). Singinst.org. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 40. ^ Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Boards (http://lifeboat.com /ex/boards#robotics). Lifeboat.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16.
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41. ^ Printable version: Smarter than thou? / Stanford conference ponders a brave new world with machines more powerful than their creators (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin /article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/12 /BUG9IIMG1V197.DTL& type=printable). Sfgate.com (2006-05-12). Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 42. ^ . RISE/Future Conference. 2122 May 2013 http://www.futureconference.or.kr /bs/content.php?co_id=KeynoteSpeech. Retrieved 7 May 2013. Missing or empty |title= (help) 43. ^ "FAQ | Singularity University" (http://singularityu.org/about/faq/). Singularityu.org. 2008-09-20. Retrieved 2011-03-27. 44. ^ "Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill" (http://www.qsinano.com /pdf/ForbesWolfe_NanotechReport_July 2006.pdf) (PDF). July 2006. Retrieved June 16, 2011. 45. ^ "Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses" (http://www.kurzweilai.net /nanotechnology-dangersand-defenses). KurzweilAI. Retrieved 2013-07-28. 46. ^ Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Viking, 1999, p. 30 (http://books.google.com /books?id=ldAGcyh0bkUC&lpg=PP1& pg=PA630#v=onepage&q&f=false) and p. 32 (http://books.google.com /books?id=ldAGcyh0bkUC&lpg=PP1& pg=PA632#v=onepage&q&f=false) 47. ^ "The Law of Accelerating Returns" (http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-lawof-accelerating-returns). Kurzweilai.net (2011-06-05). Retrieved on 2011-06-16.
48. ^ Never Say Die: Live Forever (http://www.wired.com/news/medtech /0,1286,66585,00.html?tw=wn_tophea d_3). Wired.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 49. ^ CNN.com Transcripts (http://transcripts.cnn.com /TRANSCRIPTS/0805/30/gb.01.html). Transcripts.cnn.com (2008-05-30). Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 50. ^ Philipkoski, Kirsten (2002-11-18). "Ray Kurzweil's Plan: Never Die" (http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle /news/2002/11/56448). Wired. Retrieved 2013-02-11. 51. ^ TRANSCEND | Home page (http://www.rayandterry.com /TRANSCEND/). Rayandterry.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 52. ^ Live Long Enough to Live Forever (http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/). Fantastic Voyage. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 53. ^ Ray and Terry's Longevity Products Store Front Page (http://www.rayandterry.com /index.asp). Rayandterry.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 54. ^ "As Humans and Computers Merge ... Immortality? | PBS NewsHour | July 10, 2012" (http://www.pbs.org /newshour/bb/business/julydec12/immortal_07-10.html). PBS. 2012-07-03. Retrieved 2012-07-11. 55. ^ "Ray Kurzweil At SENS 3 | Video" (http://www.exponentialtimes.net /videos/ray-kurzweil-sens-3). Exponential Times. 2011-08-25. Retrieved 2013-07-28. 56. ^ "Ray Kurzweil: Your Brain in the Cloud" (http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=0iTq0FLDII4). YouTube. 2013-02-19. Retrieved 2013-07-28. 57. ^ Kurzweil, Ray (1990). The Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 446. ISBN 0-262-11121-7.
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58. ^ Kurzweil, Ray (1990). The Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 133. ISBN 0-262-11121-7. 59. ^ Weber, Bruce (1997-05-12). "Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparav" (http://www.nytimes.com /1997/05/12/nyregion/swiftand-slashing-computer-toppleskasparov.html). The New York Times. Retrieved 2013-02-13. 60. ^ Fleeing the dot.com era: decline in Internet usage (http://ndarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m1310/is_2001_Feb /ai_70910777/pg_3). Findarticles.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 61. ^ Kurzweil, Ray (2012). "Ray Kurzweil's Predictions For 2009 Were Mostly Inaccurate" (http://www.forbes.com/sites /alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweilspredictions-for-2009-were-mostlyinaccurate/). Forbes. 62. ^ Ray Kurzweil: the ultimate thinking machine (http://www.kurzweilai.net /ray-kurzweil-the-ultimate-thinkingmachine). KurzweilAI (2012-03-01). Retrieved on 2013-09-23. 63. ^ "Solar Power to Rule in 20 Years, Futurists Say" (http://www.livescience.com /environment/080219-kurzweilsolar.html). LiveScience. 2008-02-19. Retrieved 2011-03-27. 64. ^ ACM Awards: Grace Murray Hopper Award (http://awards.acm.org /hopper/). Awards.acm.org. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 65. ^ ACM: Fellows Award / Raymond Kurzweil (http://awards.acm.org /citation.cfm?id=3622009&srt=all& aw=145&ao=GMHOPPER). Awards.acm.org. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 66. ^ a b c http://www.kurzweilai.net /ray-kurzweil
67. ^ Engineer of the Year Hall of Fame, 6/12/2007 (http://www.designnews.com/article /CA6451495.html) 68. ^ Dickson Prize (http://www.nndb.com /honors/045/000111709/). Nndb.com. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 69. ^ Corporation names new members (http://web.mit.edu/newsoce /2005/corporation-0608.html). Web.mit.edu (2005-06-08). Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 70. ^ Technology Administration. THE NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY RECIPIENTS. 19852006 Recipients (http://web.archive.org /web/20070928061946/http: //www.technology.gov/medal /Recipients.htm). technology.gov 71. ^ Technology Administration. THE NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY. 2007 Events and Activities (http://web.archive.org /web/20071218140046/http: //www.technology.gov/medal/). technology.gov 72. ^ Telluride Tech Festival (http://www.techfestival.org/honorees) 73. ^ Winners' Circle: Raymond Kurzweil (http://web.mit.edu/invent/a-winners /a-kurzweil.html). Web.mit.edu. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 74. ^ Lemelson-MIT Prize (http://web.mit.edu/invent /a-prize.html). Web.mit.edu (2006-10-27). Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 75. ^ Ray Kurzweil Inventor Prole (http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame /180.html). Invent.org (1948-02-12). Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 76. ^ Hall of Fame Overview (http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame /1_0_0_hall_of_fame.asp). Invent.org. Retrieved on 2011-06-16.
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77. ^ Hall of Fame 2002 (http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame /1_1_4_listing_induction.asp?vInductio n=2002). Invent.org. Retrieved on 2011-06-16. 78. ^ "The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation" (http://www.clarkefoundation.org /news/042009.php). Clarkefoundation.org. 2009-04-20. Retrieved 2011-03-27. 79. ^ "Design Futures Council Senior Fellows" (http://www.di.net/about /senior_fellows/). Di.net. 80. ^ http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose /news/2013/06/27/hear-from-2013visionary-awardwinners.html?page=all 81. ^ http://www.avam.org/newsand-events/pdf/press-releases /2013/AVAM2014%20Gala%20Honorees12.11.13.pdf 82. ^ http://events.baltimore.cbslocal.com /baltimore_md/events/avams2014-gala-celebration-honoringray-kurzw-/E0-001-066126729-0 83. ^ http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-tourwith-ray-adventure-in-art-and-danceat-the-american-visionary-art-museumaward-gala-honoring-ray-kurzweil 84. ^ http://www.kurzweilai.net /ray-kurzweil-biography 85. ^ Raymond Kurzweil, (http://people.forbes.com/prole /raymond-kurzweil/146841) Forbes, Retrieved 2012-06-05
86. ^ Miller, Robin (2004-10-20). "Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor" (http://interviews.slashdot.org /article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217). Slashdot. Retrieved 2008-08-28. "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." 87. ^ Brand, Stewart (2004-06-14). "Bruce Sterling "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole" " (http://blog.longnow.org/2004/06 /14/bruce-sterling-the-singularityyour-future-as-a-black-hole/). The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved 2009-06-08. 88. ^ Sterling, Bruce. "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole" (http://media.longnow.org/seminars /salt-0200406-sterling/salt-0200406sterling.mp3) (MP3). "It's an end-ofhistory notion, and like most end-ofhistory notions, it is showing its age." 89. ^ Dennett, Daniel. "The Reality Club: One Half Of A Manifesto" (http://www.edge.org/discourse /jaron_manifesto.html#dennett). Edge.org. "I'm glad that Lanier entertains the hunch that Dawkins and I (and Hofstadter and others) 'see some aw 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 aw, and I expect Dawkins and Hofstadter would say the same."
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90. ^ Brooks, Rodney. "The Reality Club: One Half Of A Manifesto" (http://www.edge.org/discourse /jaron_manifesto.html#brooks). Edge.org. "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." 91. ^ Transcript of debate over feasibility of near-term AI (moderated by Rodney Brooks): "Gelernter, Kurzweil debate machine consciousness" (http://www.edge.org/discourse /jaron_manifesto.html#brooks). KurzweilAI.net. 92. ^ Allen, Paul. "The Singularity Isn't Near" (http://www.technologyreview.com /view/425733/paul-allenthe-singularity-isnt-near/). Technology Review. "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 scientic 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."
93. ^ a b Lyons, Daniel (May 2009). "I, Robot" (http://www.newsweek.com /id/197812/page/2). Newsweek. Retrieved 2009-05-22. "During the height of the dotcom boom in 1998, Kurzweil predicted that the economy would keep on booming right through 2009 and that at least one U.S. company would have a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion, neither of which occurred. Kurzweil also predict-ed that by 2009 a top supercomputer would be capable of performing 20 petaops, the same as the human brain. In fact, the top supercomputer at the time, the IBM Roadrunner, was capable of only 1.456 petaops mark. Kurzweil also predicted that by now our cars would be able to drive themselves by communicating with intelligent sensors embedded in highways, and that speech recognition would be in widespread use." 94. ^ Rennie, John (December 2010). "Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism" (http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing /software/ray-kurzweils-slipperyfuturism/). IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved 2012-08-13. 95. ^ Joy, Bill (April 2000). "Why the future doesn't need us" (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive /8.04/joy_pr.html). Wired. Retrieved 2008-09-21. "...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..." 96. ^ O'Keefe, Brian (2007-05-02). "The smartest (or the nuttiest) futurist on Earth" (http://money.cnn.com /magazines/fortune/fortune_archive /2007/05/14/100008848/). Fortune. Retrieved 2008-08-28.
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97. ^ Ross, Greg. "An interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter" (http://www.americanscientist.org /bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hofstadter). American Scientist. Retrieved 2008-08-28. 98. ^ Lyons, Daniel (May 2009). "I, Robot" (http://www.newsweek.com /id/197812). Newsweek. Retrieved 2009-07-24. "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 baed 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 spiritualismthat's all it is," Myers says. "Even geeks want to nd God somewhere, and Kurzweil provides it for them.""
99. ^ Myers, PZ. "Singularitarianism?" (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula /2011/02/singularitarianism.php). Pharyngula blog. Retrieved 14 February 2011. 100. ^ Lanier, Jaron. "One Half of a Manifesto" (http://www.edge.org /3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_p1.html). Edge.org. Retrieved 2008-08-28. 101. ^ McGinn, Colin (2013-03-21). "Homunculism" (http://www.nybooks.com/articles /archives/2013/mar/21/homunculism /?pagination=false). The New York Review of Books. 102. ^ Gray, John (2011). The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374175061.
External links
KurzweilAI.net website, blog and newsletter (http://www.kurzweilai.net/) Raymond Kurzweil's IP (https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts& hl=en&q=ininventor:%22Raymond+C.+Kurzweil%22) all of Raymond Kurzweil's US patents & patent applications Appearances (http://www.c-spanvideo.org/raykurzweil) on C-SPAN In Depth interview with Kurzweil, November 5, 2006 (http://www.cspanvideo.org/program/Kurz) Raymond Kurzweil (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0961244/) at the Internet Movie Database Ray Kurzweil (http://www.nndb.com/people/101/000032005) at the Notable
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Names Database Works by or about Ray Kurzweil (http://worldcat.org/identities/lccnn88-274457) in libraries (WorldCat catalog) 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal (http://www.time.com/time/health /article/0,8599,2048138,00.html), Lev Grossman, Time, February 10, 2011 Ray Kurzweil That Singularity Guy (http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n4 /htdocs/ray-kurzweil-800.php), Interview April 2009 Ray Kurzweil (http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/9/) interviewed on the TV show Triangulation on the TWiT.tv network Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ray_Kurzweil& oldid=603874908" Categories: 1948 births American agnostics American people of Austrian-Jewish descent American science writers American technology writers Articial intelligence researchers Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Futurologists Google employees Grace Murray Hopper Award laureates Immortality Jewish American scientists Jewish agnostics LemelsonMIT Prize Life extensionists Living people Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni National Medal of Technology recipients Singularitarianism Transhumanists People from Queens, New York Machine learning researchers This page was last modied on 12 April 2014 at 13:24. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-prot organization.
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Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

February 12, 1948 Queens, New York, U.S.

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Life, inventions, and business career

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Raymond Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit at Stanford in 2006

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

a follow-up to Fantastic Voyage,

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stance on the future of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Law of Accelerating Returns

Health and aging

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kurzweil's view of the human neocortex

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray Kurzweil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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