PERSON
Ray Kurzweil
American inventor, futurist, and author (b. 1948) whose <em>Law of Accelerating Returns</em> and predictions about exponential technological change have shaped AI discourse for four decades.
Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, inventor, and futurist whose career spans pioneering work in optical character recognition, speech synthesis, and electronic music, alongside sustained engagement with the question of when machines will match and exceed human intelligence. Born in Queens in 1948, he built his first computer program at fifteen and went on to receive the National Medal of Technology, induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and a position as principal researcher at Google beginning in 2012. His books—The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Singularity Is Near (2005), and The Singularity Is Nearer (2024)—articulate a consistent thesis: that information technologies improve at exponential rates, that the rate itself accelerates, and that this compounding will produce artificial general intelligence by 2029 and a technological singularity by mid-century.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Kurzweil's predictive track record has made him simultaneously one of the most celebrated and most criticized figures in technology forecasting. In 2010, he published a detailed self-assessment of
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