When was ray kurzweil born

In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines Kurzweil proposed "The Law of Accelerating Returns", according to which the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems including but not limited to the growth of technologies tends to increase exponentially.

He gave further focus to this issue in a essay entitled "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which proposed an extension of Moore's law to a wide variety of technologies, and used this to argue in favor of Vernor Vinge's concept of a technological singularity. Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines , presented his ideas about the future. It was written from to and published in Building on Ithiel de Sola Pool's "Technologies of Freedom" , Kurzweil claims to have forecast the demise of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information.

In the book Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to predict correctly that computers would beat the best human players by , and most likely in that year. Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the s.

At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines , there were only 2. He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services". Additionally, Kurzweil claims to have correctly foreseen that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.

Kurzweil also claims to have accurately forecast that, by the end of the s, many documents would exist solely in computers and on the Internet, and that they would commonly be embedded with sounds, animations, and videos that would inhibit their transfer to paper format. Moreover, he claims to have foreseen that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future.

In , Kurzweil published a second book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines , which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas.

The third and final section of the book is devoted to elucidating the specific course of technological advancements Kurzweil predicts the world will experience over the next century. While this book focuses on the future of technology and the human race as did The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines , Kurzweil makes very few concrete, short-term predictions in The Singularity Is Near , though longer-term visions are present in abundance.

He recently discussed the singularity with Vice Magazine. In , Ray Kurzweil said in an expert panel in the National Academy of Engineering that solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years. Kurzweil admits that he cared little for his health until age 35, when he was diagnosed with a glucose intolerance, an early form of type II diabetes a major risk factor for heart disease.

Kurzweil then found a doctor that shares his non-conventional beliefs to develop an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills, chemical i. Kurzweil ingests " supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea" every day and drinks several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to "reprogram" his biochemistry. Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to Kurzweil joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company.

In the event of his death, Kurzweil's body will be chemically preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him. In all, he recommends that other people emulate his health practices to the best of their abilities. Kurzweil and his current "anti-aging" doctor, Terry Grossman, MD. Though Kurzweil's parents were Jewish, they raised him as a Unitarian Universalist and exposed him to many different faiths during his youth.

In The Singularity is Near he expresses his belief in a need for a new religion based on the principle of mutual respect between sentient life forms, and on the principle of respecting knowledge.

This religion would not have a leader, instead being purely personal to adherents. The Public Broadcasting Service PBS included Kurzweil as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America" along with other inventors of the past two centuries. W r. Raymond Kurzweil en. Kurzweil in en. Ray Kurzweil en. Author en en Entrepreneur en Inventor en Futurist en. Some of his other ventures include KurzweilCyberArt. Kurzweil is a well recognized and best-selling author. He is greatly interested in the field of health and ageing, futurism, genetics, nanotechnology and robotics.

At present he is a director of engineering at Google Inc. In , Kurzweil sold his O. A Music-Making Computer The Reading Machine was a godsend for blind consumers, including the performer Stevie Wonder, who befriended Kurzweil and encouraged him to venture into music technology. Kurzweil's K synthesizer, the world's first keyboard-input computer instrument, debuted in and generated the sounds of various acoustic instruments. Kurzweil sold his synthesizer company in , the same year his influential book, The Age of Intelligent Machines , was published.

Awards and Research Kurzweil, who has received dozens of awards and honorary degrees, continues to innovate and theorize about artificial intelligence A.