Ray Kurzweil

His parents got out of Austria just before the war, a concert pianist and a visual artist who raised their son in Queens on the understanding that the future was a subject you discussed at dinner. Ray Kurzweil was working with computers by 12, in a city that held about a dozen of them, and wrote his first program at 15. At 17 he walked onto the CBS panel show I've Got a Secret and played a piano piece composed by a computer he had built, then took first prize at the International Science Fair for it. He had already been writing to Marvin Minsky. He went to MIT to study under him and finished in 1970.

What he built first were machines, not forecasts. In 1974 he founded a company and built the first omni-font optical character recognition, software that read any typeface rather than a handful. He pointed it at blindness. On January 13, 1976 he unveiled the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a tabletop device that scanned a page and spoke it aloud. Stevie Wonder heard about it on television and took the first production unit. Wonder told him no electronic instrument sounded like a real one, which produced the Kurzweil K250 in 1984. The first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition arrived in 1987.

The argument that made him famous is about slope. Progress compounds exponentially, Kurzweil holds — the law of accelerating returns — and The Singularity Is Near (2005) sets the date at 2045, when machine intelligence passes human intelligence and the two merge. Supporters point to a scorecard he publishes himself, grading 147 predictions and claiming 86 percent correct. Critics, among them Daniel Dennett, Rodney Brooks and Paul Allen, answer that he grades his own paper, that the predictions are loose enough to be unfalsifiable, and that a curve in one field need not transfer to another. The stake is personal. He was found to have early type 2 diabetes at 35, his father died of a heart attack at 58, and he takes up to 250 supplements a day with the stated aim of living to reach the life-extension technology.

In December 2012 Larry Page hired him at Google, full time, on a one-sentence job description: bring natural language understanding to Google. He was 64. Bill Clinton had already handed him the National Medal of Technology in 1999, and the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 2002. A Technical Grammy followed in 2015 for the K250. What has not settled is which Kurzweil the record belongs to. The engineering is not in dispute. The forecasting is disputed, loudly, by people qualified to dispute it. Two reputations sit in one man, and the second argument is still open.

Ray Kurzweil's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Omni-font optical character recognition invention
  The first OCR that read any typeface rather than a chosen few 1974
• Kurzweil Reading Machine invention
  The first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind 1976
• Kurzweil K250 invention
  Built after Stevie Wonder said no synthesiser sounded like a real instrument 1984
• Kurzweil Applied Intelligence speech recognition invention
  The first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition 1987
• The Age of Spiritual Machines book
  Where the law of accelerating returns is first laid out 1999
• The Singularity Is Near book
  The 2045 forecast, and the book the whole argument runs through 2005

• 1965 aged ~17 At 17, plays a computer-composed piano piece on I've Got a Secret He won first prize at the International Science Fair the same year for the machine that wrote it.
• 1970 aged ~22 Graduates from MIT, where he had gone to study with Marvin Minsky A degree in computer science and literature. His father died of a heart attack the same year, at 58.
• 1974 aged ~26 Founds Kurzweil Computer Products and builds the first omni-font OCR
• January 13, 1976 aged 27 Unveils the Kurzweil Reading Machine with the National Federation of the Blind Stevie Wonder saw it on television and became the first customer.
• 1984 aged ~36 The Kurzweil K250 synthesiser goes on sale Prompted by a 1982 conversation in which Wonder complained that electronic instruments sounded electronic.
• 1987 aged ~39 Kurzweil Applied Intelligence ships commercial large-vocabulary speech recognition
• 1999 aged ~51 Receives the National Medal of Technology from Bill Clinton The same year The Age of Spiritual Machines set out the law of accelerating returns.
• 2005 aged ~57 Publishes The Singularity Is Near and dates the singularity to 2045
• December 2012 aged 64 Larry Page hires him at Google to work on machine learning and language The agreed job description ran one sentence long.

• Marvin Minsky 1927–2016
  Built the first neural network learning machine, then wrote the book blamed for burying the idea. studied under
• Stevie Wonder b. 1950
  Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose innovative recordings expanded soul and popular music. collaborator
• Larry Page b. 1973
  Co-founder of Google whose search algorithm became the foundation of the modern internet economy. hired by
• John McCarthy 1927–2011
  Coined the term artificial intelligence and created the Lisp programming language. influenced by
• Douglas Engelbart 1925–2013
  Engineer who invented the computer mouse and demonstrated interactive computing in 1968. parallel inventor