Interview: Ray Kurzweil
Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence

You were still in high school when you appeared on the TV program I've Got a Secret. How did that come about?

Ray Kurzweil: That was sort of my first project in pattern recognition, which is a part of artificial intelligence where we try to make computers recognize patterns, which is actually the heart of human intelligence. I had a system that you could feed in melodies of a human composer, and it would recognize patterns and then create original melodies in the same style. The melodies were recognizable as sort of being a student of that composer. So the compositions would sound like a third-rate Mozart. That won first prize in the International Science Fair, and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, it was one of the winners. I went on I've Got a Secret. I went on and played a piece of music and then whispered in Steve Allen's ear, "I built my own computer." And he said, "Well, that's impressive. What's that have to do with that piece of music you just played?" And I said, "Well, the computer composed the piece of music." And then Bess Myerson, who was a former Miss America, was stumped, but then Henry Morgan, who was a film star, actually guessed it, which was pretty insightful. Computers were not that well known at that time.

How did you end up even being on that program?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, I guess that stemmed from the science contest. They look for interesting projects.

Was it interesting for you to be on television at the age of 16 with your project?

Ray Kurzweil: Yeah, that was exciting.

That was my first exposure in sort of being able to communicate with a large audience. It gave me some of the excitement of inventing, being able to move people with projects. That didn't directly help people in their lives, but that's the excitement of inventing as opposed to discovering science. Technology builds on science, but it really applies it to a way that moves people, and it is a form of magic. You take just a mundane set of materials, or a mundane set of computer instructions, but in just the right combination it does something that delights people, or maybe even helps them or changes their lives. And that's the exciting aspect of inventing for me.

That's what motivates you?

Ray Kurzweil: Right. That's the thrill, to go from sort of these dry formulas on a blackboard to actually seeing transformations in people's lives. That nexus is exciting.

As an inventor, you not only create new technologies but new markets. There's a practical consequence, a use for what you do. One example that's often used is your relationship with Stevie Wonder. Can you tell us something about that?

Ray Kurzweil: I have tried to pick technologies and applications that would have an impact on people's lives, whether it's creating music or helping overcome disabilities. That's what really excites me, that linkage between dry formulas on a blackboard and the power of these ideas to transform people's lives. It's something that I enjoy contributing to, and working with my colleagues to accomplish.

The reading machine for the blind actually started out as a technology -- a solution in search of a problem. We had this omni-font optical character recognition that could recognize print in any type, though I wouldn't really know what it would be good for. And I happened to sit next to this blind guy on a plane, and he explained about the blind -- the reading problem that blind people have -- that very little is available in Braille and talking books and he'd like to be able to access ordinary printed material. And so that then seemed like a very exciting -- like, wow, we could actually apply this technology to that problem. Stevie Wonder happened to see me on a TV show, I think the Today show, demonstrating this when we announced it, and just literally dropped by and picked up our post-production unit.

That was a quarter of a century ago, 1976, so we've had a long-term friendship. He's actually quite sophisticated about technology, and he's the one who articulated the problem in the world of music that led to my starting Kurzweil Music Systems.

On the one hand there were these exciting control techniques, computerized methods where you could -- a computer could remember what you played, and you could play multiple tracks and play a whole orchestra by yourself, but the sounds that you had to work with were very thin at that time, 1982. When you selected piano, it didn't sound like a piano, it sounded like an organ. When you selected violin, it sounded like an organ. Wouldn't it be great if we could combine these very popular control methods with the beautiful, rich, complex sounds of acoustic instruments? I felt that -- again, single-processing pattern recognition -- these fields could solve those problems. Stevie Wonder agreed to be our musical adviser, and we started Kurzweil Music. Then in 1984, we had an instrument that when you selected piano, it really did sound like a piano. We were able to fool concert pianists as to whether they were listening to a piano or a Kurzweil 250. I've continued to collaborate with Stevie Wonder over these several decades on different technologies, both in the disabilities field and the music field, both areas where technology has played a strong role.

Your father was a musician. What would he think of these music systems?

Ray Kurzweil: He sort of foreshadowed my combining computers and music. He had a fascination with some of the early synthesizers in the 1960s. He died in 1970. He said that someday you will combine computers and music. He saw an affinity, both in the ability of computers to create sound and the ability of computers to control sound. He saw that there was a natural affinity there for those two worlds.

As a musician, he did not resist the computer?

Ray Kurzweil: No, not at all. He felt that music has always used the most advanced methods available. In the 19th century, the ultimate in the crafts, woodmaking crafts and metal crafts, were used to make instruments like the piano. The piano action is a very complex mechanical linkage, and it's the ultimate in 19th century technology. So we've always used advanced technologies in all of the arts, particularly in music, and since music has a relationship to mathematics, it has a linkage to science and technology.

You're often described as a futurist. As you look ahead into the 21st century, what do you see as the problems and challenges that face us?

Ray Kurzweil: What I see is quite different than what a lot of people see, because I think a major failing of even some very thoughtful observers is the real implications of the acceleration of technological change. If you say that technical change is accelerating, people are quick to agree with that. It's just sort of "motherhood and apple pie." But people don't really incorporate that. I call this the "intuitive linear view" versus the "historical exponential view." People assume that in the next 50 years we'll see 50 years of progress at today's rate of progress. I've had these arguments. People will say, "Oh well, we won't see nanotechnology self-replicators for a hundred years. I say, "Well yes, a hundred years at today's rate of progress, which will take 25 years." We're doubling the paradigm shift rate every ten years. I mean, that's something I pulled out of the air. I've been studying this. I have models of it. That means the 21st century will not be a hundred years of progress. It will be 20,000 years of progress at today's rate of progress. And the 20th century was not a hundred years, but was 25 years at today's rate of progress because we weren't going at this rate of progress for the whole century. So the 21st century will be a thousand times greater in terms of technological change than the 20th century, and the 20th century was pretty profound. That's quite a different view than if you just think in linear terms, which most people do, despite the fact that they lived through this acceleration, but they assume that it's going to stop or they just don't think about it.

We're going to be profoundly redefining our own bodies, our own brains. We're going to be expanding our intelligence, our intimate connection with intelligent machines. We're going to be spending a lot of time in virtual reality, which will incorporate all of our senses. And I guess it's complicated to explain all of that, but I do see the future will be very different, but it will be an extension of human civilization. It'll all be derivative of human intelligence and will reflect human values, and it'll be an expansion, a continued expansion, really, because we've been growing exponentially. Our knowledge is growing exponentially, and we will continue that through the 21st century. It's really the next step in evolution. Technological evolution actually continued biological evolution. You can see that very clearly. The first paradigm shifts took billions of years, and it sped it and was taken over by technological evolution, and now paradigm shifts take just a few years' time. And the next step in evolution will be enhancing our own intelligence through intimate connection with machine intelligence.

It is utterly mind-boggling. Where does it all lead? Where does it end up? Is it possible to see far enough ahead?

Ray Kurzweil: We can describe certain aspects of it, but we can't actually imagine all the innovation.

We see very powerful trends, and we see that, for example, computer power has been growing exponentially, and people say, "Okay, but Moore's Law's going to come to an end." But in fact, what I've seen is that every time one paradigm comes to an end, we replace it with another one. We've done that already five times in computation. So we can, I think, anticipate enormous power in all of these technologies. What they'll be applied for? We can't imagine all of the innovation that will occur. But I see it as fundamentally a spiritual process. The word God is really an ideal of -- and has been described as -- infinite intelligence, creativity, beauty, love, all-knowing. And what we see in evolution is that intelligence, beauty, creativity grows at an exponential rate and gets greater and greater -- never becomes infinite but becomes enormously more powerful growing exponentially, therefore becoming closer or more God-like, but never really reaching that ideal. So it's moving in that spiritual direction. I see evolution as a spiritual process, and I see technology as the cutting edge of that process. It is the human species which is different from any other species in that other species use tools, but they don't evolve over generations the way ours do, taking the next step in evolution by merging with our technology and continuing to grow in this sort of exponentially accelerating condition.

The New York Times reviewed your book in last weekend's paper. They put it like this: "How seriously are we to take all of this breathless compu-hype? Will the 21st century really see machines acquire mentality?"

Ray Kurzweil: Well, that's The New York Times review of my book!

That particular writer I think is dealing with the issue of consciousness, which is a supremely subtle, slippery issue, ultimately the most important issue. I don't think it's a scientific issue, and in saying that, I don't mean to dismiss it. I really mean to say that there's room for -- or importance to -- fields of philosophy and religion that go beyond science, that really do deal with these issues of who is conscious, and a deep respect for consciousness as sort of the ultimate reality. Western thinking has been that there's all this swirling matter and it finally evolves to be complex enough and you get entities that are conscious. Whereas, at the risk of oversimplification, Eastern and Buddhist ways of thinking very often start with the premise that consciousness is the ultimate reality and that consciousness basically creates the world of energy and matter in our thoughts. We think things and those thoughts then manifest themselves in what we consider to be physical reality. And I think in fields such as quantum mechanics, we're finding there's a blend of both, and that there's some interaction that's deeply mysterious between consciousness and the material world.

I don't think there's any such thing as a consciousness detector. I mean, I think we will have machines that have the complexity, richness, and subtlety of human behavior. I mean, right now it's very easy to dismiss machines because they're still a million times simpler than human beings, and they don't have all the endearing qualities. If you have a virtual character that claims to be conscious and have feelings, we so quickly reach the limits of their performance -- and they lack the subtle cues that we associate with really having consciousness and emotion -- then it's not an effective impression. But we will achieve machines in a few decades that have the complexity and richness of human thinking, in many ways they'll be derivative of human thinking or even copies of human thinking in a different medium, and they'll have the richness of behavior. And when they claim to be having feelings and being conscious, people will believe them. If we don't believe them, they'll get mad at us. But there will be philosophers that come along and say, "Yes, that entity is a really great simulation of a human and it really is very convincing, but it doesn't squirt neurotransmitters so it can't be conscious." And there's no way to really settle that argument. There's no machine you can put it in and a light will go on that, yes, this entity is conscious. It becomes fundamentally a deeply philosophical issue. But I think the reality will be that we will accept the consciousness of these entities, and there won't be a clear distinction. We're going to have human minds, brains that have non-biological thinking processes melded with biological ones. We'll have fully non-biological thinking processes that seem very human-like because they're derived from human thinking, and there's going to be many different subtle ways of interacting, of the two worlds interacting, and there's not going to be a clear distinction between human and machine.

How is that going to affect our lives?

Ray Kurzweil: I think it'll feel very natural when we get there.

If you described today's world to people a hundred years ago, they would find many things we talk about totally mystifying, even people from ten years ago. But we don't wake up suddenly in the year 2040. We get there a day at a time, and it's actually interesting how quickly we adjust to new developments that seem remarkable. We kind of hear about them before they happen. Then when they happen, they don't really happen because they don't quite work yet. Then they start working a little bit better. By the time they work well, it's not new anymore because we've been hearing about it for many years. And we kind of get used to these gradually evolving changes. We have a great deal of plasticity as a species in what we can accept. So we get there a step at a time, and each increment makes sense as it happens. I think it'll be part of everyday reality.

Are there any limits to what a machine is going to be able to do?

Ray Kurzweil: No.

I think once a machine achieves a human level of intelligence, it'll combine it with some natural advantages that machines have. Machines can share their knowledge. My knowledge of a subject is a pattern of energy and matter, a pattern of internal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations. I can't take that pattern and download it to your brain. I can maybe take months to explain something, and you can explain things to me, but it's a very slow process. But machines can instantly share these patterns, and they're ultimately much faster. We use this chemical information processing that's ten million times slower than electronic circuits, and we can't remember things very precisely. So a machine will be able -- once it actually achieves some of the subtlety of human intelligence based on our chaotic, massively parallel thinking processes -- it'll be able to combine that with some of these natural advantages of machines, machine intelligence. And machines will continue to evolve exponentially.

Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, in competing against the IBM chess computer, emphatically said, "The computer might beat me in a game, but the computer will never beat me in a match, in a series of games." In other words, the computer will never be able to achieve the kind of creativity and instinctive responses of the human brain. He said he would never lose a match with a computer.

Ray Kurzweil: Well, he did lose a match.

He lost a game.

Ray Kurzweil: No, it was a series of games. He lost a match. It was a standard tournament match.

The word "never" is also subject to the law of accelerating returns. It used to be when people said things will never happen, it actually took 40 or 50 years before they happened. Now when people say things will never happen, we see them in five or ten years. So it's also an accelerating process, and Deep Blue used only one narrow technique in artificial intelligence, which is recursive search, just brute force of looking at all the different possible moves and then counter-moves and building up this tree. There's a few other tricks to it, but it was not using pattern recognition, which is a sort of chaotic, highly parallel, self-organizing process we have in the brain. That's actually my field, and that's not exclusively a human province. We can create machines built on those same principles, and they'll have some of the same properties. They won't be perfect, but they'll be able to see insights and recognize patterns that are extremely subtle. Once we combine that kind of thinking with some of the logical analysis that computers have always been very good at, that'll be a very powerful combination. Kasparov is commenting on this one machine that he encountered and then thinking that that's never going to change. "Well, that machine may be able to play chess but really can't talk about chess and doesn't really understand the context of chess in the historical level." But that doesn't mean that no machine ever will.

You grew up in Queens, New York. What was it like growing up there?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, I first grew up in kind of an urban area, Jackson Heights, and then we moved to a more suburban area. I went to a public high school, although actually there was a very good science program there. We had more Westinghouse winners than any other high school in the country, actually.

How would you describe yourself as a kid growing up?

Ray Kurzweil: Curious.

I always had a project I was working on. I always had one good friend. I had some intense friendships. I wasn't gregarious, but I wasn't a classical nerd, either. I knew I wanted to be a scientist from age five, but I actually didn't understand what a scientist was. What I really wanted to do was be an inventor. I liked creating things, some kind of magic. You put materials together and something happens that goes beyond what you put into it if you get the combination just right.

What attracted you to science at age five?

Ray Kurzweil: For some reason I decided I wanted to build a rocket ship, and it was amazing to me that you could put these ordinary materials together and then take a trip to another world. It didn't work, so I learned that lesson, but I kept at it. I discovered the computer at age 12, and that did bring me to other worlds, but more subjective worlds.

Were you reading Buck Rogers in the 25th Century? Why do you think you were interested in this at such a young age?

Ray Kurzweil: There was a fascination with science then that emerged. This was the 1950s. My parents found it surprising. They were both artists, but they encouraged it because science was the thing to do. My father was a musician. He always felt actually I would combine computers and music, because he felt there was a natural affinity, and he actually had an interest in the 1960s in some of the early synthesizer work. My mother was, and still is, a visual artist. But I had a lot of scientists in my family, actually. My grandmother was, I believe, the first woman in Europe to get a Ph.D. in chemistry, and she lectured in Europe, and she also ran a school for girls. So I came from an intellectual family.

Did you have siblings? Brothers and sisters?

Ray Kurzweil: Yeah, one sister. She's six years younger, and she's an accountant in Santa Barbara now.

Were you a good big brother?

Ray Kurzweil: I hope so. I'm seeing her tomorrow, actually.

As a kid, what did you do besides think about inventing something? What were you and your friends interested in?

Ray Kurzweil: Well, aside from that, it's pretty typical. There was this little island in the middle of our street, an island of untamed bushes where we would create little fantasy worlds. I liked to create different worlds.

Did that come from reading? Was there someone early in your life who inspired you to think such things?

Ray Kurzweil: I don't know about that. I did like reading stories, Rudyard Kipling and some science fiction I remember as a child.

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

Ray Kurzweil: There were some high school teachers.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We've read that while you were a sophomore at MIT you came up with another invention. Can you tell us about that?

Ray Kurzweil: That was my first business. We matched up high school students to colleges by computer. We built this database with several millions of pieces of information about the several thousand colleges. Students would fill out a 300-question questionnaire, and we would match them up. Not tell them where to go, but tell them, "Okay, here's 15 or 20 schools that you ought to narrow your search down to, that these are really appropriate for you to research further."

What inspired you to do that?

Ray Kurzweil: Just having been through the process of applying to college, I saw it as a need. So I could feel the need for that kind of information. I saw among my fellow students how difficult a process that was. Today, there's much better information available with the Web. You can visit colleges on the Web. There's just much better information. Back then, none of that existed, and it really was very difficult to find out about what schools matched your interests and were appropriate. I just saw lots of students struggling with that and making the wrong decisions, and felt that a computer could really be a proper tool for making that connection, providing a little bit of intelligence based on this information, and it really did work quite well. We sold it to Harcourt Brace and World, now Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the New York publishing company.

At what point did school become interesting to you? You said you considered it an obstacle when you were a kid. Did it become a more interesting challenge at some point?

Ray Kurzweil: I think school was always just an environment. When I got to MIT, that was a more satisfying environment, in that you had some really stimulating professors, and students with whom I could share ideas, and a few of my best friends still stem from that early college period. You had tremendous resources and you had a flux of ideas, and you had other people who were excited with ideas and pursuing them, and it wasn't so unusual to do that. So it was a supportive environment. Courses specifically, they were interesting, but I felt I could learn as well on my own as I could in a course, and courses were useful instruction material. There weren't actually that many computer courses when I entered MIT. There were only eight or nine of them, so I took them my first year, year-and-a-half, and then I majored in literature. They didn't have any more computer courses.

There are a lot of presumably bright kids roaming these halls.

Ray Kurzweil: Yeah, definitely. I've been talking to them.

Is the school environment harder for young men or women who exceed the intellectual expectations for people their age?

Ray Kurzweil: That's hard to say. There were some sort of anti-intellectual currents that one had to deal with when I was growing up. My kids have gone to private schools, so they haven't encountered that.

Did you have a hard time because you were smart?

Ray Kurzweil: I struggled socially in that. For one thing, I didn't have time to hang out in front of the corner drugstore. On the other hand, I always did manage to find other kids who I could share ideas with and felt compatible with. My social skills were adequate. I never felt totally out in left field.

Did you feel different from the other kids?

Ray Kurzweil: Sometimes I felt different in that I always felt I had this mission, from when I was young. So when I saw other kids struggling, and they didn't really know what they wanted to do, I didn't look down at that, but I really felt that was different. I knew what my direction was. Some people are talented in many things, or their interests are more spread out. They're not sure how to apply their skills, and I kind of knew what my mission was.

We'd like to understand where this sense of mission came from. Is it possible to explain how you had this sense of mission at such a young age?

Ray Kurzweil: I don't know. My father was very talented, got a lot of recognition as a really brilliant musician, but was very busy, and they struggled financially. They were refugees, having fled Hitler and World War II. I was on my own a lot, I think, at a very young age, even before five. I remember building a go-kart when I was three or four years old. I had to find ways to occupy myself with ideas. I'm not sure I fully understand the genesis of it. I just know that I've been that way.

Do you think you were affected, consciously or unconsciously, by your parents' experience of having to flee the Nazis and come to this country?

Ray Kurzweil: There's a sense of defiance in me, and if I have confidence in a set of ideas, to be resolute in that, to be very questioning of assumptions. I'm always questioning, really take nothing for granted. A lot of common wisdom, even what people think are the wisdoms beyond a common wisdom, I'm constantly questioning my own assumptions and looking for some deeper understanding or more comprehensive framework, and a feeling that applying human thought can overcome any obstacle, and a real confidence in that. It can take a lot of effort, but there's a confidence in the power of just applying your attention to any kind of problem, from an interpersonal issue to solving some of humankind's major challenges. Not just myself, but I believe that our species has that power.

There are a lot of people in this world who are smart, who have potential, who have gifts, talent, but they don't necessarily succeed. How do you explain your success at doing what you do, where others have failed?

Ray Kurzweil: Talent is really just one prerequisite to success. There's a lot of other factors. Certainly luck had something to do with it, and a lot of factors beyond our own efforts, in terms of having the right types of support and opportunities, and also picking the right problem. Einstein, after a few successes, picked a problem that we now know he was destined to fail at. So brilliantly pursuing a problem that you can't succeed in is -- it's pick the right problems at the right time. But most importantly, I think it's persistence, and we see again and again, whether it's in the political sphere or science, people who are really relentless about their mission -- and can see the end result even more real than what we consider concrete reality, and follow that mission with great confidence -- succeed. Very often people give up too quickly. They meet a few obstacles and think, "Oh well, that didn't work." But that confidence doesn't come from just sort of mindlessly plowing ahead. It really comes from being able to envision a reality that doesn't exist and seeing the benefit of it. So imagination is important.

In this process of your work, you must have suffered detours, setbacks, frustrations, disappointments. It's not a straight line, is it?

Ray Kurzweil: Sure, it's not a straight line.

If I sort of commit myself to a particular project or vision, I can't recall ever really dropping any of those commitments. It's kind of a profound commitment I make with myself to see something through. That doesn't mean that there won't be tactical shifts and certain specific little projects might get dropped. But I do ultimately try to see these projects through, and it's kind of a great adventure. You don't know what you're going to find. Probably the biggest thing I struggle with is just the sort of triage of these ideas, because I haven't really accelerated my own thinking process and those of my colleagues sufficiently yet that we can pursue all of the exciting ideas that come our way. So that's one reason I'm interested in writing about other people's work, because I can then get excited about the accomplishments of others and see other people who are pursuing exciting ideas and don't feel that I necessarily have to be involved in everything myself. I can share in them by being a student of technology.

How do you deal with people who say your thinking is too far out? How do you deal with that kind of criticism?

Ray Kurzweil: It doesn't really bother me. I've been thinking about these ideas for decades. They're not just idle thoughts I've pulled out of the air. There's a whole theory behind them, and sometimes people will just look at one aspect. I think very often the biggest issue that will cause someone to reject something I've said is that they're not really internalizing and realizing the implications of the acceleration of technical progress. They say, "Well, that's going to take hundreds of years," not realizing that we're going to see hundreds of years of progress in decades because of this acceleration. They don't really incorporate it into their thinking. I'm not saying I have a perfect crystal ball. Ideas have come along that caused me to readjust my thinking.

Criticism ultimately is more useful than praise. I mean, praise is nice but it doesn't give you the ingredients to improve your thinking. Even if there's a criticism that I don't accept, I'll think about, "Okay, how does one deal with that criticism? How do you address it?" And that may lead to some other useful ideas. Or there may be some validity to a criticism that will also cause an improvement or some increment of my thinking about an issue. So criticism is really quite useful. We do that actually in our projects as a methodology, not just sit around and praise ourselves, but "What could be improved? What's wrong with this?" Technology never emerges perfect. It's always a glass half-full. So we try to fill it more. Artificial intelligence has been called the field of computer science dealing with problems that haven't been solved yet. Every time we solve a problem, people go, "Oh well, yeah, that was really easy to begin with, and now we understand, and it's lost its mystery, and well, computers still can't X, Y, Z..." And that will always be the case until computers fully reach human intelligence. By that time, this issue will be put to bed. But until that time, people are always going to be pointing out something it doesn't do. All right, so it does play chess. All right, so it can guide cruise missiles. All right, it does do medical diagnoses. All right, it can predict financial markets better than human analysts. But it still can't tell the difference between a dog and a cat. Oh, there's a new system that can do that. Oh, well all right, it can't deal with human language and give us a synopsis of a plot of a movie yet. When that happens, we'll find some other things computers can't do. But criticism is useful, to really point the direction how we can improve our thinking.

Have you ever doubted your ability to do what you've set out to do?

Ray Kurzweil: Not really. I hope that doesn't sound arrogant. That's just a personal commitment to a personal program and to a set of ideas. I think if that kind of confidence were to lead someone to be arrogant, to doggedly pursue the wrong ideas, I think that would be unfortunate. I do try to listen to criticism, not with the idea that criticism is necessarily wrong, but to feel there is value in some goals that I've set, and to try to stay on that course. To really keep an open mind. You know, any of the ideas that I have, or that others have, and a lot of the common wisdom that we all share, is very often found to be wrong. So keep questioning everything.

How do you measure success, achievement?

Ray Kurzweil: I think there are different ways. Very often we don't understand the significance of something until generations after the person has departed us. But I measure it in terms of impact on people's lives, and we can certainly see that in technology. I think technology is a double-edged sword. I think there are dangers. There's a whole issue there. But...

I think, on balance, we have really raised our species' ability. I really see it as part of evolution. The sort of evolution of our own cultural knowledge and science and technology is part of the evolutionary process on this planet, and we have overcome great suffering if you compare our lives to the lives of most humanity several hundred years ago. We live longer. Many more people can live fulfilling lives and pursue careers that give them gratification. That wasn't true of most humanity centuries ago, and it's really science and technology that enables us to do that. So we can measure this in concrete ways, seeing the impact these things have on people's lives. But it's true also cultural expressions -- music -- moves us, as do all the arts, and gives us greater insight into the human condition. So at different levels of our existence, these different intellectual expressions from art to science to technology have a direct impact on human beings.

Are you confident that we can use science and technology to our benefit rather than to our detriment?

Ray Kurzweil: I think technology's always been a double-edged sword. I mean it's power, and it's power to advance all of humankind's varied objectives. Certainly the destructiveness of human conflict has been amplified by human technology, and we've seen that in the 20th century. I think, on balance, the benefits outweigh the dangers and the actual destruction that the technology has made possible. And I think confidence is probably the wrong word. I'm hopeful that that will be the case in the 21st century. The story of the 21st century hasn't been written yet, and we have much more powerful technologies that will emerge in the next century, and the opportunity to really overcome age-old problems, but also exacerbate our complex and destructive potential as well. So I think the moral dimension and the ethical issues are also very important in that regard, and that's something that concerns me as well.

Do you think about these things?

Ray Kurzweil: Oh definitely. I write about them.

I think we have no choice but to proceed. I mean, there have been calls recently -- and there have, actually, ever since the Luddite movement emerged in the English textile industry two centuries ago -- calls for relinquishing technology that is just too dangerous. I think we have no choice, because there's a great economic imperative to move forward, and it's a road paved with gold, and we have received tremendous benefit from technology. Short of creating a totalitarian system that would ban any form of economic incentive, we're going to be advancing technology. I think the right way to deal with it is to be very concerned with the ethical dimension and with the application of technology, and I think it's not something that's done in one field of technology ethics. I think it's something that everybody, and not just the technologist, needs to be actively concerned with, because we have the power to actually create our future world, very literally, including really redesigning our bodies and brains and our experiences at very profound levels. So it's something that everybody needs to understand, and contribute to that dialogue so that we do advance our human values. Not that we have a consensus on what those are, but I think there is, at least at some levels, emerging consensus on what human values are.

What do you say to young people, such as students here at the Academy, who ask you for advice on how to achieve something with their lives?

Ray Kurzweil: To an individual, I would say to follow your passion, because the greatest value we have is ideas and knowledge. And new knowledge, which is really, I think, the purpose of evolution and the purpose of the human civilization, comes from passion. It's not a matter of learning dry formulas. Creating something new has to come from some passion, and passionate devotion to an idea. So if you're passionate about music or graphic arts or writing or science and technology, that's what you should pursue. That's how you will contribute. And we can clearly see in the era of the Internet that, for example, graphic arts have suddenly become enormously valuable. All of the different ways of expressing ourselves have tremendous value. There's tremendous thirst for content of all kinds on the Internet, and that's going to deepen as the technology gets more sophisticated. So follow your passion, and if you become committed to an idea, then go with it. And secondly, question all assumptions. Not to the point of inaction, I mean, we have to make certain assumptions just to get up in the morning and go through the day, but reserve part of your thinking for questioning the common wisdom. In every sphere, even outside of your area of expertise, there's always a deeper wisdom if we can break through certain assumptions.

And something I would say in general is to appreciate what a remarkable time lies ahead.

One of the things that's actually growing exponentially is human life span, and I've got charts that show that. We're actually adding, today, 120 days every year to human longevity. In the 19th century it was only a couple of weeks a year. Now we're adding a third of a year a year, and within ten years it's actually going to be adding more than a year every year. And most of these -- the vast majority of these young people here -- will see the 22nd century. By that time we will have even other things, so they'll see the 23rd century. And that century, this 21st century, will be a thousand times more profound and see a thousand times more change than the 20th century. And that was pretty significant. They can contribute to that, and there's going to be no shortage of opportunity to be a player in this sort of next stage of evolution.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

Ray Kurzweil: The American Dream is pushing beyond our boundaries and to new frontiers. Some of those new frontiers centuries ago were conquering new landmasses, but now our frontiers are intellectual. And in the area of knowledge, and in all of our cultural and scientific endeavors, there's a respect for taking risks. There's a tolerance and even a respect for failure -- which some other cultures have some difficulty with -- for experimenting, and for learning, and the trial and error that goes with that. A respect for the individual, and that we're all different, and all have a contribution to make in respect for diversity and tolerance of differences. Even though we see a lot of prejudice and intolerance, our ideals reflect a tolerance for diversity, and I think we'll see greater diversity in the century ahead. So that's what the American ideal -- the American Dream -- means, and I think it's a perfect set of ideals and philosophies for this new era.

Thank you.

Ray Kurzweil: My pleasure.