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... first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
A commercial version of the Kurzweil OCR was used by Lexis and Nexis to build their on-line legal and news information services and Ray sold the company to Xerox. Today, the OCR - now called Xerox TextBridge - continues as a market leader. His music system also continues today as one of the market leaders in computer-based musical instruments, marketed in more than 40 countries.
The Kurzweil system of voice recognition is now used in ten percent of the emergency rooms in the United States and in many other medical specialties and Ray's print-to-speech reading technology received the Stevie Wonder 'Product of the Year' Award.
Ray Kurzweil is best known for presenting a thought provoking, long-term, big picture view of the future of technology and its implications for society; explaining the exponential growth of technology (what he calls, "The Law of Accelerating Returns") and its path towards ubiquitous computing, reverse engineering the brain, full immersion virtual reality, nanotechnology, the merging of human and machine, and ultimately extreme human life extension. He describes a bright future in which technology will provide solutions to the most pressing social, economic, and environmental problems. These ideas form the core thesis of Mr. Kurzweil's lectures and his latest book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking).
After gathering background information about the event, the audience, and the host, Mr. Kurzweil is happy to (and accustomed to) tailor his speech. Mr. Kurzweil often shapes his presentations around the following topics:
Health and Longevity - Since the release of his book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004) and with the upcoming release of a new health book, TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (2009), Mr. Kurzweil addresses many medical and health related audiences on the merger of science, technology, and medicine and its impact on the healthcare industry and human longevity. He explains that as medicine becomes an information technology it will be subject to the laws of accelerating returns, meaning that it will be a thousand times more powerful than today in ten years, and a million times more powerful in 20 years.
Education - Mr. Kurzweil presents to many academic groups including educators, administrators, executive boards, and higher education IT specialists about the intersection of information technology (a broad perspective), education and human knowledge. He describes a future in which there is widespread and inexpensive access to education around the world, individualized learning through computer assisted instruction, full-immersion virtual reality classrooms and labs, and ultimately the ability to download knowledge and skills directly to our brains. He remarks on the key role of education in supporting the unique attribute of our species which is an exponential expanding knowledge base that we pass down from generation to generation. He notes that as jobs are destroyed at the bottom of the skill ladder and more satisfying and better paying jobs are added at the top, investment in education has increased to keep pace with the rising skill ladder. Specifically, in 1870 there were 60,000 college students and today there are over 6 million. Expenditures in K-12 education in constant dollars and on a per capita basis have multiplied by ten over the past century. Our economy is increasingly dominated by knowledge intensive jobs hence the increasingly central role of education and educational technology.
Innovation/Invention - As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Mr. Kurzweil has a presentation that describes a program for innovation, how to foster it in an organization, and how to bring inventions to market. He explains how the law of accelerating returns and the exponential growth of information technology are accelerating opportunities for innovation. In this talk, he draws upon his own history of innovation which led to his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, founded by the U.S. Patent Office in 2002.
Business/Investing - Mr. Kurzweil frequently presents to private equity firms and businesses on technology and the capital markets, business and technology trends, near- and long-term predictions, and strategy in an age of exponential technological growth.
Despite the current economic turmoil, Mr. Kurzweil presents an optimistic argument that the exponential growth of information technology will continue unaffected during the economic downturn as it has in every past recession and during the Great Depression, noting that information technology goes beyond just computerized devices, but includes such disparate areas as health and medicine, and energy. In every past recession and the Great Depression, he notes that economic growth snapped back to where it would have been had the downturn never occurred. He presents an incredible wealth of data showing that information technologies have the scale and the ability to overcome the major problems we face such as energy and the environment, health, and even poverty.
Disabilities and Assistive Technologies - Mr. Kurzweil explains that accelerating information technology will lead us to completely overcome handicaps associated with sensory and physical disabilities and describes the extent to which we have already done that for many handicaps. He predicts that in about a quarter century we will have millions of nanobots in our
brains putting our brains on the Internet and providing high bandwidth communication directly with the brain, so vision will ultimately become obsolete. He can speak on a range of topics relating to blindness, disabilities, and assistive technologies in the 21st century. With his many assistive technology firsts, among them: the first pocket-sized print-to-speech reading machine for the blind (2006), the first Continuous Speech Natural Language Command and Control Software (1997), the first Speech Recognition Dictation System for Windows (1994), the first commercially marketed Large-Vocabulary Speech Recognition, the first Omni-Font (any type font) Optical Character Recognition (1976), and the first Print-to-Speech Reading Machine for the Blind (1976), Mr. Kurzweil speaks from experience about the future of disabilities in an age of accelerating technology.
Speech Titles
On the Future:
• Accelerating to the Singularity
• Science, Technology, and Invention: Strategies to Create the Future
• Early in the Twenty-First Century, Intelligence will Underlie Everything of Value
• The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
• The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society
• The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Media, Communications, and Society
• The Next 20 Years of Gaming
• Transformation and the Pace of Change
• The Accelerating Impact of Exponentially Expanding Complex Systems
• The Coming Merger of Biological and Non Biological Intelligence
• An Exponentially Expanding Future from Exponentially Shrinking Technology
• The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One
On Health/Longevity:
• TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever
• The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Healthcare and Medicine
• The Democratization of Health and Medicine in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
• Human Body Version 2.0: When Humans Transcend Biology
• Reprogramming Biology: The New Paradigm
• A Bridge to a Bridge to a Bridge...to Extreme Life Extension
• How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever
• The Coming Merger of Human and Machine: the Radical Expansion of Human Longevity and Intelligence
• Reverse Engineering the Human Body and Brain -- The Impact on Human Health and Society
• Biotechnology and Nanotechnology: Two Overlapping Health Revolutions
• The Impact of 21st Century Technology on Human Health and Society
• Extending our Vision and our Life Expectancy through Accelerating Technologies
• The Exponential Growth of Information Technology: The Impact on Health Care, the Economy, and Policy in the Early 21st Century
On Innovation & Entrepreneurship:
• The Democratization of Innovation and Design in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
• How to Manage Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
• Identifying an Opportunity in Technology
• Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
• The Power of an Idea
• The Democratization of Creativity
On the Social Impact of Technology:
• Towards Singularity - it's Nature, Promise, and Dangers
• How Far will Technology Transform Humanity?
• Promise and Peril - The Deeply Intertwined Poles of 21st Century Technology
• Computers and Consciousness
• Virtual Reality and the Nature of Identity
• Are We Spiritual Machines?
On the Economic Impact of Technology:
• The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society
• 21st Century Technology and the Capital Markets
• Exponentially Growing Ventures from Exponentially Shrinking Technology
• An Integrated World Economy in an Age of Accelerating Information Technology
On Education:
• The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Education, Training, and Performance
• The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Higher Education and Society
• On Engineering and the Environment:
• From Unlimited Clean Energy to Overcoming Disease: How Engineering Can Do It
• 10,000 Times More Sunlight Than We Need
On Music:
• Accelerating Technology: The Impact on Music and Human Life
• On Disabilities and Assistive Technologies:
• Technology Empowers People with Disabilities: Today and Tomorrow
• The End of Handicaps
• Disabilities and Technology in the 21st Century
• The Future of Blindness and Disabilities in an Age of Accelerating Technology
• Technology, Neuroscience and the Future of Cognitive Disabilities
• The Future of Special Education in an Era of Accelerating Technology
• Speech Technology and the Emergence of Intelligent Machines
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- Innovation for Tomorrow
- The Age of Intelligent Machines
- Please see biog for more information
- New Technologies for a New World
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