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Ray Kurzwell
​Chairman, Kurzweil Technologies & A Director of Engineering, Google

Ray Kurzweil 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 selected Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions.

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of 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 is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.

He has received 20 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has authored 7 books, 5 of which have been national bestsellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in science.

Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times bestseller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. His latest New York Times bestseller is How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.

His website, KurzweilAI.net, tracks daily breakthroughs in science and technology and has over three million new readers annually.

In 2012, Ray Kurzweil was appointed a Director of Engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.

Kurzweil speaks frequently to diverse audiences around the world, presenting a provocative, long-term, big picture view of the future of technology and its implications for society. In his presentations he explains the exponential growth of technology (in his terms, “The Law of Accelerating Returns”) and its path toward reverse engineering the brain, nanotechnology, the merging of human and machine, and, ultimately, extreme human life extension.

These ideas form the core thesis of Kurzweil’s lectures and his best-selling book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil tailors his lectures to audiences and often speaks on: Innovation, Health and Medicine, Education, Business & Investing, Energy, and Disabilities & Assistive Technologies.

Speaking Topics

Ray Kurzweil gives over fifty presentations around the world each year. In 2009 he spoke in eight countries to influential groups including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Fortune Magazine, Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, Credit Suisse, TED, and Edwards Lifesciences. 

Kurzweil’s far reaching and optimistic views on the future of technology and its implications for society resonate with a wide range of audiences including top U.S. security officials, senior healthcare policy makers, private investors, scientists, business executives, and academic communities. His research and remarks focus on the exponential growth of technology (in his terms “The Law of Accelerating Returns”) and its path towards ubiquitous computing, reverse engineering the brain, full immersion virtual reality, nanotechnology, the merging of human and machine, and ultimately extreme human life extension. He describes a bright future in which technology will provide solutions to the most pressing social, economic, and environmental problems. Kurzweil often shapes his presentations towards the following topics: 

  • Innovation
  • Health and Medicine
  • Education
  • Business & Investing
  • Energy
  • Disabilities & Assistive Technologies
Kurzweil’s presentations are rich with content. His PowerPoint is a key tool in helping audiences visualize exponential trends and future scenarios with multiple up-to-date charts, graphs, animated images, and imbedded movies. He often engages in extended Q&A and on-stage dialogues following his lectures. 

Ray tailors each of his speeches to his audience and speaks on Innovation, Healthcare, Education, Energy, Investing/Forecasting among other topics.

  • The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact on Business, the Economy, and Society
    At the onset of the 21st century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy, and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. 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. 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. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents an inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are a billion times more intelligent...all within the next three to four decades.
  • Science, Technology, and Invention: Strategies to Create the Future
    The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process with rapid creation, violent destruction, many winners and many losers. Despite the apparent chaos, we can discern predictable patterns. The pace of innovation itself is doubling every decade. The overall price-performance and capacity of every form of information technology grows exponentially, generally doubling in a year or less. As information technology achieves each new level of price-performance and capacity, new applications become feasible and existing business models lose their viability. Another implication is that the tools of disruptive change have been democratized. A couple of students created Google on their thousand dollar laptops. A few years later, a couple of undergraduates created Facebook with tools that everyone has. The rate of change is now so rapid that even three to five year business plans need to consider that every level of an industry will undergo major changes during that period. It’s not just the devices we carry around that are influenced by these exponential changes. Health and medicine is now an information technology with the collection of the human genome, the means of changing genes in a mature individual, and the ability to design interventions on computers and to test them on biological simulators. Even energy will be transformed as we apply nanotechnology to the design of solar panels and energy storage devices. The means to change the world are in everyone’s hands.

A sampling of speech topics, titles, and abstracts

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"Ray’s keynote set the right inspirational tone for the entire summit. I believe his keynote will be talked about as one of the iMedia "greats" for years to come."- Content Director, iMedia Summits, iMedia Communications

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