Ray Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil (/ˈkɜːrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyle; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health technology, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is an advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He received the $500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the application of technology to improve human-machine communication. In 2002 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He has 21 honorary doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Inc. magazine ranked him No. 8 among the "most fascinating" entrepreneurs in the United States and called him "Edison's rightful heir".

Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York City. He attended NYC Public Education Kingsbury Elementary School PS188. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had emigrated from Austria just before the onset of World War II. Through Unitarian Universalism he was exposed to a diversity of religious faiths during his upbringing. The Unitarian church has a philosophy that there are many paths to the truth: his religious education consisted of studying one religion for six months before moving on to another. His father, Fredric, was a concert pianist, a noted conductor and a music educator. His mother, Hannah, was a visual artist. He is the elder of two children; his sister Enid, an accountant in Santa Barbara, is six years his junior.

Ray Kurzweil decided at age five that he wanted to be an inventor. As a young boy, he had an inventory of parts from various construction toys he had been given and old electronic gadgets he had collected from neighbors. In his youth, Kurzweil was an avid reader of science fiction. At age eight, nine, and ten, he read the entire Tom Swift Jr. series. At age seven or eight, he built a robotic puppet theater and robotic game. He was involved with computers by age 12 (in 1960), when only a dozen computers existed in New York City, and built computing devices and statistical programs for the predecessor of Head Start. At age 14, Kurzweil wrote a paper detailing his theory of the neocortex. His parents were involved with the arts, and he is quoted in the documentary Transcendent Man as saying that the household always discussed the future and technology.

Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School. During class, he often held onto his class textbooks to seemingly participate while focusing on his own projects hidden behind the book. His uncle, an engineer at Bell Labs, taught Kurzweil the basics of computer science. In 1963, at 15, he wrote his first computer program.

Kurzweil created pattern-recognition software that analyzed the works of classical composers, then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. In 1965 he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece composed by a computer he had built. Later in the year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention; his submission to Westinghouse Talent Search of his first computer program alongside several other projects resulted in his being one of the contest's national winners, for which President Lyndon B. Johnson personally congratulated him during a White House ceremony. The experiences impressed upon Kurzweil the belief that nearly any problem could be overcome.

While in high school, Kurzweil had corresponded with Marvin Minsky and was invited to visit him at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he did. Kurzweil also visited Frank Rosenblatt, a psychologist at Cornell. He attended MIT to study with Minsky, obtaining a B.Sc. degree in computer science and literature in 1970. Kurzweil took all the computer programming courses (eight or nine) MIT offered in his first year and a half.

In 1968, during his second year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called the Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers each student applicant submitted. Around that time he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000 ($904,211 in 2024) plus royalties. In 1974, he founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had been able to read text in only a few fonts. He decided that the technology's best application would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand text by having a computer read it to them aloud. But the device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions like Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device was large and covered an entire tabletop. Stevie Wonder heard about the demonstration of this new machine on The Today Show, and later became the user of the first production Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a long-term association with Kurzweil.