Ray Kurzweil
Technology Futurist & Inventor; Director of Engineering, Google; Co-Founder & Chancellor of Singularity University
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•Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions
•A Director of Engineering at Google developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding
•Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University
•Holds 21 Honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. Presidents
•Ray received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
•Called "The Restless Genius" by The Wall Street Journal, "The Ultimate Thinking Machine" by Forbes and the "Rightful Heir to Thomas Edison" by Inc. magazine
•Author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including How to Create a Mind and The Singularity Is Near
•A Director of Engineering at Google developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding
•Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University
•Holds 21 Honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. Presidents
•Ray received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
•Called "The Restless Genius" by The Wall Street Journal, "The Ultimate Thinking Machine" by Forbes and the "Rightful Heir to Thomas Edison" by Inc. magazine
•Author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including How to Create a Mind and The Singularity Is Near
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 selected Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions.
Kurzweil was the principal inventor 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 has written six national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). His latest novel, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, is an Amazon Best Seller and was a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 Children’s Fiction book. He is co-founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
Kurzweil is founder of FatKat Inc, (Financial Accelerating Transactions), which was created to build industry-leading tools for Quantitatively based investing. A world leader in pattern recognition techniques, Kurzweil has successfully developed, built and marketed his inventions not only by making technological advances, but by identifying and exploiting synergies among disparate technologies. It is this spirit of innovation and unfailing success at building technology-based businesses which Ray brings to FatKat.
In 2012, Ray Kurzweil became a Director of Engineering at Google, at Research at Google — heading up a team of engineers developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
Kurzweil is the recipient of the acclaimed 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 Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
He has received 20 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has authored 7 books, 5 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.
Kurzweil was the principal inventor 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 has written six national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). His latest novel, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine, is an Amazon Best Seller and was a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 Children’s Fiction book. He is co-founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
Kurzweil is founder of FatKat Inc, (Financial Accelerating Transactions), which was created to build industry-leading tools for Quantitatively based investing. A world leader in pattern recognition techniques, Kurzweil has successfully developed, built and marketed his inventions not only by making technological advances, but by identifying and exploiting synergies among disparate technologies. It is this spirit of innovation and unfailing success at building technology-based businesses which Ray brings to FatKat.
In 2012, Ray Kurzweil became a Director of Engineering at Google, at Research at Google — heading up a team of engineers developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
Kurzweil is the recipient of the acclaimed 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 Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
He has received 20 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has authored 7 books, 5 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.
- The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Healthcare and Medicine
We are now at a pivotal time in health technologies. With the collection of the genome in 2003 and the advent of techniques such as RNA interference that can actually turn off the genes that promote disease and aging, medicine has transformed itself into an information technology. As such, medicine is now subject to the “law of accelerating returns,” meaning that these technologies will be a thousand times more powerful than today in ten years, and a million times more powerful in 20 years. Up until recently, health interventions were hit or miss. We'd find something that seemed to work with only crude models of how they worked. Drug development was called "drug discovery," basically finding things that worked rather than designing them. Today it is within our grasp to slow the aging process and take full advantage of advances in bio- and nanotechnology that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace in the years ahead. Ultimately, we will merge with our machines, vastly extending human health and longevity, and greatly increasing our intelligence. - Science, Technology, and Invention: Strategies to Create the Future
The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process with rapid creation, violent destruction, many winners and many losers. Despite the apparent chaos, we can discern predictable patterns. The pace of innovation itself is doubling every decade. The overall price-performance and capacity of every form of information technology grows exponentially, generally doubling in a year or less. As information technology achieves each new level of price-performance and capacity, new applications become feasible and existing business models lose their viability. Another implication is that the tools of disruptive change have been democratized. A couple of students created Google on their thousand dollar laptops. A few years later, a couple of undergraduates created Facebook with tools that everyone has. The rate of change is now so rapid that even three to five year business plans need to consider that every level of an industry will undergo major changes during that period. It’s not just the devices we carry around that are influenced by these exponential changes. Health and medicine is now an information technology with the collection of the human genome, the means of changing genes in a mature individual, and the ability to design interventions on computers and to test them on biological simulators. Even energy will be transformed as we apply nanotechnology to the design of solar panels and energy storage devices. The means to change the world are in everyone’s hands. - The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society
At the onset of the 21st century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy, and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level "strong" AI well before 2030. The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a process well under way. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents an inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are a billion times more intelligent...all within the next three to four decades. - The Power of Ideas is Accelerating
Renowned author, inventor, and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, has a public track record of more than a quarter of a century of predictions with a stunning 86% accuracy rate, all based on his Law of Accelerating Returns which states that information technology is advancing exponentially -- doubling in price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Since 1990, Kurzweil has laid out these predictions in a series of books: The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Singularity is Near (2005), and How to Create a Mind (2012). And now, in his forthcoming book, The Singularity is Nearer (2020), he presents new data and a fresh look to the future as we approach the steep part of the exponential. By questioning old assumptions and applying exponential thinking Ray Kurzweil explains how we will rewrite the software of life, rebuild the world atom by atom, and reinvent our intelligence, to solve the world’s grandest challenges.
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