AI NEWS PAGE DOSSIER
Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil's file: reading machines, synthesizers, exponential forecasts, Google, the Singularity, and six decades of insisting the machines are coming fast.
Kurzweil spent decades turning pattern recognition into products, built machines that read and play music, became one of technology's most famous exponential forecasters, joined Google, and kept insisting that human and machine intelligence are converging toward a Singularity.
HOW THE HELL DID RAY KURZWEIL GET HERE?
1976
THE MACHINE READS PRINT OUT LOUD
Kurzweil introduced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first print-to-speech reading machine for blind users, combining OCR, scanning and speech synthesis.
RECEIPTS: National Inventors Hall of Famereported
1982
STEVIE WONDER HELPS START THE SYNTHESIZER CHAPTER
Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Music Systems in 1982 after conversations with Stevie Wonder about using computing to reproduce the expressive sound of acoustic instruments.
RECEIPTS: Kurzweilreported
1999
THE INVENTOR GETS THE NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY
Kurzweil received the U.S. National Medal of Technology after decades of work in optical character recognition, speech, music and pattern-recognition systems.
RECEIPTS: National Inventors Hall of Famereported
2005
THE SINGULARITY GETS ITS MANIFESTO
Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near, laying out his argument that accelerating computation would drive human and machine intelligence toward a transformative convergence.
RECEIPTS: Google Booksreported
Dec 2012
GOOGLE HIRES THE FUTURIST
Kurzweil joined Google as a director of engineering to work on machine learning and language processing, bringing his long-running AI forecasts inside one of the world's largest technology companies.
RECEIPTS: KQEDreported
Jun 25, 2024
THE SINGULARITY IS STILL NEAR, NOW NEARER
Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Nearer, revisiting his predictions about human-level AI, superintelligence and eventual human-machine integration.
RECEIPTS: Penguin Random Housereported