Raymond Kurzweil |
Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and technological singularity.
=Life, inventions, and awards=
Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York State. 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.S. in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-typeface optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blindness, the first Charge-coupled device 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 Musical 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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) synthesizer-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 inspired the plot of the movie S1m0ne when he created his own female alter ego, Ramona.
In 2005, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called Ray Kurzweil the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence . [http://www.cio-today.com/news/Bill-Gates-Talks-Up-Wetware/story.xhtmlstory_id=00100017HFPX]
=Transhumanism and future studies=
In his s will become more and more common as we approach the singularity. 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. 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. [http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,66585,00.htmltw=wn_tophead_3]
In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
= Published books =
Kurzweil is the co-author (and subject) of the album Spiritual Machines .
=See also=
=External links=
*[http://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html Official Biography] *[http://www.cio.com/archive/101504/interview.html Machine Dreams] - CIO Magazine interview *[http://www.kurzweilai.net/ KurzweilAI.net] - a vast resource, including some of his books for free *[http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/bio0005.htmlprintable=1 Detailed Official Biography] *[http://www.asc2004.com/Presentations/01-Monday/06-Kurzweil.pdf Warfighting in the 21 st Century - The Remote, Robotic, Robust, Size-Reduced, Virtual Reality Paradigm] - Keynote address (PDF Document), 24th Army Science Conference, given on November 29, 2004 *[http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050207/pf/050207-7_pf.html Robot Wars] - site interview, February 8, 2005 *[http://economist.com/displaystory.cfmstory_id=3714070 The future, just around the bend, The Economist, Mar 10th 2005 (membership required)] *[http://instapundit.com/archives/025289.php Interview about The Singularity is Near ] - Instapundit , September 2, 2005|
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