Ray Kurzweil

• Born: February 12, 1948
• Place of Birth: Queens, New York

• AMERICAN COMPUTER SCIENTIST AND SOFTWARE ENGINEER

A leading advocate for artificial intelligence, Kurzweil developed several advanced computer-based pattern-recognition technologies, expert systems for finance, music composition, and other fields, as well as electronic musical instruments.

PRIMARY FIELDS: Computer science; mathematics; music

PRIMARY INVENTION: Kurzweil Reading Machine

Early Life

Ray Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York. His parents, a well-educated secular Jewish couple involved in the arts, had escaped from Europe during the years of the Holocaust. His father, a musician, and his mother, a visual artist, encouraged his creativity, and his uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, shared his knowledge of computers with Kurzweil. As a child, Kurzweil enjoyed reading science fiction, learned about diverse spiritual traditions, and also developed a deep concern for social justice. He loved programming, and in high school he created music composition software that could analyze the style of a given piece and generate music in the same style. Word of this achievement spread, and in 1965 he appeared on national television as a guest on Steve Allen’s program I’ve Got a Secret. Following the format of the program, Kurzweil played a composition on the piano, and it was eventually revealed that his computer program had composed the piece. His project won first prize in the International Science Fair, and as a winner in the Westinghouse Talent Search, he and thirty-nine other students were honored at the White House, where they were greeted by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Kurzweil continued to distinguish himself as a college student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned a bachelor of science degree in computer science and literature in 1970. One of his most important teachers at MIT was Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI). During Kurzweil’s sophomore year, he created the Select College Consulting Program, which matched high school students with colleges using a database with two million items of information about three thousand colleges. Kurzweil ran this as a business, renting time on a mainframe computer to perform the calculations, and his program was highly successful. He sold it to the publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for $100,000.

Life’s Work

After graduating, Kurzweil continued his work in pattern recognition, applied to the problem of enabling a computer program to recognize printed letters. This task, known as optical character recognition (OCR), had only been partially solved, because existing programs could recognize characters but only in a few fonts. This placed severe limitations on the practical value of such systems, since text is printed in a great variety of fonts. Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products in 1974 to work on this and other technologies, and he soon succeeded in developing the first omnifont optical character recognition program. After a conversation with a blind man who was a fellow passenger on an airplane, Kurzweil realized that his OCR program could be combined with other innovations to create a useful assistive technology for those with visual impairments. Working with his team, Kurzweil supervised the development of the first charge-coupled device (CCD) flat-bed scanner, which organized signals from groups of photoelectric light sensors and improved the quality and speed of text-to-speech synthesis, incorporating all of these features into the Kurzweil Reading Machine, announced in 1976.

A discussion with musician Stevie Wonder, who was the first individual to purchase a Kurzweil Reading Machine, reignited Kurzweil’s interest in using computers for music. In this case, Kurzweil responded to Wonder’s interest in using keyboard synthesizers to imitate natural instruments more realistically. In 1982, Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Music Systems, with Wonder as the music adviser. After two years of research and development, the K250 (Kurzweil 250) was released. It was one of the first electronic synthesizers to successfully emulate an acoustic grand piano and other instruments.

During the same period, Kurzweil turned his attention to the development of speech-recognition software. In 1982, he founded another company, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, to focus on this area. He took advantage of advances in computer memory and architecture to drastically increase the vocabulary of his system, competing with earlier products developed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. Realizing that specialized fields such as medicine make use of their own extensive vocabularies, Kurzweil developed systems such as Kurzweil VoiceMED (now Kurzweil Clinical Reporter) so that physicians and other medical professionals could dictate prescriptions, reports, and other kinds of information quickly and less expensively. Further specialization allowed variants of the system to be customized for various branches of medicine.

In the 1990s, Kurzweil started additional ventures, including the Medical Learning Company, which developed computer simulations of the human body for medical training, FatKat financial investment software (1999), and several websites, including KurzweilAI.net, promoting discussion and shared research, and KurzweilCyberArt.com, which highlighted machine-generated paintings and poetry. After being diagnosed with type II diabetes, Kurzweil cured himself through diet and nutrition, adding this success to his long list of research topics. Kurzweil also became a prolific author, starting with The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Ten Percent Solution for a Healthy Life (1993), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1998), Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004; with Terry Grossman, MD), and The Singularity Is Near (2005). The topics of these books are wide-ranging, but they are unified by an optimistic view of humanity’s future.

Kurzweil has been awarded several honorary doctorates and numerous prizes and awards, including Carnegie Mellon University’s Dickson Prize (1994), the National Medal of Technology (1999), the Lemelson-MIT Prize (2001), and many others. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has continued his research and development projects but also remained in great demand as a lecturer and inspirational public speaker. Transcendent Man, a feature-length documentary film about Kurzweil’s life and ideas, was released in 2009. In December 2012, it was announced that Google had hired Kurzweil to be the company's director of engineering and that he was going to focus on machine learning and language processing. In 2015, he received the Technical Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology. In 2019, he published his first novel, Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine. He followed that work with his 2024 nonfiction release The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI.

Impact

Even without counting Kurzweil’s influence as an author, humanist, and entrepreneur, his many inventions in assistive technology, medicine, word processing, finance, music, and other fields have expanded and extended intellectual, professional, and artistic horizons for millions of people. Over the course of his career, the rapid rise in the availability and power of computers has made it possible to greatly accelerate and miniaturize Kurzweil’s earliest inventions, supporting his observations about trends in technology. Some of Kurzweil’s inventions and businesses have continued under other companies, which maintain, refine, and market them. His omnifont OCR was purchased by Xerox in 1980 and became known as Xerox TextBridge. His electronic musical instrument business was sold in 1990 to a Korean piano company, Young Chang, and became the Kurzweil Music Systems division of Hyundai. The speech-recognition software developed by Kurzweil Applied Intelligence was sold to become the dictation division of Lernout and Hauspie in 1997.

Although not everyone has agreed with his utopian vision of a technological singularity (defined by several authors as the point at which machines become more intelligent than people and at which human history as it is known will cease to exist), he continued to stimulate discussion about the fundamental nature of intelligence and its machine-based counterparts, and technology’s expanding impact on human culture.

Bibliography

Brown, David. Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse. MIT Press, 2002.

Jahoda, Gerald, and Elizabeth A. Johnson. “The Use of the Kurzweil Reading Machine in Academic Libraries.” Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 13, no. 2, 1987, pp. 99–103.

Jurafsky, Daniel, and James Martin. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition. Prentice Hall, 2000.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking Press, 2005.

Kurzweil, Ray, and Terry Grossman. Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Rodale Press, 2004.

Rothfeld, Becca. "Ray Kurzweil Is (Still, Somehow) Excited About Humans Merging with Machines." Review of The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, by Ray Kurzweil. The Washington Post, 26 June 2024, www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/06/26/singularity-nearer-ray-kurzweil-review/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Taylor, Colleen. "Ray Kurzweil Joins Google in Full-Time Engineering Director Role; Will Focus on Machine Learning, Language Processing." TechCrunch, 14 Dec. 2012, techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/ray-kurzweil-joins-google-as-engineering-director-focusing-on-machine-learning-and-language-tech. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Weinschenk, Susan, and Dean Barker. Designing Effective Speech Interfaces. Wiley, 2000.