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Raymond Kurzweil
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Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.
Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of different faiths during his upbringing.
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Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.
Life, inventions, and business career
Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of World War II, and he was exposed via Unitarian Universalism to a diversity of different faiths during his upbringing. His father was a musician and composer and his mother was a visual artist. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught young Ray the basics about computers. In his youth, he was an avid reader of science fiction literature. In 1963, at age fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Designed to process statistical data, the program was used by researchers at IBM. Later in high school he created a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed the works of classical composers, and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. The capabilities of this invention were so impressive that, in 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built. Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention, and he was also recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search and was personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony.
In 1968, during Kurzweil's sophomore year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called the Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers submitted by each student applicant. When he was 20, he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000 (roughly $500,000 in 2006 dollars) plus royalties. He earned a BS in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from MIT.
In 1974, Kurzweil started the company 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. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He 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. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies--the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Under his direction, development of these technologies was completed, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device covered an entire tabletop. It gained him mainstream recognition: on the day of the machine's unveiling, Walter Cronkite used the machine to give his signature soundoff, "And that's the way it was, January 13, 1976." While listening to The Today Show, musician Stevie Wonder heard a demonstration of the device and purchased the first production version of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a lifelong friendship between himself and Kurzweil.
Kurzweil's next major business venture began in 1978, when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents onto its nascent online databases.
Two years later, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox, which had an interest in further commercializing paper-to-computer text conversion. Kurzweil Computer Products became a subsidiary of Xerox formerly known as Scansoft and now as Nuance Communications, and he functioned as a consultant for the former until 1995.
Kurzweil's next business venture was in the realm of electronic music technology. After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder, in which the latter lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of music synthesizers capable of accurately duplicating the sounds of real instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year, and in 1984, the Kurzweil K250 was unveiled. The machine was capable of imitating a number of instruments, and in tests musicians were unable to discern the difference between the Kurzweil K250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano. The recording and mixing abilities of the machine, coupled with its abilities to imitate different instruments made it possible for a single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece.
Kurzweil Music Systems was sold to Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang in 1990. As with Xerox, Kurzweil remained as a consultant for several years.
Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems, Ray Kurzweil created the company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, which debuted in 1987, was the world's first large-vocabulary speech recognition program, allowing human users to dictate to their computers via microphone and then have the device transcribe their speech into written text. Later, the company combined the speech recognition technology with medical expert systems to create the Kurzweil VoiceMed (today called Clinical Reporter) line of products, which allow doctors to write medical reports by speaking instead of writing. KAI exists today as Nuance.
Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 to develop new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia and ADD in school. Products include the 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 Kurzweil 3000 program, which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills.
During the 1990s Ray Kurzweil founded the Medical Learning Company. The company's products included an interactive computer education program for doctors and a computer-simulated patient. Around the time, Kurzweil started KurzweilCyberArt.com--a website featuring computer programs to assist the creative art process. The site offers free downloads of a program called AARON--a visual art synthesizer developed by Harold Cohen--and of "Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet", which automatically creates poetry. During this period he started KurzweilAI.net, a website devoted towards showcasing news of scientific developments, publicizing the ideas of high-tech thinkers and critics alike, and promoting futurist-related discussion among the general population through the Mind-X forum.
In 1999, Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat" (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies) http://www.fatkat.com, which began trading in 2006. He has stated that the ultimate aim is to improve the performance of FatKat's A.I. investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends." He predicted in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, that computers will one day prove superior to the best human financial minds at making profitable investment decisions.
In June 2005, Ray Kurzweil introduced the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader)--a pocket-sized device consisting of a digital camera and computer unit. Like the Kurzweil Reading Machine of almost 30 years before, the K-NFB Reader is designed to aid blind people by reading written text aloud. The newer machine is portable and collects text through digital camera images, while the older machine is large and obtains text through flatbed scanning.
Ray Kurzweil is currently making a movie due for release in 2009 called The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future based, in part, on his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. Part fiction, part non-fiction, he interviews 20 big thinkers like Marvin Minsky, plus there is a B-line narrative story that illustrates some of the ideas, where a computer avatar (Ramona) saves the world from self-replicating microscopic robots.
In addition to Kurzweil's movie, there is an independent, feature-length documentary being made about Ray, his life, and his ideas called Transcendent Man. Filmmakers Barry and Felicia Ptolemy follow Kurzweil, documenting his global speaking tour. Scheduled for release in 2009, Transcendent Man documents Ray's quest to reveal mankind's ultimate destiny and explores many of the ideas found in his New York Times bestselling book, The Singularity is Near, including his concept of exponential growth, radical life expansion, and how we will transcend our biology. The Ptolemys have documented Ray's stated goal of bringing back his late father using AI. The film also documents critics who argue against Kurzweil's predictions.
Kurzweil said during a 2006 C-SPAN2 interview that he was working on a new book that focused on the inner workings of the human brain and how this could be applied to building AI.
While being interviewed for a February 2009 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Kurzweil told interviewer David Kushner he expressed a desire to construct a genetic copy of his late father, Fredric Kurzweil, from DNA within his grave site. This feat would be achieved by deploying various nanorobots to send samples of DNA back from the grave, constructing a clone of Fredric and retrieving memories and recollections - from Ray's mind - of his father.
Books
Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was published in 1990. The nonfiction work discusses the history of computer AI and also makes forecasts regarding likely future developments. Other experts in the field of AI contribute heavily to the work in the form of essays. The Association of American Publishers' awarded it the status of Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990.
Next, Kurzweil published a book on nutrition in 1993 called The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life. The book's main idea is that high levels of fat intake are the cause of many health disorders common in the U.S., and thus that cutting fat consumption down to 10% of the total calories consumed would be optimal for most people.
In 1998, Ray Kurzweil published The Age of Spiritual Machines, which focuses heavily on further elucidating his theories regarding the future of technology, which themselves stem from his analysis of long-term trends in biological and technological evolution. Much focus goes into examining the likely course of AI development, along with the future of computer architecture.
Kurzweil's next book returned to the subject of human health and nutrition. Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever was co-authored by Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, a medical doctor and specialist in alternative medicine.
The Singularity Is Near was published in 2005. The book is currently being made into a movie starring Pauley Perrette (NCIS), and scheduled for early 2009 release.
In February 2007, Ptolemaic Productions acquired the rights to The Singularity is Near, The Age of Spiritual Machines and Fantastic Voyage including the rights to Kurzweil's life and ideas for the film Transcendent Man. The feature length documentary is directed by Barry Ptolemy.
Recognition and awards
He has been called the successor and "rightful heir to Thomas Edison", and was also referred to by Forbes as "the ultimate thinking machine".
Moreover, Ray Kurzweil has received these awards, among others:
- First place in the 1965 International Science Fair for inventing the classical music synthesizing computer.
- The 1990 "Engineer of the Year" award from Design News.
- The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science. One is awarded every year by Carnegie Mellon University to individuals who have "notably advanced the field of science." Both a medal and a $50,000 prize are presented to winners.
- The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- The 1999 National Medal of Technology. This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering new technologies, and the President dispenses the award at his discretion. Bill Clinton presented Ray Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil's development of computer-based technologies to help the disabled.
- The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology. Two other individuals also received the same honor that year. The award is presented yearly to people who "exemplify the life, times and standard of contribution of Tesla, Westinghouse and Nunn."
- The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help the disabled and to enrich the arts. Only one is meted out each year to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A $500,000 award accompanies the prize.
- Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing the Kurzweil Reading Machine. The organization "honors the women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible." Fifteen other people were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year.
- Ray Kurzweil has also been given 15 honorary degrees from different universities.
Involvement with futurism and transhumanism
Ray Kurzweil first began speculating about the future when he was a child, but only later as an adult did he become seriously involved with trying to accurately forecast future events. Kurzweil came to realize that his success as an inventor depended largely on proper timing: His new inventions had to be released onto the market only once many other, supporting technologies had come into existence. A device issued too early and without proper refinement would lack some key element of functionality, and a device put out too late would find the market already flooded with a different product, or consumers demanding something better.
It thus became imperative for Kurzweil to have an understanding of the rates and directions of technological development. He has, throughout his adult life, kept close track of advances in the computer and machine industries, and has precisely modeled them. By extrapolating past trends into the future, Kurzweil formed a method of predicting the course of technological development.
After several years of closely tracking these trends, Kurzweil came to a realization: the innovation rate of computer technology was increasing not linearly but rather exponentially. As a computer scientist, Kurzweil also understood that there was no technical reason that this type of performance growth could not continue well into the 21st century.
Since growth in so many fields of science and technology depends upon the power of computers, improvements to computing power translate into improvements to human knowledge and to non-computer sciences like nanotechnology, biotechnology, and materials science. Considering the ongoing exponential growth in computer capabilities, this means fantastic new technologies will become available long before the vast majority of people—who intuitively think linearly about technological advance—expect. This core idea is expressed by Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns."
Kurzweil projects that between now and 2050 technology will become so advanced that medical advances will allow people to radically extend their lifespans while preserving and even improving quality of life. The aging process could at first be slowed, then halted, and then reversed as newer and better medical technologies became available. Kurzweil argues that much of this will be a fruit of advances in medical nanotechnology, which will allow microscopic machines to travel through one's body and repair all types of damage at the cellular level. But equally consequential developments will occur within the realm of computers as they become increasingly powerful, numerous and cheap between now and 2050. Kurzweil predicts that a computer will pass the Turing test by 2029, by demonstrating to have a mind (intelligence, self awareness, emotional richness) undistinguishable from a human's. He predicts that the first AI is built around a computer simulation of a human brain, which are made possible by previous, nanotech-guided brainscanning. An AI machine could handle the full range of human intellectual tasks and would be both emotional and self-aware. Kurzweil suggests that AI's will inevitably become far smarter and more powerful than un-enhanced humans. He suggests that AIs will exhibit moral thinking and will respect humans as their ancestors. According to his predictions, the line between humans and machines will blur as a natural part of technological evolution. Cybernetic implants will greatly enhance human cognitive and physical abilities, and allow direct interface between humans and machines.
Kurzweil's standing as a leading futurist and Transhumanist have gained him positions of prominence within pertinent organizations:
In February 2009, Kurzweil, in cooperation with Google and the NASA Ames Research Center, announced the creation of the Singularity University. The University's self-described mission is to: "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges." Using Kurzweil's Singularity concept as a foundation, the University plans to provide students the skills and tools to guide the process of the Singularity "for the benefit of humanity and its environment."
Futurism, as a philosophical or academic study, looks at the medium to long-term future in an attempt to predict based on current trends. His predictions are based on the 'Law of Accelerating Returns'.
Stand on nanotechnology
Kurzweil is on the Army Science Advisory Board, has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology, and sees considerable potential in the science to solve significant global problems such as poverty, disease, and climate change, viz. .
He predicts nanobots will be used to maintain the human body and to extend the human lifespan.
Kurzweil has stressed the extreme potential dangers of nanotechnology, but argues that in practice, progress cannot be stopped, and any attempt to do so will retard the progress of defensive and beneficial technologies more than the malevolent ones, increasing the danger. He says that the proper place of regulation is to make sure progress proceeds safely and quickly. He applies this reasoning, to biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and technology in general.
The Law of Accelerating Returns
In his controversial 2001 essay, "The Law of Accelerating Returns", Kurzweil proposes an extension of Moore's law that forms the basis of the concept of "Technological Singularity".
Predictions
The Age of Intelligent Machines
Arguably, Kurzweil gained a large amount of credibility as a futurist from his first book The Age of Intelligent Machines. Written from 1986 to 1989 and published in 1990, it forecast the demise of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information. In the book Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to predict correctly that computers would beat the best human players by 1998, and most likely in that year. In fact, the event occurred in May 1997 when chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament. Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content, making Kurzweil's realization of its future potential especially prescient given the technology's limitations at that time. He also 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". Additionally, Kurzweil correctly foresaw that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.
Kurzweil also accurately predicted that many documents would exist solely on computers and on the Internet by the end of the 1990s, and that they would commonly be embedded with animations, sounds and videos that would prohibit their transference to paper format. Moreover, he foresaw that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future.
The Age of Spiritual Machines
In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. The third and final section of the book is devoted to elucidating the specific course of technological advancements Kurzweil predicts the world will experience over the next century. Titled "To Face the Future", the section is divided into four chapters respectively named "2009", "2019", "2029", and "2099". For every chapter, Kurzweil issues predictions about what life and technology will be like in that year.
While the veracity of Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 and beyond cannot yet be determined, 2009 is near enough to the present to allow many of the ideas of the "2009" chapter to be scrutinized. To begin, Kurzweil's claims that 2009 would be a year of continued transition as purely electronic computer memories continued to replace older rotating memories seems to be disproved by continued rapid growth in hard-disk capacity and unit sales, while high-capacity Flash drives have yet to catch on in high-volume applications. Nonetheless, solid state storage is the preferred method of storage in low-volume applications such as MP3 players, handheld gaming systems, cellular phones and digital cameras. Samsung announced on Nov 20th 2008 that they would begin mass production of a 256 GB Solid state drive for use in laptops and desktops, but these drives will cost over $1,000, making storage on these drives cost roughly ten times the price of comparable hard-disk storage. On the other hand, Kurzweil correctly foresaw the growing ubiquity of wireless Internet access and cordless computer peripherals. Perhaps of even greater importance, Kurzweil presaged the explosive growth in peer-to-peer filesharing and the emergence of the Internet as a major medium for commerce and for accessing media such as movies, television programs, newspaper and magazine text, and music. He also claimed that three-dimensional computer chips would be in common use by 2009 (though older, "2-D" chips would still predominate), but although IBM has recently developed the necessary chip-stacking technology and announced plans to begin using three-dimensional chips in its supercomputers and for wireless communication applications, chip stacking will remain a low-volume technology in 2009.
The Singularity is Near
While this book focuses on the future of technology and the human race as The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines did, Kurzweil makes very few concrete, short-term predictions in The Singularity is Near, though longer-term visions are present in abundance.
Ideas about nutrition, health and lifestyle
Ray Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was diagnosed with a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes (a major risk factor for heart disease). Dissatisfied with the conventional treatments prescribed by his doctor, Kurzweil began studying the disease along with human metabolism, and based on what he learned, he created and adopted his own dietary and health regimen. His condition improved to such an extent that Kurzweil today shows no signs of the disease.
As mentioned earlier, Kurzweil predicts that radical technological advances will be made throughout the 21st century, and that many of those advances will benefit the field of medicine. This will ultimately culminate with the discovery of the means to reverse the aging process, cure any disease, and repair presently unrepairable injuries. Kurzweil has thus focused himself towards following a maximally healthy lifestyle to heighten his odds of living to see the day when science can make him immortal. Kurzweil calls this the "Bridge to a Bridge to a Bridge" strategy: The first bridge to longer life is Kurzweil's regimen--which is based on current technology--whereas the second- and third bridges are based on advanced biotechnologies and nanotechnologies, respectively, that have not yet been invented. They will allow for progressively longer human lifespans to the point of immortality. Successfully implementing the first "bridge" now allows one to reach the second in the future, which then allows one to reach the third.
Some elements of Kurzweil's health-focused lifestyle are conventional. He exercises frequently, does not eat to excess, and does not use drugs. Many others, however, are controversial and are explained by his obsession with living as absolutely long as possible and by his Transhumanist enthusiasm for using cutting-edge technologies and knowledge to extend human life. Kurzweil ingests "250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea" daily and drinks several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry.
Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 150.
Consuming large amounts of water is necessary for flushing toxins out of the body, and alkaline water allows the body to preserve important enzymes used for neutralizing acidic metabolic wastes. For this reason, Kurzweil abhors soft drinks and coffee, which are both acidic and drain detoxifying enzyme reserves. Kurzweil has taken criticism from nutritionists and scientists for his advocacy of alkaline water's health benefits, and he responded to this over the Internet. Green tea and red wine contain antioxidants that neutralize free radicals--a different type of toxin found within the body. Kurzweil also consumes red wine because it contains the compound resveratrol, which extends human lifespan according to some evidence. Kurzweil also takes pills containing high concentrations of the chemical.
On weekends, Kurzweil also undergoes intravenous transfusions of chemical cocktails at a clinic to further reprogram his biochemistry. He routinely measures the chemical composition of his bodily fluids to ensure balance, undergoes preemptive medical tests for many diseases and disorders, and keeps detailed records about the content of all the meals he eats. On that last note, Kurzweil only eats organic foods with low glycemic loads and claims it has been years since he last consumed anything containing sugar. Kurzweil considers foods rich in sugars and carbohydrates to be unhealthy since they spike the levels of glucose and insulin in the bloodstream, leading to health problems in the long term. He instead eats mainly vegetables, lean meats, tofu, and low glycemic load carbohydrates, and only uses extra virgin olive oil for cooking. Kurzweil also diligently consumes foods rich with Omega-3 fatty acids (including small, wild salmon) and antioxidants.
Moreover, Kurzweil makes it a priority to get sufficient sleep for physical and psychological health, and he maintains low stress levels in part by meditating and getting massages weekly. He exercises daily with walking, bike-riding and use of workout machines, but advises against high-impact forms of exercise. Kurzweil claims that his rigorous efforts have yielded positive results, which are partly proved by the fact that his body chemical profiles show his biological age to be more than a decade younger than his chronological age. In fact, Kurzweil claims that his personal health regimen has actually slowed down his rate of aging. He also advocates maintaining a slightly below-average body weight on the grounds that it imparts some of the life-extension benefits of full-blown caloric restriction.
Kurzweil joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which is a company that provides human cryonics services. In the event of his death, Kurzweil's body will be chemically preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at a safe Alcor facility until a point in the future when medical technology can revive him safely.
Kurzweil has authored two books on the subjects of nutrition, health and lifestyle: The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. In both, he recommends that other people emulate his health practices to the best of their abilities.
Stance on religion
Though Kurzweil's parents were Jewish, they raised him as a Unitarian and exposed him to many different faiths during his youth. Kurzweil gave a 2007 keynote speech to the United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut alongside Barack Obama, who was then a Presidential candidate. In The Singularity is Near he expresses a need for a new religion based on the principle of mutual respect between sentient life forms, and on the principle of respecting knowledge. This religion would not have a leader, instead being purely personal to adherents. Kurzweil expects that, once the human/machine race has converted all of the matter in the universe into a giant, sentient supercomputer it will have created a supremely powerful and intelligent being which will be Godlike in itself.
Criticism
Philosophical arguments over whether a machine can "think" aside (see Philosophy of artificial intelligence), Kurzweil's ideas have generated some criticism within the scientific community. Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has been one of the strongest critics of Kurzweil’s ideas, describing them as “cybernetic totalism”, and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil’s predictions in an essay for Edge.org entitled One Half of a Manifesto.
Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has said of Kurzweil's and Hans Moravec's books: "It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."
Although the idea of a technological singularity is a popular conceit in science fiction, some authors such as Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling have voiced scepticism about its real-world plausibility. Sterling expressed his views on the singularity scenario in a talk at the Long Now Foundation entitled The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. Other prominent AI thinkers and computer scientists such as Daniel C. Dennett, Rodney Brooks, and David Gelernter have also criticized Kurzweil’s projections.
PZ Myers, a scientific blogger, questioned the validity of Kurzweil's logarithmic graphs in a 2005 entry.
Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, agrees with Kurzweil's timeline of future progress, but thinks that technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and advanced biotechnology will create a dystopian world.
See also
External links
- - a vast resource, including some of his books for free
- , Ray Kurzweil, Chancellor
- Movie about Ray Kurzweil
- - Official Site
- - CIO Magazine interview, October 15, 2004
- - Keynote address, 24th Army Science Conference, November 29, 2004
- at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA, February 2005. (24 minutes)
- - news@nature site interview, February 8, 2005
- - Instapundit, September 2, 2005
- - December 23, 2005
- October 24, 2006
- November 27, 2006 , ,
- - How the next version of the Web will prepare us for the Singularity December 11, 2006
- and from Interwoven's GearUp Podcast
- , 3 hours in length
- May 2, 2007
- presentation from Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), Third Conference, Queens' College, Cambridge, England, 9 September, 2007
- and .
- - June 6, 2008
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