Raymond Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields as diverse as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is 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 honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Kurzweil has written seven books, five of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. Ray’s latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, was released on November 13, 2012.

In his controversial 2001 essay, "The Law of Accelerating Returns," Kurzweil proposes an extension of Moore's law that forms the basis of the concept of "Technological Singularity," which predicts that technological progress will soon become extremely fast, and consequently will make the future (after the technological singularity) unpredictable and qualitatively different from today.

Related Links

• Kurzweil's website, KurzweilAI.net
• Ray Kurzweil's Wikipedia page
• Kurzweil Companies web site
• The Singularity is Near movie website
• Human v 2.0: Ray Kurzweil vs. Hugo de Garis

Ray Kurzweil Quotes

My view is that consciousness, the seat of “personalness,” is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).