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"Imagine a world where the
difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between
humanity and technology fades, and where soul and silicon unite.
This is not science fiction, but a very real possibility in a few
short decades."
Those
words wouldn't command much authority if their author, Raymond C.
Kurzweil, hadn't already proven himself as a high-tech visionary
- an inventor who designs and makes the machines that will alter
our future.
Nearly
everyone would like to create something unique, but Kurzweil has
developed a remarkable system for doing it. "I do all my work while
I'm sleeping. Every night before I go to sleep I think about an
issue and think about a solution," he said.
"In
the twilight stage, while I'm dreaming, that's the most creative
time. All the sensors in your head are relaxed. I think about the
issue again in the morning and can write a whole chapter of a new
book, write a speech or come up with a new invention in just a few
minutes."
That
may sound far-fetched, but consider the fact that Kurzweil, a 1970
graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invented
the first commercial computer system that responds to spoken commands
and the first print-to-speech machine to read to the blind.
"The
thing that excites me the most is having an impact on people's lives,"
said Kurzweil, who received last year's National Medal of Technology,
the country's highest award for technological innovation. "Our machines
have helped tens of thousands of blind people."
His
father, who was a concert pianist, conductor, and composer, predicted
that Kurzweil would eventually combine his interest in music and
computers. "I've always wanted to be an inventor, since age 4,"
Kurzweil said. "When I was 12 I built my own computer. I went to
the used electronic parts stores on Canal Street in New York and
found the parts."
In
high school, he started experimenting with pattern recognition.
"I built a computer that could write melodies in the same style
as a piece by Mozart," he said. Ever since that time, he's pursued
his fascination with pattern recognition, artificial intelligence,
and virtual reality.
"I
wanted to model the real world inside the computer," said Kurzweil.
He eventually developed music synthesizers, and founded two speech
recognition companies that he sold for over $70 million. Today,
one of his inventions, the Kurzweil 1000 computer system, is used
in thousands of schools around the country by blind people, who
scan a book into the computer and then listen to the machine read
the text out loud.
The
CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, an incubator in Wellesley, Massachusetts,
has enjoyed the fruits of his labor: he met President Clinton last
year to receive the national award. "It was very gratifying to be
recognized, but it's even more satisfying when I get a letter from
a blind student saying they were able to get their education because
of the Kurzweil reading machine," he said.
Kurzweil
is also a prolific writer, a Carl Sagan of the computer world, committed
to explaining his ideas with popular books such as The
Age of Intelligent Machines and The
Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.
And
he still is coming up with new ideas. One of his newer companies
is applying pattern recognition to the stock market with a new program
he designed. "It's able to predict what the stock market is going
to do," Kurzweil said.
Is
he going to sell the new program to the public? Fat chance. Instead
of making it available to everyone, Kurzweil is organizing an investment
fund around the new software program.
-
Christopher A. Szechenyi, Salary.com Contributor
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