i3 - November/December 2017 - 43

Ray Kurzweil
PUBLISHER,
INVENTOR,
TWICEFUTURIST
MAGAZINE(1948
(1947- -0000)
)

t would be easier to list
the communications and
music-making innovations that Ray Kurzweil has not
influenced or prophesied. He
has founded nine companies,
is the principal inventor of the
first CCD flat-bed scanner, the
first omni-font optical character
recognition, the first print-tospeech reading machine for the
blind, the first text-to-speech
synthesizer, the first music
synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other
orchestral instruments, and the
first commercially marketed
large-vocabulary speech recognition. As a futurist, nearly all his
predictions for technological life
in the 21st century have come
to fruition.
Kurzweil was born in Queens,
NY, on February 12, 1948, to a pair
of creative and inquisitive parents;
his father, Fredric, was a noted
pianist, composer and conductor
and his mother, Hannah, was
a visual artist. A technological
future was a constant home
discussion topic. When he was 12,
Kurzweil was already tinkering with
computers and built computing
devices and statistical programs.
Kurzweil's uncle, who
worked at Bell Labs, first taught
him computer science. By age 15,
he developed an AI patternrecognition software program
that won him a Westinghouse
Talent Search prize and a
personal congratulations from
President Lyndon Johnson.
While a sophomore at MIT, he
earned a B.S. in computer sci-

C TA . t e c h / i 3

Ray Kurzweil is a respected futurist
who founded nine companies and
numerous inventions including the
CCD flat-bed scanner, print-to-speech
reading machine for the blind,
text-to-speech synthesizer and large
vocabulary speech recognition.

ence and literature in 1970 and
started a company that he sold
for $100,000 plus royalties.
After inventing the first CCD
flatbed scanner in 1974 and the
first text-to-speech synthesizer,
Kurzweil then developed the first
omni-font character recognition
software and put them together
into the Kurzweil Reading Machine
in January 1976. He started selling
a version that was used to create
the first major databases such as
Lexus and Nexus.
In 1982, Kurzweil met Stevie
Wonder, who asked if "we could
use the extraordinarily flexible
computer control methods on

the beautiful sounds of acoustic instruments." An inspired
Kurzweil developed the Kurzweil
250, the first synthesizer capable
of realistically recreating the
sounds and musical response of
all instruments, allowing a single
individual to compose and play
an entire orchestral piece.
Concurrent with the development of his synthesizer, Kurzweil
also founded Kurzweil Applied
Intelligence, which developed the
first commercially marketed large
vocabulary speech recognition.
In the 1990s, he created Kurzweil
Educational Systems to develop
pattern-recognition systems for

dyslexic, blind and ADHD students. He also made KurzweilAI.
net, a website devoted to showcasing scientific developments
and futurist discussion.
While creating companies,
Kurzweil also was writing. Five of
his seven books have been bestsellers, including The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and The
Age of Spiritual Machines (1999),
which made many prescient
predictions about technology
that have come to fruition.
In 2000, Kurzweil launched the
Kurzweil Network, which explores
key breakthroughs, trends and
growth of biological and machine
technologies in all facets of society, including biotech, nanotech
and materials science, electronics,
computation, artificial intelligence,
robotics, neuroscience, web,
pattern recognition, virtual reality,
human brain reverse engineering,
and brain and body augmentation.
He is co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University and,
in December 2012, was named a
director of engineering at Google
by Co-Founder Larry Page,
heading up a team developing
machine intelligence and natural
language understanding.
Among Kurzweil's many
honors include the National
Medal of Technology (1999); the
Lemelson-MIT Prize (2001); induction into the National Inventors
Hall of Fame (2002); a Technical
Grammy Award for outstanding
achievements in the field of music
technology (2015); 21 honorary
doctorates; and honors from
three U.S. presidents.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017

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i3 - November/December 2017

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