Ray Kurzweil

Renowned author, inventor, and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, has a public track record of more than a quarter of a century of predictions with a stunning 86% accuracy rate, all based on his Law of Accelerating Returns which states that information technology is advancing exponentially — doubling in price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year. Since 1990, Kurzweil has laid out these predictions in a series of books: The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Singularity is Near (2005), and How to Create a Mind(2012). And now, in his forthcoming book, The Singularity is Nearer (2020), he presents new data and a fresh look to the future as we approach the steep part of the exponential. By questioning old assumptions and applying exponential thinking Ray Kurzweil explains how we will rewrite the software of life, rebuild the world atom by atom, and reinvent our intelligence, to solve the world’s grandest challenges.

Kurzweil explains that accelerating information technology will lead us to completely overcome handicaps associated with sensory and physical disabilities and describes the extent to which we have already done that for many handicaps. He predicts that in about a quarter century, we will have millions of nanobots in our brains putting our brains on the Internet and providing high bandwidth communication directly with the brain, so vision will ultimately become obsolete. He can speak on a range of topics relating to blindness, disabilities, and assistive technologies in the 21st century. With his many assistive technology firsts, Mr. Kurzweil speaks from experience about the future of disabilities in an age of accelerating technology.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Kurzweil presents a program for innovation, how to foster it in an organization, and how to bring inventions to market. He explains how the law of accelerating returns and the exponential growth of information technology are accelerating opportunities for innovation. In this talk, he draws upon his own history of innovation which led to his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, founded by the U.S. Patent Office in 2002.

Based on his book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and his new health book, TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, Kurzweil addresses the merger of science, technology, and medicine and its impact on the healthcare industry and human longevity. He explains that as medicine becomes an information technology, it will be subject to the laws of accelerating returns, meaning that it will be a thousand times more powerful than today in ten years, and a million times more powerful in 20 years.