59 Facts About Raymond Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist.

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

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

Raymond Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

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

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

Raymond Kurzweil has received 21 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U S presidents.

Raymond Kurzweil attended NYC Public Education Kingsbury Elementary School PS188.

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond 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.

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

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

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

In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil founded Raymond 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.

Raymond 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.

Raymond Kurzweil sold his Raymond 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.

Raymond Kurzweil started Raymond 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 Raymond 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 Raymond Kurzweil 3000 program, which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills.

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

In June 2005, Raymond Kurzweil introduced the "Raymond Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" —a pocket-sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1999, Raymond 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, Raymond 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.

Raymond 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.

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

Raymond 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.

Raymond 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, Raymond 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.

Raymond 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.

Raymond 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 .

Raymond 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, Raymond 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond 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.

Raymond 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, Raymond 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.

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