The Wall Street Journal called him “the restless genius.”
Forbes said he was “the ultimate thinking machine.” by Forbes magazine.
Inc. Magazine proclaimed him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.”
Author. Inventor. Futurist. Freak?
If you don’t know Ray Kurzweil, you should definitely read up on his Wikipedia page. Then, check out this graphic by our friends at GrasshopperGroup. When you’re done with that, scroll down and watch the Ted video under the graphic..
At that point, you should be giving yourself a pep talk about how you can be as geeky cool as this guy.
When I first read one of Ray Kurzweil’s books it took a while to grasp the whole concept of exponential growth. Once I really studied it with a view to determining if he was correct I was stagggered to find that no matter how you view it the pace of technological development has been accelerating for centuries. My list of human breakthroughs is at http://drjohnty.com/Exponential_Growth.html but you could spend an hour or two making your own list and you will find that even with different items the trend and outcome is always the same. What this shows in my mind is that much of what Ray claims today could well come to pass based on previous predictions. I am not a believer in the singularity because Articial Intelligence is proving very elusive but I believe 100% that the integration of human and machine intelligence which is achieved by bringing computing power inside the body is an inevitable and imminent progression.