Ray Kurzweil

Award-winning technology expert and New York Times bestselling author

Photo of Ray Kurzweil

Biography

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 number eight among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of sixt …

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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 number eight among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed 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 re-creating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s website, www.KurzweilAI.net, has over one million readers.

Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT 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 thirteen honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Ray has written five books, four of which have been national bestsellers. THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES has been translated into nine languages and was the number one bestselling book on Amazon.com in science. Ray’s latest book, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR, was a New York Times bestseller, and has been the number one book on Amazon.com in both science and philosophy.

Photo by Helene DeLillo
 
Speaking Topics

On the Future

  • Early in the twenty-first century, intelligence will underlie everything of value
  • The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology
  • The acceleration of technology in the twenty-first century: the impact on business, the economy, and society
  • The accelerating impact of exponentially expanding complex systems
  • The emergence and impact of intelligent machines
  • An exponentially expanding future from exponentially shrinking technology
  • The web within us: when minds and machines become one
  • Why we can be confident of turing test capable AI within a quarter century
  • The law of accelerating returns and the twenty-first century

On Health/Longevity

  • Reprogramming biology: the new paradigm
  • A bridge to a bridge to a bridge…to immortality
  • How to live long enough to live forever
  • The coming merger of human and machine: the radical expansion of human longevity and intelligence
  • Reverse engineering the human body and brain: the impact on human health and society
  • Biotechnology and nanotechnology: two overlapping health revolutions
  • The impact of twenty-first century technology on human health and society

On Innovation & Entrepreneurship

  • The democratization of innovation in an era of accelerating technologies
  • How to manage innovation in an era of accelerating technologies
  • Identifying an opportunity in technology
  • Innovation in an era of accelerating technologies
  • Innovation in the twenty-first century
  • The power of an idea

On The Social Impact of Technology

  • Towards singularity: its nature, promise, and dangers
  • How far will technology transform humanity?
  • Promise and peril: the deeply intertwined poles of twenty-first century technology
  • Computers and consciousness
  • Virtual reality and the nature of identity
  • Are we spiritual machines?

On Economic Impact

  • The future of information technology as it asymptotes to 100% of the value of products and services
  • Exponentially growing ventures from exponentially shrinking technology
  • The acceleration of technology in the twenty-first century: the impact on business, the economy, and society
  • The forces of deflation: why we don’t need high interest rates to counter inflation, a confluence of exponential trends
  • Twenty-first century technology and the capital markets

On Education

  • The acceleration of technology in the twenty-first century: the impact on education, training, and performance
  • The acceleration of technology in the twenty-first century: The impact on higher education and society

On Disabilities and Assistive Technologies

  • The end of handicaps
  • Disabilities and technology in the twenty-first century
  • The future of blindness and disabilities in an age of accelerating technology
  • Disabilities and blindness technology in the twenty-first century
  • Technology, neuroscience, and the future of cognitive disabilities
  • The future of special education in an era of accelerating technology

Featured Book

Featured book's cover THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR "Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence..." —Bill Gates Buy Books now!
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