How Ray Kurzweil Works

Chris Poulett. I'm an editor here at How Stuff Works. And next to me, as always is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. How do folks? And uh, we're going to continue our series, this being the second series, so I guess technically it's not a serious yet we have to have one more, okay unless you're the Braves in case those two games are winning streak. Now, Um, we're going to talk about some uh, some famous tech people here and there in our podcasts, and today we have chosen to speak of Ray.

That's right, Ray Kurtzwile. Uh and if you haven't heard the name before, um, shame on you. No, No, We're we're gonna fix that. We'll start off slow. I want to talk about kind of his entry into the whole tech world. He was interested in computers back when computers were pretty much brand new. Yeah, we're talking punch cards. Yeah, and um uh he was known for being he was one of the people first people who was really interested

in artificial intelligence for computers. Um, starting off with simple pattern recognition, where you could teach a computer to recognize a pattern of information and identify it and respond when

it detects that pattern. Uh. And one of the famous first attempts that he made was a program that he created for a computer where it could um analyze classical music and look at all the different uh features of classical music from famous composers, and then compose music itself based upon the information that it gleaned by looking at this music. And uh. He actually went on a kind of a goofy little game show where they played this music and they had the contestants had to guess that

it was the computer that made it. But anyway, I just thought it was kind of cool that he created this computer program in the first place. You know, I gotta say it's a classic game show. It was I've Got a Secret with with Ray Allen and his host and uh, I just did point out this was in ve and he was in high school when he was on national TV doing this with a computer program that he had created that that did that had this pattern

recognition ability. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty awesome, I gotta say so. But that's just the very beginning of his amazing career. Oh yeah, yeah. Um. He went on to UH to work at m I T yep UM and there he actually created a program that would try to match kids and colleges together for the best fit and not necessarily hit with the parents. No, because it left out some pretty important schools. It seemed it didn't seem to recommend certain big name schools like Harvard and Yale.

Is there a call, Yes, well, you know, if you're suited for Podunk Community College. It was going to tell you the truth, right right. But he sold that business and made the tidy profit. I think it was for about a hundred thousand dollars, which is a good chunk of change. And uh, that was not the first time that he founded a company and then later sold it. In fact, he's kind of made a career of that.

Speaking of pattern recognition, we've noticed as we were doing the research for Mr Kurtzwild that he has sold off several of his companies, and I think all of them are still in existence in some form. All the all of the four major companies are still operating in some form or another. That's a good that's a good h that's not a bad track record at all. And you look at the companies that are around these days and

which ones aren't around. So yeah, In nineteen seventy four he founded UH, the Kurtswild Computer Products Incorporated Company UM and that was one where again pattern recognition came into play. That's where he was looking at ways for computers to recognize printed text and UH to be able to actually read that printed text. So this came in very handy

for people who are visually impaired. You could have a computer that could when when you scanned a sheet of paper that text on, it could interpret that text UM and read it back. And and this is trickier than you would first think. I mean you might think, oh, well, you just have to teach it. One A looks like you can't just teach a computer. One A looks like you have to teach it, teach it. What a times New Roman A an aerial A, A comic sans A a handwritten A. I mean no, you know, not all

a's are created equally. And you had to do this for every single letter. It had to be able to interpret on the fly sometimes because you don't always have the most clean copy of text either. Um. So Kurt's well dedicate a lot of time and energy into perfecting this, and um he got a lot of attention for it. Yeah. You might know this technology by by its initials O c R, which is optical character recognition. And you say, oh, yeah, that's the uh, that's the system they use on my

flatbed scanner. Well, funny you should mention that because, as Jonathan pointed out, this is this is a very useful thing for people who can't see because, um, a suggestion came in from a visually impaired person and said, you know, it'd be really cool if you could use this for that. And so they invented the flatbed scanner and a text to speech program to work together with this optical character

recognition and do exactly that. And it ended up being called the kurtswhile Reading Machine, which debuted in January of seventy six. And uh, that that you know there was a reasonably well known fan of that system. Oh wait, I think I know who you're talking about, not Wondering, No, I now I know Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder. I did read that. I was thinking, you know, I think I know who said that. But and you know, Stevie Wonder was he was the first customer, wasn't it he about

the first one. He bought the very first one. And and just this a note before, you know, let Jonathan get back on that. But when I started, we were talking about ideas for people, famous people. Um I kurs Wild has been on on my reading list for a while. He has several books out. We'll talk about that in a minute. But um, I thought, you know, that's the guy who makes the musical instruments. Well, this is the

start of all that. When he became friends with Stevie Wonder as a result of developing this reading machine, they developed a partnership for music. Uh you know, which we'll talk about a minute. But that's where I knew him from, was the musical instrument. So delving into his past, he's got all these different things that he's done. It's just a personal note. Sorry, no, no no, no, look, I think

I think we should just keep on building on that. Yeah, and and he he founded h kurts Wild Music and U. Together with Stevie Wonder, he managed to create a synthesizer that sounded more like a an actual piano than any

synthesizer up to that time. And in fact, in blind tests, many musicians could not tell the difference between the synthesizer and a real grand piano um which of course was a huge, huge achievement because up to that point computer instruments sounded a lot like a craft work record, right, computer instruments, I was gonna say they sounded they sounded did They sounded artificial? They did not sound natural at all.

So Kurtswild really made some some great progress into U into breaking that barrier so that you could have a more natural sound coming from a digital instrument. Yep, and UH. As a matter of fact, that company got sold They actually created Kurtzwild Music Systems, and that company got sold off to uh UM, Asian company called Young Chang Um and it's still doing business. He was actually a consultant for a while. Apparently is no longer, but he's got

some other stuff he's done. Um, you know, like speech recognition. For example, he came up with the first large vocabulary speech recognition system. Yeah, you might be sensing a pattern here, pattern recognition. Hey. Now instead of text, he's looking at speech. This was part of the kurts While Applied Intelligence initiative

that you made. Um, yeah, it's uh so once again, he's looking at ways that computers and people interact, trying to break those barriers down as much as possible so that the interaction becomes very natural and almost to the point ideally, you get to the point where you're not even conscious of the interface anymore. It's just it just happens.

And of course we're we're miles away from that right now, but it's because of things like like the speech recognition and the text recognition that Kurtswhile worked on, that we're making progress toward that goal. True. So yes, And speaking of print to speech, there was another company founded, Chris Wild Educational Systems. Yet yet another program, and there were a whole bunch of other little things that he's done.

They're just fascinating. Um fat cat, for example, I thought it was really cool using a computer algorithms to predict the patterns of the markets, right, you would you're essentially trying to create a a an artificially intelligent stock market trader, So you would you would follow the the guidance of an artificially intelligent you know, I've met some stock market traders. I would suggest that a lot of their intelligence is

completely artificial. So I don't see this as a big stretch. Yeah, that's the whole thing is it's not really their fault. The markets just do what the markets do. You wonder, like, can you program in that kind of intuition? I am very curious as to how fat cat performs actually, because uh so much of the stock market is beyond just just logic. I mean, you have to you have to take in so many factors into account, just crowds ecology

for one. We're we're seeing right now in the markets where they're bouncing up and down, that that as people gain confidence and lose confidence, so goes the market. And you know, it's kind of hard to just predict that all on its own. Yeah, I think we probably have all experienced in proof of that. Wise, Right, let's let's not think of our ferro One case at the moment, showing um other things Mr Kurtzwil has been involved with, you know, the Medical Learning Company which has a patent

for online doctor training. Yeah. Um, and uh, the Kurtswild cyber Art, which is a digital art software company that apparently no longer has its program available for download. But essentially it was tricking your computer into drawing things for you, which was kind of cool. I think it was more of a just a messing around type thing, but um,

messed around with some other stuff. I know that if you go to the Kurtswild ai uh site, he has a was it roberta the artificially intelligent creature that you can ask it questions and answers. I played with that a little bit before the podcast and uh, and it's definitely not up to the touring test just yet. But um, but you know, you can see where where his interests are. In fact, we should probably talk about that as kurtswell

is is. You know, we're talking about a lot of his past accomplishments, but you might be saying, well, what's he up to today? He's right on the forefront of all the people who are talking about something that, um, well, you might call it a convergence. You might call it the singularity. But it's this idea of reaching a point where we have artificially intelligent machines. He likes to call it accelerated intelligence, UM, but artificially intelligent machines that can

create new, smarter, artificially intelligent machines. And we just reached this point where it becomes is the tipping point really where innovation comes at at shorter and shorter gaps, so eventually get to a point where it's just con stantly innovation, and no one really knows what that's going to look like. UM. And Uh, he's one of the people who really is

is kind of a proponent of this idea. UM. He's talked about the singularity many times, and it seems very very enthusiastic about it, UM, as opposed to some people who are really scared of it. Yeah, that's that's true. Um. The singularity was actually proposed some time back by a mathematician named John von Newman. UM. And he was saying, you know, this is a point after which human affairs

cannot continue as normal. That's short of vague description. Verner VINGI, Yeah, this is an article that that Jonathan just wrote not too long ago. UM, he was talking about the possibility that machines will become artificially intelligent and you know, design venter machines and decide we're irrelevant and that you know, we should just go away right or the other out of the coin. He doesn't say that that's necessarily what

would happen. Um. He does say that no matter what, our lives will be completely different, and to the point where it's almost it's almost pointless to try and imagine what our lives will be like because there's no way of knowing right now. But we it could be the opposite. We could be living in a paradise where machines are

doing everything we need them to do for us. Um. We don't have to do anything for ourselves, and we can pretty much spend our lives just you know, learning new things or uh, pursuing art or fooling around, you know, whatever happens to be your your purpose for life. You don't necessarily have to clock in and clock out every day because machines are doing it for you. Um. I'm sure that psychologists and psychiatrists will still be in great demand.

Doctors will probably still be in demand. I mean, there's farmers definitely I mean, some things humans will probace still have a hand in, although a lot of those tasks, even in those fields, will be automated by machines according to this vision. And I even get to a point where we don't even need them anymore, perhaps our consciousness will merge with some sort of computer network, which sounds really far out right now. But these are the kind of things that hurts Weill and and Verne as I'll

like to call him talk about. I mean, they they they are not outside the realm of possibility in their minds. Well, yeah, it's it's funny, uh, that you said that, because I was going to point out that Ray kurtzwill is believe that this is actually going to be a good thing. Um, And instead of being the end of human conscious consciousness,

thank you. Um, it's actually kind of be that the start of something really cool where it's going to prolong human consciousness and preserve human consciousness, which is why he's been doing a lot of preparation. An article and Wired earlier in two thousand and eight, Um, I read that he is taking massive doses of vitamin supplements and doing a lot of exercise to try to prolong his life in order to catch up to the singularity so that

his consciousness can be among those preserves. He actually he wrote a book about that, in fact, about about living a healthy lifestyle. He was able to uh beat heart disease and diabetes. Diabetes. Yeah, that's pretty serious stuff. So um yeah, he's definitely determined to see this come about. And according to uh to Urn, uh, we should expect it before the year. Say, I think it was a thirty something like that, so so not too far off, I mean, uh. And the whole point on that is

just the idea of this development cycle. It's getting shorter and shorter and shorter for us to make more and more powerful machines. Now, whether or not we hit a barrier before we can hit the artificial intelligence slash accelerated intelligence goal post that remains to be seen. We may not be able to achieve it as fast as everyone thinks, because we might actually hit physical limitations on what we can what we can really do, and that could slow

us down. Next thing, you know, it might be twenty six. Yeould be really depressing. They're always putting off good stuff like that, you know, when the machines take over. Anyway, the book that I was most interested in was the the age of spiritual machines when human computers exceed human intelligence, and that that sort of gives you an idea of the um the concept that he's got the crush Wells got of what he expects from the singularity in in

in the future. So it would be interesting to check out. Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely have to keep our eyes on that. You know. Um, I've got something a similar field that Kurt Swell is actually interested in that relates to this that I want to talk about. But before we do, Okay, I'd like

to take a moment to thank our sponsor. Yes, so we have our sponsor, audible dot com And if you sign up at www dot audible podcast dot com slash text stuff, you'll get a free download when you when you sign up, you can download any book for free, and they have fifty thousand books on audible dot com. It's a huge library. And we each came up with a an a book to suggest that kind of sort of relates to our topic. Christy, want to you want to go first? Sure, since we were talking about verner VINGI.

He is a noted science fiction author and his book Rainbows end is available now at audible podcast dot com. Nice and uh, you know it could be an interesting and worthwhile reading insight into his uh his background there right, mine, mine, I I played a little bit here. Um. I'm also a science fiction fan. But I chose Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Yeah, so, um, yeah, I wanted to go with neuromancwer but I didn't see that on audible dot com.

But they have Pattern Recognition, which is another William Gibson book. It's not actually about the same sort of pattern recognition that Kurt Swell was talking about, but it's a great mystery. But and and it is a good book. It is a good but a real real page turner. Or if you're listening to it on audible dot com, it's an excellent listen. You should definitely listen to it. That could be one of your that could be your free download if you wanted, right, so, you can sign up for

that at www dot audible podcast dot com. Slash tech stuff And now let's get back to what I was going to talk about. The technology I was going to talk about. The Kurtswell is very much interested in nanotechnology. It's definitely part of this whole concept of the singularity um building devices that are on the nanoscale, which is incredibly tiny. We're talking like on the atomic level. And uh, nanotechnology is one of those things that probably is going

to be necessary in order to achieve these goals. I mean, we're already building transistors that are on the nanoscale. So if you want to learn more about that, I recommend you read How Nanotechnology Works. That's by Jonathan Strickland. Not to toot my own horn, but how Manamail Technology Works. And it's live right now at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you again soon. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the

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