Ray Kurzweil

[Jason Kravitz]

I was just reading last weeks edition of the KurzweilAI.net newsletter and thought other DMT readers might be interested in checking out his site if you have not already.

Ray Kurzweil has been an innovator in technology for 30+ years. He developed some of the original Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology still used in scanners today as well as text to speech technology.

Many musicians would agree that the Kurzweil 250 synthesizer, released in 1984, was the first electronic instrument to accurately recreate the sound of a grand piano (previous synths could not come close to the tonal quality)

In recent decades Kurzweil has written several interesting books on the future of technology such as "The Age of Intelligent Machines" and "The Age of Spiritual Machines".

These days he focuses a lot on nano-technology, artificial intelligence and how it comes closer to the complexity of human thought, and technology's place in humanitarian efforts such as curing diseases etc...

you can sign up for his weekly newsletter or read up on the huge amount of info on his site http://www.kurzweilai.net/

[Zack Mahdavi]

I actually finished reading Kurzweil's book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines," for a CS ethics class I'm taking. His thoughts were interesting, yet rather odd at the same time. If you're interested in Kurzweil, take a look at books from Brooks and Moravec as well.

I was also interested in this Bill Joy article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html), where he discusses we should stop development on Genetics, Robots, and Nanotechnology.