Ray Kurzweil

Co-Founder & Chancellor, Singularity University

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Ray Kurzweil is a world class inventor, thinker, and futurist, with a 35-year track record of accurate predictions. He 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, and many more. For these achievements, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.”

Ray has received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology. He is also the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and holds honors from three US presidents. Ray has written five national best-selling books including The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How to Create a Mind (2012). He is also a principal researcher and AI visionary at Google, looking at the long-term implications of technology and society

Everything Videos Articles

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Ray Kurzweil explains how AI makes radical life extension possible

Kurzweil predicts that AI will combine with biotechnology to defeat degenerative diseases this decade. Then things will get really interesting.

Your Brain in the Cloud: Access the Internet Directly with Your Mind

Technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil says our brains, as complex as they are, are constrained by an upper limit of 300 million “pattern recognizers.” But our future, cloud-based “virtual brains” will have no such constraints.

Ray Kurzweil: Can You Read 100 Million Web Pages in a Few Seconds? Your Robot Assistant Will.

In our most recent discussion with Ray, he discusses the ability of natural language machines, such as IBM's Jeopardy!-slaying computer named Watson, to overleap our own cognitive abilities. The result, he says, will be a computerized personal assistant to help us throughout the day.

Ray Kurzweil: Your Robot Assistant Will Be Able to Do What No Human Can Do

Your computer will be an assistant that helps you through the day, will answer your questions before you ask them or even before you realize you have a question

Why Should We Create a Mind?

Ray Kurzweil is the author of the book How to Create a Mind. The first question we have for him is “why create a mind?”

How Humans Can Put Machines to Shame

Being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment - that's the cutting edge of human intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil: Your Thoughts Create Your Brain

The basic technologies to enable us to look inside the brain and see its functioning are growing exponentially. And they're at a point now where we can actually see individual interneural connections forming and firing.

Can the Brain’s Metaphor Machine be Copied?

I'm not actually predicting that until 2029 that we will match human intelligence, but computers will nonetheless do things that humans can't do.

We Need More Intelligence

We won't be able to solve the major problems that we have without more intelligence.

Am I a Technological Optimist? You Bet!

I think you have a very different perspective on the future when you consider the exponential growth of information technology.

What if a Computer Passed the Turing Test?

My prediction is, in a few decades, we will come to accept entities that are not biological as conscious.

An App That Helps You Find Tacos Might Save the World

There's a million apps out there, and if you look through all of them they're doing remarkable things.

True Intelligence Goes Way Beyond Logic

Intelligence actually involves things like being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment, maybe in a poem or in a musical piece.

Predicting the Future with Precision

I did do an analysis of the 147 predictions I did for 2009 in my book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which I wrote in the mid to late 1990’s […]

You CAN Predict the Future, and You Must

All too often we get plans which have this common assumption that the future’s going to be just like today.

Imagine No Countries: The Singularity and Politics

We live in one unified world.

Three Reasons to Reverse-Engineer the Brain

Ray Kurzweil is the author of the recent book How to Create a Mind. The first question we have for him is "why create a mind?"

Ray Kurzweil: Humans Learn By Doing

Ray Kurzweil: Thinking Through the Great Change Epochs

Ray Kurzweil has developed six epochs for stages in the evolution of information.

Your Future Reality Is Virtual

In 10 years we’ll have three dimensional virtual realities that will seem just like real reality, beamed straight from eyeglasses into our retinas.

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