55 Facts About Ray Kurzweil

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

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

Ray Kurzweil is the elder of two children; his sister Enid, an accountant in Santa Barbara, is six years his junior.

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

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

At 14, 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 discussed the future and technology.

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

Ray Kurzweil took all the computer programming courses MIT offered in his 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.

Ray Kurzweil 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.

Stevie Wonder heard about the demonstration of this new machine on The Today Show, and later became the user of the first production Ray Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a long-term association with Ray Kurzweil.

Ray Kurzweil 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Ray Kurzweil holds faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and William James College in graduate education in psychology.

Ray Kurzweil 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.

In 1999, Ray Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines, which further elucidates his theories of the future of technology, which stem from his analysis of long-term trends in biological and technological evolution.

In 2010, Ray Kurzweil wrote and co-produced the film The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future, directed by Anthony Waller and based in part on the book The Singularity Is Near.

Independent filmmaker Doug Wolens's feature-length documentary film The Singularity showcases Ray Kurzweil and has been acclaimed as "a large-scale achievement in its documentation of futurist and counter-futurist ideas" and "the best documentary on the Singularity to date".

The band emailed Ray Kurzweil to ask permission to use the title of his book for their project.

Ray Kurzweil further emphasized this issue in his 2001 essay "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which 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.

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 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.

Ray 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, Ray 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.

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 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.

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

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

Ray Kurzweil 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".

In October 2010, Ray 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.

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, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which explains his futurist ideas in more depth.

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 reality, but that they will not yet be able to directly interact with our nervous system.

Ray Kurzweil 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.

Ray Kurzweil believes a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil says that humans will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence that becomes increasingly dominated by its non-biological component.

In 2008, Ray 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.

Ray Kurzweil was called "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes in 1998 and a "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal in 1989.