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Click here to download Ray Kurzweil’s Venture 2006 keynote remarks (please note this is a large file and will take approximately 5 minutes to download). Interested in seeing Ray Kurzweil’s PowerPoint presentation? Click here to download it.

Ray Kurzweil
Renowned Inventor

Ray 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. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray's Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has received seven national and international film awards. His book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, was named Best Computer Science Book of 1990. His best-selling book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, has been published in nine languages and achieved the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in the categories of “Science” and “Artificial Intelligence.” Ray's upcoming book, coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D., is Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, published by Rodale.

For additional articles, interviews and background on Kurzweil, visit www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html

Click here to view Ray Kurzweil's Venture 2006 PowerPoint presentation.

Kurzweil Speech Abstract
The Acceleration of Innovation in the 21st Century: The Impact on Business and Society

The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. The well-known Moore’s Law is only one example of many of this inherent acceleration. The size of the key features of technology is also shrinking, at a rate of about 4 per linear dimension per decade. Three-dimensional molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level "strong" AI well before 2030. The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a process well under way. 

We are rapidly learning the software programs called genes that underlie biology. We are understanding disease and aging processes as information processes, and are gaining the tools to reprogram them. RNA interference, for example, allows us to turn selected genes off, and new forms of gene therapy are enabling us to effectively add new genes. Within one to two decades, we will be in a position to stop and reverse the progression of disease and aging resulting in dramatic gains in health and longevity. 

The fraction of value of products and services comprised by software and related forms of information is rapidly asymptoting to 100 percent. The deflation rate for information technologies, both hardware and software, is about 50 percent per year, providing a powerful deflationary force in the economy. Despite this, the information technology industry grows around 18 percent per year, now comprises 8 percent of the GDP, and is deeply influential on the rest. Within a couple of decades, the bulk of the economy will be dominated by information and software. 

Once nonbiological intelligence matches the range and subtlety of human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in the environment, our bodies and our brains, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, experience "beaming," and enhanced human intelligence. The implication will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the evolutionary process it spawned.

Click here to view Ray Kurzweil's Venture 2006 PowerPoint presentation.