Meet Ray Kurzweil – The Singularity

With all the change happening in our world today, it's interesting to look to today's futurists to try to make sense of it all.

Meet Ray Kurzweil, the futurist visionary, inventor, entrepreneur, who predicted with uncanny accuracy the rise of the Internet, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the year that a computer would beat a human being at chess. His prediction for the coming Singularity–when Artificial Intelligence completely outpaces the human brain, an event Kurzweil forecasts will happen in the year 2045–remains to be seen.

Ray's theory on “The Singularity” is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. Wired Magazine has a good article on Ray here.

Food for thought…

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Ray is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.

He has received nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has authored six books, four 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. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times bestseller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers annually.