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 reverse engineering the brain, nanotechnology, the merging of human and machine, and ultimately extreme human life extension. He is especially busy at the moment speaking about these topics surrounding the release of his latest book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking).
Kurzweil 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 successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, financial investment and other technolgies that remain market leaders today in industries that he pioneered. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 and has received scores of national and international awards, including the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. Four of his books have been national best-sellers and one reached #1 on Amazon's Science list.
Kurzweil is a widely sought speaker and has given keynote presentations at many leading venues, including the Microsoft CEO Summit, the World Economic Forum, Pop!Tech, PC Expo, Business Week, The Council on Foreign Relations, SIGGRAPH, Cowen, TED, ICASSP, the American Psychiatric Association, Agenda and many others.
Since the release of his last book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale Books, October 2004), Ray has received many invitations to address medical and health related audiences on the merger of science, technology, and health and its impact on the healthcare industry and human longevity.
Kurzweil has a presentation that describes a program for innovation and how to foster it in an organization - "Ray's Rules for Innovation." In this talk, he draws upon his own history of innovation as an inventor.
Ray also presents to business groups, entrepreneurs and inventors about business and technology trends, more near-term predictions (in addition to some of the long-term predictions), and business planning in an age of exponential technological growth.
Sample Topics:
Health/Longevity:
Ray Kurzweil describes how you can live to see (and enjoy!) the "Singularity," a profound transformation in what it means to be human, which will arrive by mid century. The leading causes of death (heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease) do not appear out of the blue. They are the end result of processes that are decades in the making. You can understand where you are personally in the progression of these processes and end (and reverse) the lethal march towards these diseases. Ray Kurzweil presents a program he devised in collaboration with longevity expert Terry Grossman, M.D. that describes how longstanding imbalances in our metabolic processes can be corrected before you "fall off the cliff." This information is not "plug and play," but the knowledge is available and can be applied through a comprehensive and concerted effort. Ray and Terry's Program for a Long and Healthy Life is a bridge to the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology--AI (artificial intelligence) revolution. The latter revolution will radically redefine our concept of human mortality.
A Bridge to a Bridge to a Bridge...to Immortality
How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever
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
On the Future:
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 Emergence and Impact of Intelligent Machines
An Exponentially Expanding Future from Exponentially Shrinking Technology
The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One
The Law of Accelerating Returns and the 21st Century
Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the 21st Century
Innovation & Entrepreneurship:
How to Manage Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
Identifying an Opportunity in Technology
Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
Innovation in the 21st Century
The Power of an Idea
Ray Kurzweil's Entrepreneurial Experience, Experiences and Lessons through Nine Companies
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?
Economic Impact:
The Future of Information Technology as it Asymptotes to 100% of the Value of Products and Services
Exponentially Growing Ventures from Exponentially Shrinking Technology
The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society
The Forces of Deflation: Why We Don't Need High Interest Rates to Counter Inflation
A Confluence of Exponential Trends
21st Century Technology and the Capital Markets |