Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Kurzweil was the principal developer 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.

Among his many honours, Kurzweil is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honour in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.

Kurzweil has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honours from three U.S. presidents. He is the author of six books, four of which have been national best-sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into nine languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Kurzweil’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Kurzweil speaks frequently to diverse audiences around the world, presenting a provocative, long-term, big picture view of the future of technology and its implications for society. In his presentations, he explains the exponential growth of technology and its path toward reverse engineering the brain, nanotechnology, the merging of human and machine, and, ultimately, extreme human life extension. Kurzweil tailors his lectures to audiences and often speaks on: innovation, health and medicine, education, business & investing, energy, and disabilities & assistive technologies.

• 7. Technology and Disabilities

  Only technology can provide the scale to overcome the challenges with which human society has struggled for generations. Within a couple of decades non-biological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence and will necessarily soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in the environment, our bodies and our brains, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, experience ‘beaming’, and enhanced human intelligence. These emerging technologies will be a great leveler in eliminating the handicaps associated with sensory and physical disabilities.
  
  Sample Titles:
  
  ·    Technology Empowers People with Disabilities: Today and Tomorrow
  
  ·    The End of Handicaps in an Era of Accelerating Technology

• 6. Energy

  Energy is certainly not an information technology today.  70% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, a nineteenth century technology.  However, if we could capture one part in ten thousand of the sunlight that falls on the Earth we could meet 100 percent of our energy needs using this renewable and environmentally friendly source.  We are unable to do that now because today’s solar panels are also an old industrial technology that are expensive, inefficient, heavy, and hard to install.  There is a new generation of solar panels based on “nanotechnology” (manipulating matter at the level of molecules) that is starting to overcome these obstacles.  The tipping point when energy from solar panels is actually less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away.  This is following an exponential progression in solar energy that is similar to what we see in computers.  The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years.  At that rate, it can meet all of our energy needs within twenty years. 
  
  Nanotechnology is an emerging area of technology in which matter and energy is reorganized at the molecular level using information processes.  It is an information technology and therefore subject to what I call the “law of accelerating returns,” this continual doubling of capability about every year.  There are billions of dollars now being invested in these new renewable energy technologies by venture capital organizations, and companies such as Google.  An era in which we can obtain energy from sunlight using nanoengineered solar panels and store the energy in nanoengineered fuel cells (to overcome the intermittency of sunlight) at lower cost than environmentally damaging fossil fuels is close at hand. 
  
  Sample Titles:
  
  ·    From Unlimited Clean Energy to Overcoming Disease:  How Engineering Can Do It
  
  ·    10,000 Times More Sunlight Than We Need

• 5. Business/Investing

  Kurzweil frequently presents to private equity firms and businesses on technology and the capital markets, business and technology trends, near- and long-term predictions, and strategy in an age of exponential technological growth. 
  
  Despite the current economic turmoil, Mr. Kurzweil presents an optimistic argument that the exponential growth of information technology will continue unaffected during the economic downturn as it has in every past recession and during the Great Depression, noting that information technology goes beyond just computerized devices, but includes such disparate areas as health and medicine, and energy.  In every past recession and the Great Depression, he notes that economic growth snapped back to where it would have been had the downturn never occurred.  He presents a wealth of data showing that information technologies have the scale and the ability to overcome the major problems we face such as energy and the environment, health, and even poverty.
  
  Sample Topics:
  
  ·    21st Century Technology and the Capital Markets
  
  ·    Exponentially Growing Ventures from Exponentially Shrinking Technology

• 4. Education

  4. Education
  
  Kurzweil presents to many academic groups including educators, administrators, executive boards, and higher education IT specialists about the intersection of information technology (a broad perspective), education and human knowledge.  He describes a future in which there is widespread and inexpensive access to education around the world, individualized learning through computer assisted instruction,  full-immersion virtual reality classrooms and labs, and ultimately the ability to download knowledge and skills directly to our brains.  He remarks on the key role of education in supporting the unique attribute of our species which is an exponential expanding knowledge base that we pass down from generation to generation.  He notes that as jobs are destroyed at the bottom of the skill ladder and more satisfying and better paying jobs are added at the top, investment in education has increased to keep pace with the rising skill ladder.  Specifically, in 1870 there were 60,000 college students and today there are over 6 million.  Expenditures in K-12 education in constant dollars and on a per capita basis have multiplied by ten over the past century.  Our economy is increasingly dominated by knowledge intensive jobs, hence the increasingly central role of education and technology.
  
  Sample Titles:
  
  ·    The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Education and Society

• 3. Health/Medicine

  We are now at a pivotal time in health technologies.  With the collection of the genome in 2003 and the advent of techniques such as RNA interference that can actually turn off the genes that promote disease and aging, medicine has transformed itself into an information technology.  As such, medicine is now subject to the “law of accelerating returns,” meaning that these technologies will be a thousand times more powerful than today in ten years, and a million times more powerful in 20 years.  Up until recently, health interventions were hit or miss.  We'd find something that seemed to work with only crude models of how they worked.  Drug development was called "drug discovery," basically finding things that worked rather than designing them.  Today it is within our grasp to slow the aging process and take full advantage of advances in bio- and nanotechnology that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace in the years ahead.  Ultimately, we will merge with our machines, vastly extending human health and longevity, and greatly increasing our intelligence.   
  
  
  Sample Titles:
  
  ·    The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Healthcare and Medicine
  
  ·    Human Body Version 2.0: When Humans Transcend Biology
  
  ·    Reprogramming Biology: The New Paradigm
  
  ·    The Coming Merger of Human and Machine:  the Radical Expansion of Human Longevity and Intelligence

• 2. Innovation/Invention

  As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer 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.  In his presentations Kurzweil discusses the democratizing effects of technology,  how to foster innovation in an organization, and how to bring inventions to market. He explains how the law of accelerating returns and the exponential growth of information technology are accelerating opportunities for innovation. In this talk, he draws upon his own history of innovation which led to his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, founded by the U.S. Patent Office in 2002.
  
  Sample Titles:
  
  ·    The Democratization of Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
  
  ·    How to Manage Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies

• 1. Technology and The Future

  At the onset of the 21st century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what is means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy, and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.  The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate.  Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level "strong" AI well before 2030.  The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a process well under way.  While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents an inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are a billion times more intelligent...all within the next three to four decades. 
  
  Sample Titles:
  
  ·    The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society
  
  ·    The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One
  
  ·    Science, Technology, and Invention: Strategies to Create the Future

• We were very pleased with Mr. Kurzweil’s speech, his expertise combined with the Teleportec system made his lecture one of the highlights of the event.

   

  Management Forum Starnberg GmbH

• The conference went very well and the clients (and myself too!) were very fascinated by Mr. Kurzweil’s speech!

  Credit Suisse

• The event was a big success. The journalists I spoke to said they found Ray’s speech ‘awe inspiring’ and he was in hot demand for one to one interviews the following day.  We’re collating feedback forms from the attendees – many of them gave Ray 5 out of 5!

  Ketchum Public Relations

• Mr. Kurzweil was undoubtedly a Conference highlight.

  The Israeli Presidential Conference Steering Committee

• Ray was fantastic!  We had a full audience and there continues to be follow-up discussion on Twitter.

  Cambridge BioPartners

• A huge thank you for your enlightening, inspiring and thought-provoking keynote that closed our Handheld Learning Conference the other week… The delegate feedback from the event and for your talk in particular has been overwhelmingly positive.

  Learning Without Frontiers

• We are still excited and full with adrenaline following the exciting talk by Mr. Kurzweil. The presentation was a remarkable achievement.  It was fluent and brilliant.

  Olive Bay, Ltd.

• 
  April 2009

  Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever

  In 2004, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD, published Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Their groundbreaking book marshaled thousands of scientific studies to make the case that new developments in medicine and technology will allow us to radically extend our life expectancies and slow down the aging process. Soon, our notion of what it means to be a 55-year-old will be as outdated as an eight-track tape player. TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever presents a practical, enjoyable program so that readers can live long enough (and remain healthy long enough) to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace during the years ahead.

  
  
• 
  September 2006

  The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

  For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

  
  
• 
  September 2005

  Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever

  Startling discoveries in the areas of genomics, biotechnology, and nanotechnology occur practically every day. The rewards of this research, some of it as spectacular as science fiction, are practically in our grasp. Fantastic Voyage shows us how we can use these new technologies to live longer than previously imaginable. The authors take the reader on a journey to undreamed-of vitality with a comprehensive investigation into the cutting-edge science regarding diet, supplementation, genetics, detoxification, and the hormones involved with aging and youth. By following their program, which includes such simple recommendations as eating a balanced, low- glycemic-index diet, and taking powerful anti-aging nutritional supplements, anyone will be able to add years of healthy, active life.

  
  
• 
  June 2001

  The Age of Spiritual Machines

  The most relevant conclusion to draw from the long list of honorary degrees and professional awards, the praise by colleagues and the media, is that Ray Kurzweil is a smart man who people listen to. The Age of Spiritual Machines is his latest effort to explore the future of technology, a future he sees filled with machines as intelligent as their owners.