Emergence of Kurzweil: As time went on, more and more people started talking about the singularity and its daunting dramatics. One of the focal speakers and advocates of the singularity is a futurist by the name of Ray Kurzweil. (NPR Kaste 2010) He has done an enormous amount of research in the field of technological singularities and has written books, papers, and done several studies on the topic. He even has his own website where he tries to explain his theories to the mass public. Of course many of these theories are confusing, very dense, and hard to understand to say the least. He even wrote in his first paragraph of one of his papers, If you can understand this whole paper, I will pay you 9 trillion dollars. Kurzweil started studying technology at a young age and by age 17, on a television game show he showed that he could make a computer write piano music. No one realized the significance of his accomplishments at the time. He went on to create software that could change print to speech in college along with many other technological breakthroughs and inventions; in all he holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctrines. (Grossman 2011) His research in the 1980 was the research that he founded his singularity thoughts upon. At this time, technology was not that eminent, but he wanted to be able to track technological progress at the time. So he tried to match up his findings with a proven law at the time called Moores Law, which stated that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. Surprisingly, his ‘ule of thumb kind of law turned out to be matching Kutzweils numbers. (Kurzweil 2001)
Sources: Video: Ray Kurzweil: How technology's accelerating power will transform us.
Youtube.com. ted.com, 12 Jan. 2007. Web. 8 Apr. 2012.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A Photo: Malfredi, Rennio. Ray Kurzweil. N.d. wired.com. N.p., 24 Mar. 2008. Web. 8 Apr.
2012. http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1604/ff_kurzweil1_f.jpg
