Ray Kurzweil, byname of Raymond Kurzweil, (born February 12, 1948, Queens, New York, U.S.), American laptop scientist and futurist who pioneered pattern-recognition know-how and proselytized the inevitability of humanity’s merger with the know-how it created.
Kurzweil was raised in a secular Jewish household in Queens, New York. His dad and mom fostered an early curiosity in science, permitting him to work as a pc programmer for the Head Start program at age 14. In 1965 he earned first prize within the International Science Fair with a laptop program that might write music that mimicked the kinds of nice composers. The program marked the start of his career-long try to re-create sample recognition, or the flexibility to search out order in advanced knowledge. It was Kurzweil’s perception that sample recognition shaped the premise of human thought.
As a scholar on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kurzweil created a pc program that helped high-school college students select a school to attend. He then offered the service to a writer for $100,000 plus royalties. He graduated from MIT in 1970 with a bachelor’s diploma in laptop science and literature. Four years later he established Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., which developed know-how that allowed computer systems to learn textual content printed in any regular typeface. Under Kurzweil’s course, the corporate additionally pioneered a flatbed scanner and a text-to-speech synthesizer and used all three innovations to construct a studying machine for the blind. A business model of the machine was developed, which led to the sale of the corporate to the Xerox Corporation in 1980; Kurzweil was a guide for Xerox till 1995. A friendship with musician Stevie Wonder led Kurzweil to launch a enterprise that created professional-quality music synthesizers in 1982. That enterprise was offered to the Korean instrument producer Young Chang in 1990.
In 1987 one other firm based by Kurzweil spawned the primary business speech-recognition system and in 1997 was offered to a priority that later teamed with the Microsoft Corporation to market speech-recognition software program for private computer systems. In 1997 and 1999 he based companies that produced software program utilizing synthetic intelligence for monetary evaluation and medical coaching. Kurzweil additionally explored the probabilities of know-how in creating artwork, founding an organization in 1998 that produced software program able to creating work and poetry. His Web website, KurzweilAI.web, was based in 2001 and featured articles on the way forward for know-how, in addition to Ramona, a virtual-reality girl who conversed with customers. In 2003 Kurzweil cofounded an organization that offered dietary dietary supplements aimed toward extending the human life span, and in 2005 he cofounded an organization that launched a handheld print reader for the blind.
Kurzweil attracted the eye of most people along with his daring prognostications about how know-how would form the long run. He explicated an array of prescient theories in The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), which anticipated the explosion in reputation of the Internet. Kurzweil additionally wrote The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life (1993), which particulars a weight-reduction plan that he had used to assist treatment himself of diabetes. His ebook The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) presents a imaginative and prescient of the twenty first century as a time when laptop know-how would have superior far sufficient to permit machines to function on a stage equal to that of the human mind. Computers, he predicted, would make advanced choices, recognize magnificence, and even expertise feelings. Moreover, Kurzweil believed that as people transferred the data of their brains to computer systems, the excellence between man and machine would turn out to be blurred. He additional augured the convergence of human life with know-how in Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004), coauthored with Terry Grossman, and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005). Transcendent Man (2009), a documentary, chronicles Kurzweil’s life and options interviews with each supporters and detractors of his predictions.
In 2000 Kurzweil was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology in recognition of his many improvements. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office, in 2002.