Ray Kurzweil
Receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation placed Raymond Kurzweil among a select group of American innovators recognized at the national level. That award is one marker in a career that has stretched across invention, computer science, artificial intelligence research, entrepreneurship, and writing — a combination that makes him genuinely hard to fit under a single label.
Born on February 12, 1948, in Queens, New York, Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School before going on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the following decades he built careers in parallel: working as an inventor and computer scientist, operating as an entrepreneur, and writing in English across both nonfiction and science fiction. His roles as a futurist and philosopher have fed directly into what has become a notable part of his public profile — the predictions he has made about the trajectory of technology and artificial intelligence.
Those predictions are themselves listed among the notable works associated with him. Beyond that, Kurzweil has accumulated a substantial record of formal recognition. He is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has received the Migel Medal and the Dickson Prize in addition to the National Medal of Technology and Innovation — acknowledgments that span his work as a scientist, inventor, and researcher.
As an artificial intelligence researcher and futurist, Kurzweil continues to be an active figure. The body of predictions he has put forward over the course of his career remains a concrete and traceable part of his public record, distinguishing his work in futurism from more general commentary and giving his output as an author and philosopher a measurable dimension that ties back to his identity as both a scientist and an inventor.
Quotes by Ray Kurzweil
I think we are evolving rapidly into one world culture. It's certainly one world economy. With billions of people online, I think we'll appreciate the wisdom in many different traditions as we learn more about them. People were very isolated and didn't know anything about other religions 100 years ago.
People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight.
Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines we're creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.
If we look at the life cycle of technologies, we see an early period of over-enthusiasm, then a 'bust' when disillusionment sets in, followed by the real revolution.
If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.
Aging is not one process. It's many different things going on that cause us to age. I have a program that at least slows down each of these different processes.
I decided to be an inventor when I was five. My parents had given me a few various enrichment toys like erector sets, and for some reason I had the idea that if I put things together just the right way, I could create the intended effect.
A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AI's will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous.
All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence.
Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.