Ray Kurzweil
Raymond " Ray" Kurzweil [ kɜrzwaɪl ] ( born February 12, 1948 in Queens, New York City ) is an American author, inventor, futurist, and "Director of Engineering" ( line of technical development ) on Google.
He is a pioneer of optical character recognition ( OCR), speech synthesis (computer read aloud texts), speech recognition, flatbed scanners and technology in the field of electronic musical instruments, especially the keyboards.
Well known as a nonfiction writer, he writes about topics such as health, transhumanism, technological singularity and future research.
Biography
Raymond Kurzweil, son of a Jewish family from the New York City borough of Queens, who left in 1939 just before the start of the war, Austria, studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science and literature and graduated in 1970 with the bachelor's degree. He was inducted in 2002 for his achievements in the National Inventors Hall of Fame and also received by President Clinton, the National Medal of Technology. Bill Gates speaks of him as " a leading expert in the field of artificial intelligence "
In 1983, Raymond founded in the U.S., the company Kurzweil Music Systems. The production of synthesizers, which were able to produce natural sounds in good quality, presented in this time a major challenge
The idea to start a company for electronic musical instruments was born from the friendship with the blind musician Stevie Wonder. This was in 1976 by a Kurzweil's invention, the " Kurzweil Reading Machine" ( reading machine ), heard and immediately contacted the creator. This instrument allowed the visually impaired for the first time access to normal printing texts by the words transformed into acoustic signals, ie " read aloud ". The Reading Machine is still regarded as the biggest milestone for the social integration blind after 1829 introduced Braille Braille.
Encouraged by Stevie Wonder, brought Raymond Kurzweil 1984 the so-called Kurzweil K250 synthesizer on the market. This revolutionary instrument produced the sounds of various acoustic instruments in an outstanding quality for this time. As a thank you for the musical support Raymond Kurzweil produced for Stevie Wonder a special model of K250, which could be controlled by voice commands.
The company Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in 1989 at the Korean company Young Chang Akki Co. Ltd.. sold, which retained the brand name " Kurzweil " however.
In 2002, he joined with the so-called Long Bet One from a bet over $ 20,000, that in 2029 a computer or " machine intelligence " will pass the Turing test.
In December 2012, Kurzweil "Director of Engineering" at Google was.
Ray Kurzweil found as a minor character in Frank Schätzing novel The Swarm mention where he developed a neural computer simulated the mindset of Yrr.
Honors and Awards
Ray Kurzweil is the recipient of these awards and honors:
Raymond Kurzweil is also a carrier of 19 honorary doctorates, he was awarded by various institutions. He also was honored by three U.S. presidents, including Bill Clinton with the National Medal of Technology, the highest technology award in the United States.
On religion?
Though Kurzweil's parents were Jewish, they raised him unitarist. In " The Singularity is Near ", he describes the need for a new ethics based on the principles of mutual respect.
Criticism
Kurzweil's ideas are controversial. While his supporters see him as a visionary in artificial intelligence and a computer genius, evaluate his critics his method as unscientific and some of its promise as a quasi- religious.
Works
- Raymond Kurzweil: The Age of Intelligent Machines. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990, ISBN 978-0-262-11121-8.
- Ray Kurzweil: Homo sapiens S @. Econ Tb, 1999, ISBN 978-3-548-75026-2. (English Original title: The Age of Spiritual Machines )
- Ray Kurzweil, Terry Grossman Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Plume, New York 2005, ISBN 978-0-452-28667-2.
- Ray Kurzweil: Humanity 2.0. Lola Books, Berlin, 2013, ISBN 978-3-944203-04-1. (English Original title: The Singularity Is Near )
- Ray Kurzweil, Terry Grossman: Transcend. Rodale, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-60529-207-6.
- Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind. Viking, 2012, ISBN 978-0-6700-2529-9.
- Ray Kurzweil: The mystery of the human mind. Lola Books, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-944203-06-5. (English Original Title: How to Create a Mind )