Ray Kurzweil
Speaking Engagements

In 2009 Ray Kurzweil gave over fifty presentations in eight countries to influential groups including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Fortune Magazine, Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, Credit Suisse, TED, and Edwards Lifesciences.  Many of his appearances went beyond a standard keynote address to include extended audience Q&A, panel discussions, in-depth dialogue sessions, on-stage interviews, podcasts, simultaneous broadcasts, book signings, and press interviews.

With the current economic turmoil, Kurzweil's optimistic viewpoint has been well received by many groups, especially financial audiences.  He convincingly argues that the exponential growth of information technology will continue unaffected during the economic downturn as it has in every past recession including the Great Depression.  He notes that information technology goes beyond just computerized devices to include such disparate areas as health and medicine, and energy.  Kurzweil shows that following every economic contraction, the overall size of the economy snapped back to where it would have been had the downturn never occurred.  He presents an incredible wealth of data showing that information technologies have the scale and the ability to overcome virtually every major problem we face.

Virtual Lectures:

Kurzweil frequently gives live and interactive virtual lectures via Teleportec Teleporter or standard videoconferencing.  He is the only speaker in the world to have a Teleportec system installed in his office that enables him to appear as if he were at an event, on stage, in person and in three dimension behind a wooden lectern.  It is quite a dramatic illusion and creates a feeling of personal presence far beyond standard videoconferencing.  Kurzweil Technologies has an in-house studio with professional lighting, a broadcast quality camera specifically optimized for videoconferencing demands, and a top-of-the-line Tanberg codec that connects over ISDN lines or the Internet.  After six years of successful collaboration with Teleportec, Kurzweil has a comprehensive system to produce a high-quality and reliable virtual appearance.  As an alternative, standard videoconferencing is a cost effective way of having Kurzweil give live remarks followed by interactive Q&A.  For more information including photos, please see the Background Materials section below.

Speech Topics:

Kurzweil is best known for presenting a thought provoking, long-term, big picture view of the future of technology and its implications for society; explaining the exponential growth of technology (what he has termed, "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.  These ideas form the core thesis of Kurzweil's lectures and his book The Singularity is Near:  When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking). 

Kurzweil’s presentations are relevant across many industries and fields.  After gathering background information about the event, audience, and host, he will tailor his speech.  He often shapes his presentations around the following topics, each described in detail below:

• Innovation
  
• Health and medicine
  
• Education
  
• Business and Investing strategy
  
• Energy
  
• Disabilities/assistive technologies

Technology and the future (core thesis of all lectures) – At the onset of the 21st century, it will be an era in which the very nature of what is 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, 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.  

Innovation/Invention – The democratization of innovation is a turbulent process.  Rapid creation and violent destruction. Many winners and many losers, both big and small. Are there patterns of success in the chaos? Ray Kurzweil definitely thinks so. He has been on the bleeding edge of innovation for decades and his track record is something to admire. Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed 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 an ardent student of technology trends and had developed mathematical models of how technology in different areas evolves.  These models show that the pace of innovation itself is doubling every decade.  As information technology achieves each new level of price-performance and capacity, new applications become feasible and existing business models lose their viability.  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.  Kurzweil will talk about the democratization of innovation in an era of accelerating technologies and how this will impact business, the economy, and society.

Health and Medicine – We are now at a pivotal time in health technologies.  With the collection of the genome in 2003 and the advent of techniques such as RNA interference that can actually turn off the genes that promote disease and aging, medicine has transformed itself into an information technology.  As such, medicine is now subject to the “law of accelerating returns,” meaning that these technologies will be a thousand times more powerful than today in ten years, and a million times more powerful in 20 years.  Up until recently, health interventions were hit or miss.  We'd find something that seemed to work with only crude models of how they worked.  Drug development was called "drug discovery," basically finding things that worked rather than designing them.  Today it is within our grasp to slow the aging process and take full advantage of advances in bio- and nanotechnology that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace in the years ahead.  Ultimately, we will merge with our machines, vastly extending human health and longevity, and greatly increasing our intelligence.    

Education – Kurzweil presents to many academic groups including educators, administrators, executive boards, and higher education IT specialists about the intersection of information technology (a broad perspective), education and human knowledge.  He describes a future in which there is widespread and inexpensive access to education around the world, individualized learning through computer assisted instruction,  full-immersion virtual reality classrooms and labs, and ultimately the ability to download knowledge and skills directly to our brains.  He remarks on the key role of education in supporting the unique attribute of our species which is an exponential expanding knowledge base that we pass down from generation to generation.  He notes that as jobs are destroyed at the bottom of the skill ladder and more satisfying and better paying jobs are added at the top, investment in education has increased to keep pace with the rising skill ladder.  Specifically, in 1870 there were 60,000 college students and today there are over 6 million.  Expenditures in K-12 education in constant dollars and on a per capita basis have multiplied by ten over the past century.  Our economy is increasingly dominated by knowledge intensive jobs, hence the increasingly central role of education and technology.

Business/Investing – Kurzweil frequently presents to private equity firms and businesses on technology and the capital markets, business and technology trends, near- and long-term predictions, and strategy in an age of exponential technological growth.  Despite the current economic turmoil, Kurzweil presents an optimistic argument that the exponential growth of information technology will continue unaffected during the economic downturn as it has in every past recession and during the Great Depression, noting that information technology goes beyond just computerized devices, but includes such disparate areas as health and medicine, and energy.  In every past recession and the Great Depression, he notes that economic growth snapped back to where it would have been had the downturn never occurred.  He presents a wealth of data showing that information technologies have the scale and the ability to overcome the major problems we face such as energy and the environment, health, and even poverty.

Energy - Energy is certainly not an information technology today.  70% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, a nineteenth century technology.  However, if we could capture one part in ten thousand of the sunlight that falls on the Earth we could meet 100 percent of our energy needs using this renewable and environmentally friendly source.  We are unable to do that now because today’s solar panels are also an old industrial technology that are expensive, inefficient, heavy, and hard to install.  There is a new generation of solar panels based on “nanotechnology” (manipulating matter at the level of molecules) that is starting to overcome these obstacles.  The tipping point when energy from solar panels is actually less expensive than fossil fuels is only a few years away.  This is following an exponential progression in solar energy that is similar to what we see in computers.  The power we are generating from solar is doubling every two years.  At that rate, it can meet all of our energy needs within twenty years.

Nanotechnology is an emerging area of technology in which matter and energy is reorganized at the molecular level using information processes.  It is an information technology and therefore subject to what Kurzweil calls the “law of accelerating returns,” this continual doubling of capability about every year.  There are billions of dollars now being invested in these new renewable energy technologies by venture capital organizations, and companies such as Google.  An era in which we can obtain energy from sunlight using nanoengineered solar panels and store the energy in nanoengineered fuel cells (to overcome the intermittency of sunlight) at lower cost than environmentally damaging fossil fuels is close at hand. 

Disabilities and Assistive Technologies – 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 speaks on a range of topics relating to blindness, disabilities, and assistive technologies in the 21st century.  With his many assistive technology firsts, among them: the first pocket-sized print-to-speech reading machine for the blind (2006), the first Continuous Speech Natural Language Command and Control Software (1997), the first Speech Recognition Dictation System for Windows (1994),  the first commercially marketed Large-Vocabulary Speech Recognition,  the first Omni-Font (any type font) Optical Character Recognition (1976),  and the first Print-to-Speech Reading Machine for the Blind (1976), Kurzweil speaks from experience about the future of disabilities in an age of accelerating technology.

Testimonials provided by Kurzweil's recent hosts:

“We are still excited and full with adrenaline following the exciting talk by Mr. Kurzweil.  The presentation was a remarkable achievement.  It was fluent and brilliant.” 
-- Joseph Gilor, PhD, Founder and CEO, Olive Bay, Ltd. , World Innovation Summit Tel Aviv, September 10, 2009 (Kurzweil spoke via videoconference)

“Kurzweil’s presence at an institution can have a transformative effect, and I can see it already in a flurry of e-mails expressing interest in teaching with technology, and especially Second Life.  It is also healthy for people to have a chance to express their fears and concerns about technology, and hear them answered in such a rational, clear, big-picture way.  When we at Berklee chart our development in our use of technology, Kurzweil’s visit and the impact of his ideas will be a milestone, causing a paradigm shift that helped us not only grow, but understand our growth.”
-- Lori L anday, PhD, Associate Professor, Berklee College of Music, January 11, 2009

"Our guests were absolutely enthralled with both the technology and the content of the evening.  I was especially grateful for the effort that Kurzweil put in to know about Dr. Humayun and about ROPARD.  That effort came through as if he had some personal experience with all of us and that was truly a lovely touch."
-- Paula Korelitz, Outreach Coordinator, The Association for Retinopathy of Prematurity and Related Diseases (Kurzweil spoke via Teleportec Teleporter)

Current and future projects:

*Kurzweil is the co-founder and Chancellor of Singularity University (SU), a new university launched in June 2009 based on Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near.  SU is backed by NASA and Google, and opened its doors to an inaugural class of 40 students on June 29, 2009 at its campus at NASA Ames Research Park with the goal of preparing the next generation of leaders to address "humanity's grand challenges.”  The student body was narrowed from a pool of more than 1,200 applicants from around the globe.  ePlanet Ventures and Google are lead corporate sponsors.  Kurzweil announced the creation of SU at the TED conference in February 2009 spawning over 1,000 press articles on the subject.  

*Transcendent Man, a feature length film about Kurzweil’s life and ideas, premiered at three film festivals in 2009 with appearances by Kurzweil at each including the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, the  AFI Film Festival at the Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood, CA, and the International Documentary Film Festival at the Tuschinski Theater in Amsterdam.  The acclaimed film documents Kurzweil as he travels the world to share his vision of the future and includes interviews with 22 noted luminaries such as Colin Powell, Peter Diamandis, Dean Kamen, William Shatner, Stevie Wonder, and Kevin Warwick.  Original theme music is by noted American composer Philip Glass.

*On October 15, 2009, a major partnership was announced between one of Kurzweil’s companies, K-NFB Reading Technology,  and Baker & Taylor, the world’s leading distributor of books.  K-NFB has developed e-book reading software that will operate seamlessly on a variety of electronic devices including personal computers, smart phones, and cell phones.  Ray Kurzweil was quoted on KurzweilAI.net, “For every technology, there comes a tipping point when adoption starts to spread like wildfire, for digital books, that time is now. With Baker & Taylor's market leadership along with our cutting-edge 3-D book technology -- and our combined and rapidly growing repository of online books from leading publishers -- we believe we have the key to transform the book industry." For more information see Publisher’s Weekly:

*On April 28, 2009 Kurzweil’s latest health book, TRANSCEND:Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, was released by Rodale. The book presents a practical, easy-to-understand program to slow down the aging process, so that readers can live long enough (and remain healthy long enough) to take full advantage of the biotech and nanotech advances that have already begun and will be occurring at an accelerating pace during the years ahead.  The book draws from extensive scientific evidence for dramatic levels of life extension that Kurzweil and his coauthor, Terry Grossman, M.D. first presented in their 2004 health book, Fantastic Voyage:  Live Long Enough to Live Forever.  The book website is: http://www.Kurzweilandterry.com/transcend/.

* Kurzweil has written and is producing a full-length motion picture The Singularity is Near, A True Story about the Future, inspired by his New York Times best selling book.  Kurzweil stars along side Pauley Perrette (star of NCIS on CBS) with appearances by Alan Dershowitz, Tony Robbins, and many others.  For more information:  http://singularity.com/themovie/. 

To learn more about Ray Kurzweil’s companies go to: http://www.kurzweiltech.com.

Background Materials:
- A sampling of speech topics, titles, and abstracts
- Compilation of conference testimonials
- Teleportec Fact Sheet
- Sample PowerPoint presentation

A video of Mr. Kurzweil presenting at Google Zeitgeist (23 minutes), October 26, 2005:

Mr. Kurzweil presenting via Teleportec Teleporter to Advanced Equities, January 3, 2008

A PowerPoint presentation given by Mr. Kurzweil to the World Economic Forum Davos, Young Global Leaders on January 22, 2008 http://www.kurzweilai.net/pps/YGL/ .