Ray Kurzweil Interview (page: 4 / 6) Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence	Print Interview

Do you recall any teacher in particular who was important to you and influenced you?

Ray Kurzweil: There were some high school teachers.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I remember a math teacher, Mr. Ewen -- actually a math teacher in eighth grade, Mrs. Matwell, who got excited about my ideas and wanted to listen to them. My mother actually was kind of a fan of my ideas and would listen to them. Marvin Minsky I actually communicated with in high school and came to visit him, came up to Boston, and to my delight, took me, a high school student, as seriously as he would take a professor. I mean, that is his approach. He treats everybody the same. I think he really doesn't care if somebody's a professor or a high school student. He's very excited with ideas and very honest with his reactions. But that encouragement was important to me.

Isn't it hard for a kid with ideas to be taken seriously?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ray Kurzweil: I've always been rather relentless and managed to find a way to get the resources -- the hardest one of which is my own time -- to see ideas through. That's an important aspect of success. It's just not to recognize failure. I mean, failure is just sort of success deferred. It just means it's going to just take you a little bit longer. But where an idea becomes so real to you that it absolutely is real, even though it may not be real to anybody else, and then it's just a matter of carrying out this plan that has emerged in your head, and you work backwards from this vision, from this fantasy that becomes very real, and then imagine, well, okay, how can we work backwards? If that were to exist, what would have had to have happened? And then it lays out a path that you kind of work out in reverse, and then you just follow it. You have to be very, very persistent in doing that. But persistence towards a vision usually works. That's been my experience.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

If the rocket ship was your first failure, what was your first success?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Ray Kurzweil: At age 12 I discovered the computer, which was not as ubiquitous as it is today, but I had opportunity through my uncle to get access to a computer affiliated with New York University, and then discovered the ability of computers to kind of model reality. That was very exciting. You could create the world in a computer, admittedly crudely back then, but I think I sensed the potential to do that, and really re-create any aspect of reality. That has been a theme of my thinking, and I think we'll see that emerge in the 21st century, where it really can re-create our experiences and re-create the world through virtual reality and that'll be the nature of the Web in the 21st century. But I kind of had a hint of that at age 12 and got involved in computer programming, actually did some statistical programming that was distributed sort of as shareware, built a computer back then that was able to do some calculations. Got really interested in pattern recognition, the power of that -- because that's really the heart of human thinking, is how really to recognize patterns -- in high school.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

To what do you attribute this? Was it your home environment? Your schooling?

Ray Kurzweil: No. A lot of things, like schooling, were just obstacles, things that kind of would take up my time. That's hard to say. I really can't attribute it to any one teacher who provided that spark. I've had that sort of orientation since my earliest memories. Certainly there were a lot of people who were encouraging along the way.

For example?

Ray Kurzweil: These teachers I mentioned, who were delighted that a student would have an idea and want to pursue it, and would really help. They would talk to me about my ideas and help provide resources, including my parents.

I get the impression that you feel you came upon this on your own, that it was going to happen. Was it just something inside of you?

Ray Kurzweil: I think so. I was probably influenced by the popular culture, which I think in the '50s began to discover science as important, and that built in the '60s with the space race and all that. There was a real public emphasis on science. But it was never an abstract issue for me. It was really the ability to create new worlds.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I actually had an interest in magic as a young child, also from the age of five -- I mean, traditional magic tricks -- and sometimes would sort of invent my own little tricks based on some of the principles I learned from tricks I had bought. I used to acquire lots of magic tricks and put on magic shows for my family. There was something delightful -- in fact, again, you took ordinary materials, just mirrors and things, and if you did things in exact sequence, people would be intrigued with that. It would have an effect. But I quickly realized that that was a superficial form of magic, because once the secrets were revealed, the magic would disappear, and the profound aspect of technology is that once the secrets are revealed, the magic doesn't disappear. In fact, it provides knowledge and power to create the next generation of technology, which will be even more powerful. So in a sense, the computer and technology were more meaningful forms of magic, but there's still that magic of getting materials in just the right sequence to create an effect that can be very profound and change our lives.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I became interested in technology in general, and have been a student of technology trends, very interested in technology even of the future, which gives me the opportunity to invent with materials that don't exist today. Alan Kay says, "To anticipate the future, you need to invent it." But you need to have some sense of what will be available in the future to invent with. So it gives me the opportunity to actually invent things 20 years out, through writing, which gets to be more abstract. You're not dealing with actual materials. I mean, my first inventions were physical, and then I moved on to software, which is more abstract, and then to really the world of ideas, which is more abstract yet. But ideas are very powerful. They're really the most powerful entity that we have. Just take the concept of money. It's an abstraction, it's an idea, yet everybody respects it. Even if they don't respect the concept at some level, everybody agrees to this elaborate system, but it's all an abstraction, it's all an idea. That's just one example of the power of ideas, and that's something unique in our species, that ideas have this kind of power over us, and there's things that we come up with and the ideas evolve. That's something that we don't see in other species.

You mentioned the Space Race, and the discovery of science by popular culture in the '50s and '60s. Do you remember the day the Sputnik launch was announced?

Ray Kurzweil: No, I don't remember that exactly. I do remember the moon landing, and the general fascination with science. I think it was sort of lurking in the '50s, but in the '60s the nation woke up to the power of science and technology, that it really was going to shape our future.

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