Physics has shown that while it may be nearly impossible to predict the actions of individual items, by looking at patterns of a group, we can often very accurately predict trends. By looking at the large scale history of biological and technological evolution, we can see an exponential growth that is continuing through the current age and into the future.
In this address from Accelerating Change 2005, Ray Kurzweil outlines his startling predictions for the next twenty-five years. Based on recent progress in the fields of neurobiology and nanotechnology, Kurzweil predicts significant strides in the fight against disease and aging, as well as the augmentation of the human mind. In the future, the line between biology and technology will blur and eventually become irrelevant.
While there are many concerns about the impact of new technologies on human existence, Ray Kurzweil presents a vision of the future that is unequivocally positive. This perspective suggests a future where humanity is aided by our interaction with technology and potential pitfalls are mitigated by smart technological solutions. Kurzweil offers an amazing picture for our future, one in which many of us will live to participate.
Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America," along with other inventors of the past two centuries. Ray was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, 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.
He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray's books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.
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This program is one of a series from IT Conversations coverage of the Accelerating Change 2005 conference held September 16-18, 2005 at Stanford University.
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