Kurzweil's Future Coming Fast
Raymond Kurzweil talks to Wired about the promise and peril of technology.
Originally Published 4/25/01
Originally published April 25, 2001 at Wired. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 31, 2001.
There are those who eagerly await things such as Apple's OS X or the latest build of Linux or whatever twist Microsoft has in store for its windowed world.
And then there are others whose interest in operating systems runs on a longer clock.
Take Raymond Kurzweil. His life and work revolves around a singularly significant launch that he expects within the next 20 to 30 years: Brain 2.0.
Kurzweil, pioneer of artificial intelligence and pattern recognition technology, will be awarded MIT's annual $500,000 Lemelson Prize for Innovation and Invention on Wednesday.
He, along with MIT-Lemelson Lifetime Achievement Award winner Raymond V. Damadian--inventor of the first MRI scanner--will be honored in a ceremony at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Kurzweil's interest in computationally emulating human capabilities dates back to the early '60s, when at age 15 he wrote a computer algorithm that could compose music.
"He ended up on I've Got A Secret because of that invention," said Annemarie Amparo, director of the Lemelson-MIT program. "He played a tune for Steve Allen and the rest of the panel that had actually been composed by a computer."
In the interim, Kurzweil has developed the first all-purpose, omni-font optical character recognition system, the first text-to-speech reading machines, and the first commercially available speech recognition software.
He now uses the speech recognition software to compose his books, which promote technological awareness and preparedness for the coming waves of change. His writing is something akin to a Unabomber manifesto, divorced from its own twisted history and turned inside-out on itself.
Complete article available at Wired
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