Kurzweil, Ray

Raymond Kurzweil (1948-) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist. He is also a proponent of rapid technological advancement in genetics, [Page 387]nanotechnologies, and robotics (GNR), which he describes as converging technologies. Kurzweil predicted that molecular assembly will be possible by the 2020s and will provide nanotechnologies that alleviate poverty, address environmental concerns, and eliminate human disease and aging.

Kurzweil was born in 1948 in Queens, New York. He received a bachelor of science degree in computer science and literature from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1970. By 2009, he had been awarded honorary doctorates by 13 universities. Kurzweil was awarded the 1999 National Medal of Technology by President Bill Clinton. He has been compared to Thomas Edison for his contributions to the fields of optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. Kurzweil has authored popular science books on artificial intelligence, health, and the future of advanced technologies. In 1990, he published The Age of Intelligent Machines about artificial intelligence in which he made several accurate predictions, including the development of the Internet. In 1999, he published The Age of Spiritual Machine, expanding on themes from his previous book and proposing the idea of human life fused with technology.

An early manuscript motivated Bill Joy to write his well-publicized 2000 Wired article “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,” beginning the conversation about risks associated with nanotechnologies. In 2004, Kurzweil published Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever with coauthor Terry Grossman, laying out recommendations for maintaining one's health in order to take advantage of future technologies that enable aging reversal. In 2005, Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, in which he introduced the concept of the singularity, an event he coined to refer to a point in time when humans merge with machines.

Kurzweil predicted that the Singularity will take place by 2045, made possible through rapid advances in technology and decreasing costs. By the 2030s, Kurzweil predicted, nanobots will be imbedded in the human body to eliminate disease, maintain health, and reverse aging. By the mid-2040s, he predicted, nano-bots will be embedded in the environment, essentially turning nature into a computer. Eventually, Kurzweil has predicted, converging technologies will allow for human immortality, the resurrection of the dead, and a new type of universe he has described as conscious, or fully interactive. Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity has been variously criticized as scientifically impossible, a secular form of religious zealotry, and as threatening the essential nature of what it means to be human. He has been described as a techno-optimist and transhumanist.