Technology: There's a Future In It
An interview with Raymond Kurzweil at the Music and Internet Expo
Originally published April 25, 2001 at Internet World. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 31, 2001.
Ray Kurzweil predicts in all seriousness that, before they die, people alive today will encounter thinking machines possessing emotional and spiritual lives. Would you trust such a man to give you hardheaded, pragmatic advice on business strategy?
Consider this: Since 1974, Kurzweil has built four technology companies and guided each through a successful exit strategy and is launching a fifth. Among his many accomplishments, he invented optical character recognition (OCR), which provided the foundation for the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind in 1976. Several of the pattern-recognition software products he pioneered remain market leaders in fields that will be essential to the emergence of ubiquitous computing.
So if Kurzweil's writings fall somewhere on a continuum between the biologist-philosopher Edward O. Wilson and the physicist-mystic Fritjhof Capra, he bears a slight physical resemblance to Elliot Carver, the stylishly villainous media mogul played by Jonathan Pryce in the James Bond spectacular "Tomorrow Never Dies." Witness Kurzweil, in the guise of his virtual reality alter ego--a hip, lithesome young woman named Ramona--singing a live version of the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" (with a trio of virtual hip-hop dancers modeled on the portly organizer of the TED conference in Monterey) or quizzing Ramona's online avatar through a headset "Bill Gates's secretary gave me." It gives you that same sense of a brilliant and restless mind at (in Kurzweil's case, benevolent) play.
Complete article available at Internet World
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