Kurzweil, Raymond

▪ 2001

      In March 2000 American computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology in recognition of his many innovations. Already well known in scientific circles, Kurzweil increasingly was attracting the attention of the general public with his daring prognostications about how technology would shape the future. His book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) presented a vision of the 21st century as a time when computer technology would have advanced far enough to allow machines to operate on a level equivalent to that of the human brain. Computers, he predicted, would make complex decisions, appreciate beauty, and even experience emotions. Moreover, Kurzweil believed that as humans transferred the information in their brains to computers, the distinction between person and machine would become blurred.

      Kurzweil was born on Feb. 12, 1948, in Queens, N.Y. As a teenager he earned first prize in the International Science Fair—and an appearance on the television show I've Got a Secret—with a computer program that could write music that mimicked the styles of great composers. The program marked the beginning of his career-long attempt to re-create pattern recognition, or the ability to find order in complex data. It was Kurzweil's belief that pattern recognition formed the basis of human thought.

      As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Kurzweil created a computer program that helped high-school students choose a college to attend. He then sold the service to a publisher for $100,000 plus royalties. He graduated from MIT in 1970, and four years later he established Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., which developed technology that allowed computers to read text printed in any typestyle. Under Kurzweil's direction, the company also pioneered a flatbed scanner and a text-to-speech synthesizer and used all three inventions to build a reading machine for the blind. A commercial version of the machine was developed, which led to the eventual sale of the company to the Xerox Corp. A friendship with musician Stevie Wonder led Kurzweil next to launch a business that created professional-quality music synthesizers. That venture was later sold to the Korean instrument manufacturer Young Chang.

      In 1987 another Kurzweil company spawned the first commercial speech-recognition system and was sold to a concern that later teamed with the Microsoft Corp. to market speech-recognition software for personal computers. In the late 1990s yet another Kurzweil firm produced software that used artificial intelligence for a variety of purposes, including financial analysis and the training of doctors. Somehow Kurzweil found time away from starting businesses to launch a successful writing career. Before The Age of Spiritual Machines came The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), which anticipated the explosion in popularity of the Internet. Kurzweil also wrote The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life (1993), which detailed a diet that he had used to help cure himself of diabetes.

Anthony G. Craine

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