Raymond Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is an American author, computer scientist, inventor, and futurist and is a director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil was the principal inventor 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 recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He has also written several books such as “The Age of Spiritual Machines “or “The Singularity Is Near”.

His Views:


 In 2001 he wrote an essay entitled “The Law of Accelerating Returns” which proposed an extensions of Moore’s law to a wide variety of technologies, and used this to argue in favour of technological singularity. Technological singularity is a hypothesis saying that technological progress will reach a point wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual possibilities and have a great impact on how our civilization will look with a possibility of ending it. The event where civilization would end is called singularity.

 Kurzweil has also stressed the extreme potential danger of nanotechnology. He says however, that progress cannot be stopped because that would require totalitarian system. In order to prevent that danger we need to develop our defensive technologies so that they will stay ahead of destructive ones.





His predictions:
 Raymond Kurzweil has also made several predictions regarding technology advancements that were yet to come. For example he predicted appearance of new technologies such as: cell phones and fax machines. He has also predicted that by the year 2000 computer will be able to beat the best human player in chess. The most significant one was however, when he predicted the explosive growth of worldwide Internet use.

 Apart from these, he has also made predictions for the upcoming future. One of the most interesting ones states that in about 10 years we will be able to spend some time of our time in 3D virtual environment which will appear as real as real world. Another one says that in around 20 to 25 years from now we will have millions of blood-cell sized devices that will enhance our immunity system, memory and other abilities. Around year 2045 the pace of change will be so fast that we won’t be able to keep up with it unless we merge with the machines we will be creating.

 Raymond Kurzweil his ideas are pointing towards the future where technology and artificial intelligence overrun humans. As we are heavily dependent on today’s technology, it became part of everyone’s life. It keeps developing at a fast pace and according Kurzweil that pace will increase significantly in the future. Devices such as nanorobots will enhance our abilities He also considers possibility where artificial intelligence outsmarted human race and led to it extinction.