by Mark A. Ollig
He’s been called “the ultimate thinking machine” by
Forbes magazine.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says Kurzweil is “the
best in the world at predicting the future.”
Time Magazine writer Harriet Barovic wrote: “Kurzweil’s
eclectic career and propensity for combining science with practical often
humanitarian – applications have inspired comparisons with Thomas Edison.”
Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, inventor, and
futurist.
He has authored five national best-selling books, and
received 20 honorary doctorates.
Kurzweil is the recipient of the 1999 National Medal of
Technology.
In 2002, he was inducted into the US Patent Office’s
National Inventors Hall of Fame.
He has also made some bold future predictions; but
first, let’s look at a couple of his accomplishments.
In 1974, Kurzweil invented the first print-to-speech
reading machine using omni-font (any font) Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
technology.
Kurzweil came up with the idea for this device while
talking with a blind gentleman on a plane flight.
He said the blind person told him “the only real
handicap that he experienced was his inability to read ordinary printed
material.”
By 1976, his new Kurzweil Reading Machine was allowing
the blind to read by hearing the text words from commonly printed materials,
such as books, magazines, newspapers, and other text documents, using a
flat-bed scanner and text-to-speech technology.
Kurzweil’s invention was demonstrated by CBS news
anchor Walter Cronkite, who used the device to read aloud his “And that’s the
way it was, January 13, 1976” television sign-off.
By 1980, Kurzweil’s OCR technology was bought by Xerox,
who then began calling it: the Xerox TextBridge.
In 1984, he introduced the Kurzweil K250 musical
synthesizer.
This was the first computer-based instrument which
synthetically recreated the realistic musical sound of a grand-piano, violins,
drums, guitars, and other orchestra instruments.
The K250 could even play what amazingly sounded like
the angelic voices of The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
An NBC “Today Show” video with Gene Shalit interviewing
Ray Kurzweil, while his K250 music synthesizer is being demonstrated, can be
seen here: http://tinyurl.com/Kurzw250.
Saturday, Feb. 7, Kurzweil will receive the 2015
Technical Grammy for his lifetime of work in the field of music technology.
Let’s move on now, to some of Ray Kurzweil’s bold,
futuristic predictions.
During the 2020s, he predicts tiny nanobots
(microscopic robots) will become “smarter” than our current medical technology,
and will be used for treating our illnesses.
I agree. Using remote controlled and preprogramed
nanobots the size of blood cells for medically treating a person’s internal
injuries, or specific medical condition will likely happen.
Kurzweil also predicts machine intelligence will match
a human’s by 2029.
Let’s move on to the 2030s, when humans, according to
Kurzweil, will be able to upload their consciousness into a computer.
I question whether this will be our actual
consciousness, or just a mirror image of it.
It’s quite the bold prediction – would you want to
consciously exist inside a computer’s memory chip?
He also predicts during this time, virtual reality will
begin to feel “100 percent real.”
This prediction could have us living life through
virtual reality; like in one of my favorite movies, “The Matrix.”
In 2045, Kurzweil predicts we will increase our intelligence
“a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our [brain’s] neocortex to a
synthetic neocortex in the cloud.”
Instead of accessing the Internet cloud, humanity may
end up becoming immersed inside of it.
Let’s digress back in time for a moment.
The transistor, an electronic component originally
developed in AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in 1947, is used in just about every
electronic device on (and off) the planet.
In 1965, computer chip-maker Intel’s co-founder, Gordon
Moore stated the number of transistors per square on a computing chip which
provides processing power, would double roughly every two years.
What became known as “Moore’s Law” has, so far, proved
to be accurate.
With the continuing advances in nanoscale engineering,
it is believed, by 2020, manufacturers will be producing transistors on
computing chips the size of atoms.
Of course, science is always surprising us with its
breakthroughs.
According to a Dec. 8, 2014 article in the Electronic
Engineering Journal, transistors can be made the size of an electron.
The use of “single-electron transistors” or SETs, may
someday be used in the next generation of quantum computing processors.
Future quantum computers will be a game-changer in the
computing industry. They will be far more powerful than today’s best
supercomputers.
Currently, Kurzweil is director of engineering at
Google, where he leads a team in advancing machine intelligence and natural
language understanding.
You can watch Ray Kurzweil in a March 20, 2014 TED
(Technology, Entertainment and Design) Talk video at:
http://tinyurl.com/lvcj7wo.
Ray Kurzweil will turn 67 Thursday, Feb. 12.
A video of a 17-year-old Ray Kurzweil, when he appeared
on CBS television’s “I’ve Got a Secret” gameshow from 1965, can be seen at:
http://tinyurl.com/m7r6hl2.
Ray Kurzweil continues to track breakthroughs in
science and technology via his website: http://www.kurzweilai.net.
