Raymond Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced: ) (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, technological singularity, and futurism.

Life, inventions, and awards
Ray Kurzweil grew up in Queens, New York. He was born to secular Jewish parents who had escaped Austria just before the onset of WWII, and he was exposed to a great diversity of different faiths during his upbringing. In his youth, he was an avid consumer of science fiction literature. By the age of twelve, he had written his first computer program, and in high school he created a sophisticated pattern-recognition software program that analyzed musical pieces of great classical music composers and then synthesized its own songs in similar styles. The capabilities of this invention were so impressive that, in 1965, he was invited to appear on the CBS television program I've Got a Secret, where he performed a piano piece that was composed by a computer he also had built. Later that year, he won first prize in the International Science Fair for the invention, and he was also recognized by the Westinghouse Talent Search and was personally congratulated by President Lyndon B. Johnson during a White House ceremony.

In 1968, during Kurzweil's sophomore year at MIT, Kurzweil started a company that used a computer program to match high school students with colleges. The program, called the Select College Consulting Program, was designed by him and compared thousands of different criteria about each college with questionnaire answers submitted by each student applicant. When he was 20, he sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000 plus royalties. He earned a BS in Computer Science and Literature in 1970 from MIT.

In 1974, Kurzweil started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and developed the first omni-font optical character recognition system--a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Up until that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a very narrow range of fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine for the blind, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them out loud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies--the CCD flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Under his direction, development of these new technologies was completed, and on January 13 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a widely reported news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device covered an entire tabletop, but functioned exactly as intended. It gained him mainstream recognition: on the day of the machine's unveiling, Walter Cronkite used the machine to give his signature soundoff, "And that's the way it was, January 13, 1976." While listening to The Today Show, musician Stevie Wonder heard a demonstration of the device and personally purchased the first production version of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a lifelong friendship between himself and Kurzweil. Furthermore, in 1977, then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis publicly met with Kurzweil and congratulated him for the invention.

Kurzweil's next major business venture began in 1978, when Kurzweil Computer Products began selling a commercial version of the optical character recognition computer program. LexisNexis was one of the first customers, and bought the program to upload paper legal and news documents onto its nascent online databases.

Two years later, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox, which had an interest in further commercializing paper-to-computer text conversion. Kurzweil Computer Products thus became a subsidiary of Xerox known as Scansoft, and he functioned as a consultant for the former until 1995.

Kurzweil's next business venture was in the realm of electronic music technology. After a 1982 meeting with Stevie Wonder, in which the latter lamented the divide in capabilities and qualities between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, Kurzweil was inspired to create a new generation of music synthesizers capable of accurately duplicating the sounds of real instruments. To this end, Kurzweil Music Systems was founded in the same year, and in 1984, the Kurzweil 250 was unveiled. The machine was capable of imitating a number of different types of instruments, and in tests even musicians were unable to discern the auditory difference between the Kurzweil 250 on piano mode from a normal grand piano. The recording and mixing abilities of the machine coupled with its aforementioned abilities to imitate a variety of different instruments made it possible for a single user to compose and play an entire orchestral piece.

Kurzweil Music Systems was sold to Korean musical instrument manufacturer Young Chang in 1990. As with Xerox, Kurzweil remained as a consultant at the larger company for several years more.

Concurrent with Kurzweil Music Systems, Ray Kurzweil created the company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (KAI) to develop computer speech recognition systems for commercial use. The first product, which debuted in 1987, was the world's first large-vocabulary speech recognition program. Later, the company combined the speech recognition technology with medical expert systems to create the Kurzweil VoiceMed (today called Clinical Reporter) line of products, which allow doctors to write medical reports by speaking to their computers instead of writing. KAI still exists today as ScanSoft.

Kurzweil started Kurzweil Educational Systems in 1996 to develop new pattern-recognition-based computer technologies to help people with disabilities such as blindness, dyslexia and ADD in school. Products include the award-winning Kurzweil 1000 text-to-speech converter software program, which enables a computer to read electronic and scanned text aloud to deaf or hearing-impaired users, and the Kurzweil 3000 program, which is a multifaceted electronic learning system that helps with reading, writing, and study skills.

In 1999, Kurzweil created a hedge fund called "FatKat" (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies), which began trading in 2006. He has stated that the ultimate aim is to improve the performance of FatKat's A.I. investment software program, enhancing its ability to recognize patterns in "currency fluctuations and stock-ownership trends." He predicted in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, that he believes computers will one day prove superior to the best human financial minds at making profitable investment decisions.

Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.

The inventor attributes his success in marketing technology products to being able to predict the arrival date of competitively priced components and match it to rollout of his designs, for example, the hand-held book reader built into a digital camera.

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.

He has received scores of other 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 in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He 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 sixteen “revolutionaries who made America”, along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

Kurzweil's musical keyboards company Kurzweil Music Systems produces among the most sophisticated and realistic (and expensive) synthesized-sound creation instruments. Kurzweil Music Systems was sold to Korean piano manufacturer Young Chang in the early 1990s and its founder was no longer involved in the company. However, Hyundai purchased Young Chang in 2006 and appointed Ray Kurzweil as Chief Strategy Officer as of February 2007, to help them "build Kurzweil Music Systems into one of the largest music instruments brands in the world."

Kurzweil has also created his own twenty-five year old female rock star alter ego, "Ramona," whom he regularly performs as through virtual reality technology to illustrate the as-yet untapped possibilities of computers to enhance and alter our interpersonal interactions. This project inspired the plot of the movie S1m0ne.

In 2005, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called Kurzweil "the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence".

Kurzweil has been associated with the National Federation of the Blind, many of whose members use his products. He began working with the NFB in the 1970s, and has been described as a great friend by the movement’s former President Kenneth Jernigan and current president, Marc Maurer. After speaking at their convention in 2005, Kurzweil received a special award, an honor received by few sighted people. At their convention in 2007, he received another high honor, the Newell Perry Award. Since about 2004, Kurzweil has participated, along with the NFB and one of his own companies, Kurzweil Educational Systems in the development of the KNFB Reader, a reading machine for the blind which is smaller and more powerful than those previously available.

Ray Kurzweil is currently making a movie due for release in 2008 called "Singularity is Near" full title The Singularity is Near: A True Story About the Future. Part fiction, part non fiction he interviews 20 big thinkers like Marvin Minsky, plus there is a B-line narrative story that illustrates some of the ideas, where a computer avatar (Ramona) saves the world from self-replicating microscopic robots.

Stand on nanotechnology
Kurzweil is on the Army Science Advisory Board, has testified before Congress on the subject of nanotechnology, and sees considerable potential in the science to solve significant global problems such as climate change, viz. Nanotech Could Give Global Warming a Big Chill (July, 2006).

In addition he advocates using nanobots to maintain the human body and to extend human lifespan beyond current palliative drug-based and nutritional attempts.

Kurzweil has stressed the extreme potential dangers of nanotechnolgy, but argues that, realistically, progress cannot be totally stopped, and any attempt to do so will retard the progress of defensive and beneficial technologies more than the malevolent ones, increasing the danger. He says that the proper place of regulation is to make sure progress proceeds safely and quickly. He applies this reasoning, in fact, to biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and most all technology in general.

The Law of Accelerating Returns
In his controversial 2001 essay, "The Law of Accelerating Returns", Kurzweil proposes an extension of Moore's law that forms the basis of many people's beliefs regarding a "Technological Singularity". Kurzweil's grand vision of a coming Singularity is not without its critics. Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Corporation, has called the notion of a Singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people. This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different---it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."

Transhumanism
Kurzweil is also an enthusiastic advocate of using technology to achieve immortality. He advocates using nanobots to maintain the human body, but given their present non-existence he adheres instead to a strict daily routine involving ingesting "250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea" to extend his life until more effective technology is available.

In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

In October 2005, Kurzweil joined the scientific advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation.

On May 13 2006, Kurzweil was the first speaker at the Stanford University Singularity Summit.

Futurism, as a philosophical or academic study, looks at the medium to long-term future in an attempt to predict based on current trends. Raymond Kurzweil states his belief that the future of humanity is being determined by an exponential expansion of knowledge, and that the very rate of the change of this exponential growth is driving our collective destiny irrespective of our narrow sightedness, clinging archaisms, or fear of change. Our biological evolution, according to Kurzweil, is on the verge of being superseded by our technological evolution. An evolution conjoined of cogent biological manipulation with a possible emerging self-aware, self-organizing machine intelligence. The rate of the change of the exponential explosion of knowledge and technology not only envelops us, but also irreversibly transforms us.

Accordingly, in Kurzweil's predictions, we are currently (as of the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first century) exiting the era in which our human biology is closed to us, and are entering into the posthuman era, in which our extensive knowledge of biochemistry, neurology and cybernetics will allow us to rebuild our bodies and our minds from the ground up. Kurzweil believes that Strong A.I., advanced nanotechnology and cybernetics are enabling technologies that will initiate the Posthuman Era through a disruptive, worldwide event known as the Singularity. By extrapolating past and current trends of technological growth into the future, Kurzweil has concluded that the aforementioned technologies will be available in 2045, and that the Singularity will thus occur in the same year.

Kurzweil is generally considered to be amongst the most personally optimistic of futurists, both because he views the Singularity as almost inevitable and because he believes that the outcome will likely be beneficial for the human race. However, the ultimate future he envisions often leaves some of his less technophilic colleagues cringing at the overtones of a future which has often been portrayed in science fiction as dystopian: one in which humans are fused with or dominated by machines and technology so thoroughly that human meaning and the "human spirit" are lost completely.

The Age of Intelligent Machines
Arguably, Kurzweil gained a large amount of credibility as a futurist from his first book The Age of Intelligent Machines. Written from 1986 to 1989 and published in 1990, it correctly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union (1991) as new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines critically disempowered authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information. In the book Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to correctly predict that computers would beat the best human players by 1998, and most likely in that year. In fact, the event occurred in May of 1997 when chess World Champion Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess tournament. Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet usage that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines, there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was unreliable, difficult to use, and deficient in content, making Kurzweil's realization of its future potential especially prescient given the technology's limitations at that time. He also stated that the Internet would explode not only in the number of users but in content as well, eventually granting users access "to international networks of libraries, data bases, and information services." Additionally, Kurzweil correctly foresaw that the preferred mode of Internet access would inevitably be through wireless systems, and he was also correct to estimate that the latter would become practical for widespread use in the early 21st century.

Kurzweil also accurately predicted that many documents would exist solely on computers and on the Internet by the end of the 1990s, and that they would commonly be embedded with animations, sounds and videos that would prohibit their transference to paper format. Moreover, he foresaw that cellular phones would grow in popularity while shrinking in size for the foreseeable future.

Kurzweil's views regarding the future of military technology were likewise supported by the course of real-world events following the publication of The Age of Intelligent Machines. His pronouncement that the world's foremost militaries would continually rely on more intelligent, computerized weapons was illustrated spectacularly just a year later during the Gulf War, which served as a showcase for new weapons technologies. The trend towards greater computerization of weapons systems is further demonstrated by the increased use of precision munitions since the publication of Kurzweil's book. For example, 10% of all U.S. Naval ordinance expended during the Gulf War (1991) were guided weapons. During the Kosovo campaign (1999), that quantity climbed to 70%, and it reached 90% during the 2001-2002 Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. As he also predicted, remotely controlled military aircraft were developed, beginning with the Predator reconnaissance plane in the mid-90's, and an armed version of the aircraft was first used in combat in November of 2002.

Kurzweil also described the future of computer-controlled, driverless cars, claiming that the technology to build them would become available during the first decade of the 21st century, yet that due to political opposition and the general public's mistrust of the technology, the computerized cars would not become widely used until several decades hence. In fact, considerable progress has been made with the technology since 1990, and General Motors is scheduled to unveil a new electronic car system called "Traffic Assist" in its 2008 Opel Vectra model. "Traffic Assist" uses video cameras, lasers and a central computer to gather and process information from the road and to make course and speed changes as needed, and is supposedly capable of driving itself without any input from the user in speeds below 60 mph, making it a true driverless car "Traffic Assist" will not be exclusive to the 2008 Opel Vectra for long as GM has announced plans to offer the system for several other types of cars before the end of the decade. Due to stricter U.S. product liability laws, the system will not be available in America for the foreseeable future and will only be offered in Europe.

Kurzweil predicted that pocket-sized machines capable of scanning text from almost any source (a piece of paper, a road sign, a computer screen) and then reading the text out loud in a computerized voice would be available "In the early twenty-first century" and would be used to assist blind people. In June of 2005, Ray Kurzweil himself unveiled the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader), which is a reading machine possessing the aforementioned attributes. However, he also claimed back in 1990 that the readers would be able to recognize and describe symbols, pictures and graphics in addition to words, read multiple languages, possess wireless Internet access, and be in use with "most" blind and dyslexic people, and perhaps among some normal people as well. While the K-NFB Reader does not have these final attributes, it is entirely possible that the device may be upgraded to the necessary level before the nebulously defined "early twenty-first century" expires. Kurzweil stated during a speech to the 2006 Singularity Summit that his company's current efforts are focused on increasing the pattern recognition abilities of the K-NFB Reader so that the device could identify animals, objects and people, also utilizing facial recognition programs for the final task. Presumably, a machine complex enough to handle such tasks would also be able to read much simpler written symbols and traffic signs.

The Age of Spiritual Machines
In 1999, Kurzweil published a second book entitled The Age of Spiritual Machines, which goes into more depth explaining his futurist ideas. The third and final section of the book is devoted to elucidating the specific course of technological advancements Kurzweil believes the world will experience over the next century. Entitled "To Face the Future," the section is divided into four chapters respectively named "2009", "2019", "2029", and "2099"--each chapter title signifying a different year. For every chapter, Kurzweil issues predictions about what life and technology will be like in that year.

While the veracity of Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 and beyond cannot yet be determined, 2009 is near enough to the present to allow many of the ideas of the "2009" chapter to be scrutinized. To begin, Kurzweil's claims that 2009 would be a year of continued transition as purely electronic computer memories continued to replace older rotating memories seems to be vindicated by the current growth in the popularity and cost-performance of Flash memory. He also correctly foresaw the growing ubiquity of wireless Internet access and cordless computer peripherals. Perhaps of even greater importance, Kurzweil presaged the explosive growth in peer-to-peer filesharing and the emergence of the Internet as a major medium for commerce and for accessing media such as movies, television programs, newspaper and magazine text, and music. He also claimed that three-dimensional computer chips would be in common use by 2009 (though older, "2-D" chips would still predominate), and this appears likely as IBM has recently developed the necessary chip-stacking technology and announced plans to begin using three-dimensional chips in its supercomputers and for wireless communication applications.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil also spent time discussing future increases in computing use in education. He predicted that interactive software and electronic learning materials would be used by 2009. Indeed, smartboards, interactive whiteboards with a connection to the Internet and learning software and activities are commonly used in schools in developed nations.



Kurzweil went further to say that students would commonly have portable learning computers in the form of a "thin tablet-like device weighing under a pound." While students increasingly use portable laptops in schools, they tend to be of traditional configuration and of greater weight. But supporting Kurzweil's prediction is the emergence of the One Laptop Per Child Project, which aims to provide low-cost laptop computers (often called the "$100 Laptop") to students in developing nations across the world. The computer can be quickly reconfigured from traditional laptop layout to a tablet-like "e-book reading" layout. However, the current model of the $100 Laptop also weighs well over a pound. The first batch of 5 million laptops is expected to ship sometime in 2007. By the end of 2009, there could be millions more in use across the world, vindicating Kurzweil's belief that portable computers will be playing a central role in education.

However, it should be noted that text-to-speech converters remain uncommon, along with computerized distance learning, which were two other technologies Kurzweil imagined in widespread use by 2009.

Kurzweil also restates his earlier prediction from The Age of Intelligent Machines regarding the advent of pocket-sized, text-to-speech converters for the blind. As mentioned, this can be regarded as correct given the 2005 introduction of the "Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader" (K-NFB Reader), though a significant reduction in price would be required by 2009 to reasonably classify the device as "cheap"--one quality Kurzweil claimed they would possess.

Kurzweil's pronouncements regarding the state of Warfare in 2009 seem likely to meet mixed success. While the United States remains the world's dominant military power and will almost certainly remain so until 2009, Kurzweil's "prediction" of this reality is not so awe-inspiring given the massive military preponderance the U.S. has historically enjoyed coupled with the extreme unlikelihood of a sudden diminishment of American strength between 1999 and 2009 considering the U.S.'s past emphasis on military readiness. Kurzweil instead predicted that most opposing countries in 2009 would focus on challenging the United States' economic as opposed to military strength, and this is already the case today. Kurzweil's claim that warfare in 2009 would be dominated by unmanned combat planes seems unlikely to pan out, though it should be noted that unmanned aircraft have nevertheless advanced considerably since 1999 and are more widely used than ever. A squadron of Reaper pilotless bombers was announced for Iraq in August 2007 where there are already numerous smaller Predator unmanned planes there that can fire missiles. Also unlikely is his more general assessment that humans would be largely absent from the battlefield thanks to fighting machines. One needs to look no farther than Iraq or Afghanistan, where the world's most advanced military is forced to fight infantry-based wars in which even soldiers in "safe" rear-echelon areas are subject to regular attack, to realize that combat remains--at its core--a human endeavor. On that note, Kurzweil's prediction that wars between nations would remain rare in 2009 is so far vindicated by the occurrence of only two such wars since 1999--one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. While numerous conflicts rage elsewhere, Kurzweil was right to foresee that they would primarily pit regular forces against terrorists.

Kurzweil successfully predicted privacy emerging as a political issue (see CCTV: Privacy).

Moreover, Kurzweil's prediction that portable computers will shrink in size and take on nontraditional physical forms (i.e. - very different in design from a laptop or desktop computer) by 2009 is supported by the emergence of devices such as the portable media players and advanced cell phones, as well as by newer PDA's. All meet Kurzweil's aforementioned criteria, being small to the point of wearability, possessing the power and range of function of older computers, and featuring designs that radically depart from normal computers. Kurzweil's forecast that these devices would lack rotating memories was also right.

However, his claim that such portable computers will be commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry by 2009 seems unlikely to pass, as does his prediction that people will typically be wearing "at least a dozen" such computers in the same year. Most "portable computers" as they are defined here also have built-in keyboards or accessible keyboard functions (such as a digital keyboard that can be manipulated through a touchscreen), putting reality again at odds with Kurzweil's belief that most computers would lack this feature by 2009, with users instead relying on continuous speech recognition (CSR) to communicate with their PC's.

Similarly, Kurzweil's claim that, by 2009, "the majority of text" will be created through continuous speech recognition (CSR) programs instead of through keyboards and manual typing seems highly unlikely. On that vein, he also implied in The Age of Spiritual Machines that CSR software should in fact have already replaced human transcriptionists years before 2009 (i.e. - 2007 or earlier) due in part to its projected superiority in understanding speech compared to human listeners. CSR is not yet this advanced, and the total replacement of human transcriptionists did not happen, nor is it on the verge of happening.

Not only that, he also optimistically stated that houses would have around one hundred computers within, yet houses are not yet "Intelligent". However, this linked into his prediction of domestic robots being around but not mainstream (see Domestic robots).

Since the publication of The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil has even tacitly admitted that some of his 2009 predictions will not happen on schedule. For instance, in the book he forecast that specialized eyeglasses that beamed computer-generated images onto the retinas of their users to produce an HUD-effect would be in wide use by 2009, and that in the same year telephone companies would commonly provide computerized voice translating services, allowing people speaking different languages to understand one another through a phone. Yet in a 2006 C-SPAN2 interview, he stated that these two technologies would not be available until sometime in the 2010's.

The Age of Spiritual Machines also features a "Timeline" section at the end, which summarizes both the history of technological advancement and Kurzweil's predictions for the future.

Other Sources
In an October 2002 article published on his website, Kurzweil stated that "Deep Fritz-like chess programs running on ordinary personal computers will routinely defeat all humans later in this decade."

Deep Fritz is a computer chess program--generally considered superior to the older Deep Blue--that has defeated or tied a number of human chess masters and opposing chess programs. Due to advances in personal computer performance, the Deep Fritz program can now run on ordinary personal computers, and different versions of it are available for purchase. While this makes the first part of Kurzweil's prediction true, it is unknown whether the Deep Fritz programs are currently defeating ALL humans in ALL games played, though considering the impressive professional record of Deep Fritz, it would be reasonable to assume that only the very best human players can beat the program with consistency.

Published books
Kurzweil's most recent book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), ISBN 0670033847, deals with the fields of genetics, nanotech, robotics, and the rapidly changing definition of humanity.

Other works by Kurzweil:
 * The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990)
 * The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life (1994)
 * The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)
 * Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004)
 * The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)
 * The Ray Kurzweil Reader: The Ray Kurzweil Reader is a collection of essays by Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, radical life extension, conscious machines, the promise and peril of technology, and other aspects of our future world. These essays, all published on KurzweilAI.net from 2001 to 2003, are now available as a PDF document for convenient downloading and offline reading. The 30 essays, organized in seven memes (such as "How to Build a Brain"), cover subjects ranging from a review of Matrix Reloaded to "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine" and "Human Body Version 2.0."
 * Kurzweil is the co-author (and subject) of the 2002 book Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I.. He also wrote the introduction to the 2003 artificial personality book Virtual Humans and collaborated with the Canadian band Our Lady Peace for their 2000 album Spiritual Machines.