Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil

An American inventor and futurist whose engineering and whose forecasting are received quite differently. In the 1970s he built the first omni-font optical character recognition system and turned it into the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which read printed text aloud to blind users; he went on to found companies in music synthesis and in large-vocabulary speech recognition, all of it applied pattern recognition of the kind AI later industrialised. He is better known for the Law of Accelerating Returns, the claim that information technologies improve exponentially rather than linearly, and for the predictions he draws from it in The Singularity Is Near (2005) and The Singularity Is Nearer (2024): human-level machine intelligence around 2029, and a merger of human and machine intelligence around 2045. He has been a director of engineering at Google since 2012. Critics object that extrapolating performance curves is not a theory of intelligence, and that he grades his own past predictions generously, but the optimistic trajectory he set out is the one much of the current risk debate is arguing against. (See also: AGI, Scaling laws, Nick Bostrom, Gary Marcus)