Ray Kurzweil
In plain wordsAn American inventor of reading machines and speech technology who became the best-known prophet of the 'singularity', predicting human-level AI by 2029.
American inventor and futurist who moved from building pattern-recognition machines to forecasting when machines would equal human intelligence. In 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' (1999), 'The Singularity Is Near' (2005) and 'The Singularity Is Nearer' (2024) he argued, from his law of accelerating returnslaw of accelerating returns, n.: Ray Kurzweil's claim that technology improves at an ever-faster rate, because each advance helps build the next, so progress speeds up exponentially rather than steadily., that exponential growth in computing would bring human-level AI, a machine passing the Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out., by 2029 and a technological singularitytechnological singularity, n.: A moment some people expect in the future when technology, usually AI smarter than us, starts changing the world so fast and so deeply that we cannot see past it. around 2045, with humans merging with their technology. The inventions came first: his Kurzweil Reading Machine (1976) paired optical character recognitionoptical character recognition, n.: Software that picks out the letters and words in a picture — a road sign, a handwritten note, a page of an old book — and turns them into real text a computer can copy, search or read aloud. for ordinary typefaces with text-to-speechtext-to-speech, n.: Technology that reads written text aloud in a computer-generated voice, used in screen readers, voice assistants, audiobooks and navigation apps. so that blind users could hear print read aloud, and his companies went on to make early large-vocabulary speech recognitionspeech recognition, n.: Technology that turns spoken words into written text, as when a phone transcribes a voice message or captions appear automatically under a video. products and electronic music synthesizers, work recognized with the US National Medal of Technology (1999) and the Lemelson–MIT Prize (2001). He co-founded Singularity University (2008) and joined Google in 2012 to work on natural-language understanding. His dated forecasts are among the most cited, and most disputed, in the field.
Related
- technological singularitytechnological singularity, n.: A moment some people expect in the future when technology, usually AI smarter than us, starts changing the world so fast and so deeply that we cannot see past it.
- law of accelerating returnslaw of accelerating returns, n.: Ray Kurzweil's claim that technology improves at an ever-faster rate, because each advance helps build the next, so progress speeds up exponentially rather than steadily.
- Vernor VingeVernor Vinge, prop. n.: An American science-fiction author and mathematics professor who popularized the 'technological singularity': a coming point when smarter-than-human minds change the world so fast that no one can foresee what follows.
- mind uploadingmind uploading, n.: The idea of moving a person's mind out of their biological brain and into a computer, so that they could go on living as software.
- AI timelinesAI timelines, n.: Forecasts of when AI will reach major milestones, such as matching humans at most work. People with short timelines expect this within years; others expect decades, or never.
- optical character recognitionoptical character recognition, n.: Software that picks out the letters and words in a picture — a road sign, a handwritten note, a page of an old book — and turns them into real text a computer can copy, search or read aloud.
Sources
- Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking.
- Kurzweil, R. (2024). The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. Viking.
Mentioned in
technological singularitytechnological singularity, n.: A moment some people expect in the future when technology, usually AI smarter than us, starts changing the world so fast and so deeply that we cannot see past it., Vernor VingeVernor Vinge, prop. n.: An American science-fiction author and mathematics professor who popularized the 'technological singularity': a coming point when smarter-than-human minds change the world so fast that no one can foresee what follows., law of accelerating returnslaw of accelerating returns, n.: Ray Kurzweil's claim that technology improves at an ever-faster rate, because each advance helps build the next, so progress speeds up exponentially rather than steadily., rapture of the nerdsrapture of the nerds, phr.: A mocking nickname for the 'technological singularity', comparing the belief that superintelligent AI will transform the world to the religious idea of the Rapture., transhumanismtranshumanism, n.: A movement holding that people should use technology, such as genetic engineering, brain implants or AI, to overcome human limits like aging, disease and death, and become more than human.