Page 6 - Artificial Intelligence: Building Smarter Machines

AI PIONEER: RAY KURZWEIL
Long before Ray Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity, he was an
inventor of groundbreaking electronic devices. Growing up in New York City
in the 1950s, Kurzweil learned computer
science from an uncle. He created some
of his fi rst computer programs to help
with his homework in high school. Kurzweil
loved music and developed programs that
analyzed the works of famous classical
musicians and then created original
compositions in similar styles. For this
accomplishment, the fi fteen-year-old
received fi rst place in the Westinghouse
Science Talent Search and an invitation to
visit the White House in 1963. A year later,
he showed off his invention on the TV game
show I’ve Got a Secret.
After graduation from MIT, Kurzweil
began to market his inventions. He created
a fl atbed scanner and a machine that could
convert written text into speech. Then he
merged the two technologies into a machine
that could read to the blind. In 1983 he created an AI expert Ray Kurzweil
predicts that by the year
electronic keyboard that impressed professional 2045, computers will be
musicians. They could not tell the difference smarter than humans.
between the keyboard’s synthesized sounds and
those from real instruments.
In the 1990s, Kurzweil began considering the possible future of
humanity. His motto “Live long enough to live forever” refl ects his
controversial belief that disease and death will be overcome in a post-
Singularity world. “We will transcend all the limitations of our biology,” he
told the New York Times in 2010. “That is what it means to be human—to
extend who we are.”

76 Artificial Intelligence