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Ray Kurzweil interview for the book Super You

Who is Ray Kurzweil?

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, author, and technology futurist. He is currently a Director of Engineering at Google, where his team is responsible for developing machine intelligence and natural language innovations

He also runs KurzweilAI.net, a site the follows and provides information on the latest breakthroughs and innovations in science and technology. The site attracts over three million readers annually.

Kurzweil is one of the greatest inventors of the the last two centuries. The Wall Street Journal called him “the restless genius” and Forbes inc. ranked him #8 on a list of the leading entrepreneurs in the United States, where they also referred to him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison”.

His inventions include: The first CCD flatbed 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.

Kurzweil has written 7 books. Five of his books were national bestsellers. The titles include: The Singularity Is Near, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Transcend, and How to Create a Mind:The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. 

What can you learn from Ray in Super You?

Ray’s theory of the technology Singularity is the backdrop of the book Super You. Ray charted the exponential growth of technology and predicts that machine intelligence will match human intelligence by 2045. When we (the authors of Super You) spoke to Ray he mentioned he has revised his prediction in a yet to be released book called the Singularity is Nearer.

Kurzweil lends his knowledge to many of the Super You chapters. You’ll find his quotes throughout the book. In our chapter on brain science, Chapter 5: How to Rewire and Turbo-Boost Your Ape Brain, we look at Ray’s current project at Google: He’s developing the world’s first synthetic neocortex. This technology would allow humans to expand their intelligence on-demand by connecting to the Cloud.

Links to some of Ray’s books and sites:

Books:

Sites:

KurzweilAI.net

Singularity University

Ray’s longevity web site

Videos:

Ray’s TED Talks

Ray on BigThink