Ray Kurzweil
CEO, Kurzweil Technologies
What, then, is the Singularity? It's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life. I regard someone who understands the Singularity and who has reflected on its implications for his or her own life as a 'singularitarian.'
Biography
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, Inc Magazine called him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included him as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. As one of the leading inventors of our time, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, 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. Kurzweil has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence . All of his inventions continue today as market leaders. His web site Kurzweil AI.net is a leading resource on emerging technologies and has over one million readers.
In 2002, Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in innovation, and in 1999 he was awarded the National Medal of Technology, America's highest honor in technology. Kurzweil has also received dozens of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents, and seven national and international film awards. Kurzweil’s books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Three of his books have been national best sellers, and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into nine languages. His newest book, published by Viking Press, is The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The book has been named “One of the Best of the New Fall Books” by CBS News, the 13th most blogged about book of 2005 according to the NY Times, and the fourth bestselling science book at Amazon in 2005 (published in fourth quarter).