62 Facts About Ray Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist.

Ray Kurzweil is involved in fields such as optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.

Ray Kurzweil has written books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

Ray Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from then President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony.

Ray Kurzweil was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human-machine communication.

Ray Kurzweil has received 21 honorary doctorates, and honors from three US presidents.

Ray Kurzweil attended NYC Public Education Kingsbury Elementary School PS188.

Ray Kurzweil was born to secular Jewish parents who had emigrated from Austria just before the onset of World War II.

Ray Kurzweil was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing.

Ray Kurzweil's father, Fredric, was a concert pianist, a noted conductor, and a music educator.

Ray Kurzweil decided he wanted to be an inventor at the age of five.

Ray Kurzweil was involved with computers by the age of 12, when only a dozen computers existed in all of New York City, and built computing devices and statistical programs for the predecessor of Head Start.

At the age of fourteen, Ray Kurzweil wrote a paper detailing his theory of the neocortex.

Ray Kurzweil's parents were involved with the arts, and he is quoted in the documentary Transcendent Man as saying that the household always produced discussions about the future and technology.

Ray Kurzweil created pattern-recognition software that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles.

Ray Kurzweil went to MIT to study with Marvin Minsky.

Ray Kurzweil took all of the computer programming courses offered at MIT in the first year and a half.

In 1968, during his second year at MIT, Ray Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges.

In 1974, Ray Kurzweil founded Ray 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.

Ray Kurzweil 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.

Ray Kurzweil sold his Ray Kurzweil Computer Products to Xerox, where it was known as Xerox Imaging Systems, later known as Scansoft, and he functioned as a consultant for Xerox until 1995.

Ray Kurzweil started Ray Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 to develop new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in school.

Products include the Ray 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 Ray Kurzweil 3000 program, which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills.

In 1999, Ray Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat", which began trading in 2006.

In December 2012, Ray Kurzweil was hired by Google in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing".

Ray Kurzweil was personally hired by Google co-founder Larry Page.

Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil agreed on a one-sentence job description: "to bring natural language understanding to Google".

Ray Kurzweil received a Technical Grammy on February 8,2015, specifically for his invention of the Kurzweil K250.

Ray Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company.

Ray Kurzweil married Sonya Rosenwald Ray Kurzweil in 1975 and has two children.

Sonya Ray Kurzweil is a psychologist in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts, working with women, children, parents and families.

Ray Kurzweil holds faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and William James College for Graduate Education in Psychology.

Ray Kurzweil serves as an active Overseer at Boston Children's Museum.

Ray Kurzweil has a son, Ethan Kurzweil, who is a venture capitalist, and a daughter, Amy Kurzweil, a cartoonist.

In 1999, Ray 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.

In 2010, Ray Kurzweil wrote and co-produced a movie directed by Anthony Waller called The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future, which was based in part on his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near.

Ray Kurzweil gave further focus to this issue in a 2001 essay entitled "The 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 John von Neumann's concept of a technological singularity.

Ray Kurzweil was working with the Army Science Board in 2006 to develop a rapid response system to deal with the possible abuse of biotechnology.

Ray Kurzweil suggested 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.

Ray Kurzweil has testified 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.

In media appearances, Ray Kurzweil has stressed the extreme potential dangers of nanotechnology 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.

Ray Kurzweil 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.

Ray 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.

Ray Kurzweil then found a doctor, Terry Grossman, who shared his unconventional beliefs and helped him to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical intravenous treatments, red wine, and various other methods to attempt to extend his lifespan.

In 2007, Ray 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 effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry.

Ray Kurzweil further reduced his daily pill regimen down to 100 pills.

Ray Kurzweil asserts that in the future, everyone will live forever.

Ray Kurzweil's standing as a futurist and transhumanist has led to his involvement in several singularity-themed organizations.

In December 2004, Ray Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

In October 2005, Ray Kurzweil joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

On May 13,2006, Ray Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Singularity Summit at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

In May 2013, Ray Kurzweil was the keynote speaker at the 2013 proceeding of the Research, Innovation, Start-up and Employment international conference in Seoul.

Ray Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s.

Ray Kurzweil 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".

In October 2010, Ray Kurzweil released his report, "How My Predictions Are Faring" in PDF format, analyzing the predictions he made in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near.

For example, Ray Kurzweil predicted, "The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition", which was not the case.

In 1999, Ray Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas.

Ray Kurzweil 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 real reality, but these will not yet be made possible via direct interaction with our nervous system.

Ray Kurzweil expounded on his prediction regarding nanorobotics, making the claim of within 20 years having millions of blood-cell sized devices, known as nanobots, inside our bodies fighting diseases, and improving our memory and cognitive abilities.

In 2008, Ray 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.

Ray Kurzweil was called "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes and a "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal.

Barnum and Ed Feigenbaum, Ray Kurzweil had no problems talking up his technical prowess.