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Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil is one of A.I.’s leading proponents, Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil argues that nonbiological intelligence will soon become indistinguishable from conscious entities such as humans. He often explains how we will "reverse engineer" our software (our minds) and "upgrade" our hardware (our bodies) to indefinitely extend human life -- before the dawn of the 22nd century. Kurzweil argues that accelerating growth of computer power will result in machine intelligence exceeding human intelligence early in this century. Nanobots will scan and enable the reverse engineering of our brains, provide 3D immersive virtual realities, and free the human mind from its severe physical limitations as the next step in evolution. Ultimately, humankind will "merge with its computational technology." Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, 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. Ray has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray
Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize (view the video),
the world's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received
the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in
technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has
also received scores of other national and international awards, including
the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize),
Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT,
and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing
Machinery. He has received ten honorary Doctorates and honors from three
U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film
awards. His book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer
Science Book of 1990. His current best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual
Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, has been published
in 9 languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in
the categories of "Science" and "Artificial Intelligence." Links
Are
We Spiritual Machines? |
Ray
Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, and author. His books include
"The Age of Intelligent Machines" and "The Age of Spiritual
Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence". The recently
published "Are We Spiritual Machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics
of Strong AI" is a collection of critiques and responses regarding
Ray's vision of Strong Artificial Intelligence.
