Raymond Kurzweil was born on the 12th February 1948, in Queens, New York City USA, and is a computer scientist, inventor, futurist and author, best known to the world for improving technology in areas such as text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition, optical character recognition (OCR), and other related fields.
Have you ever wondered how rich Ray Kurzweil is, as of late 2016? According to authoritative sources, it has been estimated that Ray`s net worth is as high as $27 million, an amount earned through his successful scientific career, including authoring a number of books – “The Age of Intelligent Machines” (1990), “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” (2004), among others, the sales of which have also added to his net worth.
Ray Kurzweil Net Worth $27 Million
Ray is the son of Jewish parents, but secular, and who escaped from Austria to USA just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Since an early age, Ray was making up new things from parts of his various toys and old electronic gadgets. Little by little his skills improved, and when he was seven or eight years old he constructed a robotic puppet theater. In his teens Ray became interested in computers, and soon started building computing devices and statistical programs. While in high school Ray wrote his first computer program, which was able to analyze sound of classical composers and then make a song of its own based on the sounds it received; he won first prize at the International Science Fair for his invention. After high school, Ray enrolled at MIT, from which he graduated with a BSc degree in computer science and literature. During his college days, Ray continued to progress, and in his second year created the program Select College Consulting Program, which was used to compare thousands of different categories about colleges and students, and his answers on a college application adapted as a questionnaire. Thanks to the success of the program he soon sold it to Harcourt, Brace & World for $100,000, which only increased his net worth. Since then, his career has gone only upwards, and so has his net worth.
Ray has started several companies throughout his successful career, including Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc, which was responsible for developing one of the first omni-font optical character recognition systems, then Kurzweil Music Systems, which made some of the most popular synthesizers including Kurzweil K250, and was later sold as a whole company to Young Chang, a South Korean manufacturer of musical instruments. His next venture was Kurzweil Applied Intelligence or KAI, which the developed speech recognition program, Kurzweil Educational Systems, which saw the light of day in 1996, and was founded with the goal of developing a new pattern recognition program for children with disabilities such as dyslexia, blindness and other disabilities. He also started several other companies, such as Medical Learning Company, and a website KurzweilCyberArt.com, among many others, which successes only increased his net worth.
Most recently, Ray was hired by Google co-founder Larry Page, “to bring natural language understanding to Google”.
Thanks to his outstanding career, Ray has received numerous prestigious awards, including Dickson Prize in Science in 1994, National Medal of Technology in 1999, Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000, and the Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award among many others.
Regarding his personal life, Ray has been married to Sonya Rosenwald Fenster since 1975 and the couple has two children. Ray is a part of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which is a cryonics company, and on his death he is to be perfused with cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, in the hope that future technology will allow him to be revived and his tissue repaired.
Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by [a transformation] process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. We each have a fat insulin receptor gene that says, 'Hold on to every calorie'. That was a good idea 10,000 years ago when you worked all day to get a few calories. There were no refrigerators, so you stored them in your fat cells. I would like to tell my fat insulin receptor gene, 'You don't need to do that anymore', and indeed that was done at the Joslin Diabetes Center. They turned off this gene and the lab mice ate ravenously and remained slim. They didn't get diabetes; they didn't get heart disease. They lived 20 percent longer.
2
All my measurements are in ideal ranges. I scan my arteries to see if I have plaque buildup, and I have no antherosclerosis. I come out younger on biological aging tests. So far, so good. But this program is not designed to last a very long time. [It] is what we call bridge one. The goal is to get to bridge two: the biotechnology revolution, where we can reprogram biology away from disease.. Bridge three is to go beyond biology to the nanotechnology revolution. At that point we can have little robots, sometimes called 'nanobots', that augment your immune system . We can create an immune system that recognizes all disease and .. could be programmed to deal with new pathogens.
3
People say, 'I don't want to live like a typical 95-year-old for hundreds of years'. But the goal is not just to extend life. The idea is to stay healthy and vital and not only to have life extension but life expansion.
4
We are increasing the intelligence of our civilization, and we're doing so exponentially. Technology is part of our civilization. Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see a lot of that in science fiction. But the machines we're inventing are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our reach, One thousand years ago, I couldn't reach fruit at a higher branch, so I created a tool to increase my reach. No other species does that.
5
It is only the rich that afford [new technologies] at an early point, when they don't work. By the time they work a little bit, they're affordable. By the time they work really well, they're almost free. And that will be true of these health technologies. Look at AIDS drugs - twenty years ago they were $30,000 per patient per year, Today they're [more] effective and they're $80 per patient per year.
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Fact
1
Founder of Kurzweil Technologies.
2
Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first device to transform print into computer-spoken words.
3
Kurzweil is a pioneer in the field of human-computer interfacing, and has also developed music synthesizers that successfully re-create the sound of acoustic instruments.
Director
Title
Year
Status
Character
The Singularity Is Near
2010
Documentary co-director
Producer
Title
Year
Status
Character
The Singularity Is Near
2010
Documentary producer
Thanks
Title
Year
Status
Character
Circuit
2001
additional thanks: Kurzweil Technologies
Self
Title
Year
Status
Character
The University
2016
Documentary
Himself - Interviewee (as Ray Kurzweil)
Dans les limbes
2015
Documentary
Himself
Autopilots
2013
Documentary
Himself
Steve Aoki-Singularity
2013
Short
Himself
Terms and Conditions May Apply
2013
Documentary
Himself - Futurist & Inventor
Google and the World Brain
2013
Documentary
Himself - Inventor of the Scanner, Futurologist (as Ray Kurzweil)
The Singularity
2012
Documentary
Un monde sans humains?
2012
TV Movie documentary
Welcome to the Machine
2012
Video documentary
Himself
Weird or What?
2011
TV Series documentary
Himself - Author & Inventor
Transcendent Man: Live with Ray Kurzweil
2011
TV Movie documentary
Himself
Real Time with Bill Maher
2011
TV Series
Himself
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
2011
TV Series
Himself
The Colbert Report
2011
TV Series
Himself - Futurist
Charlie Rose
2005-2011
TV Series
Himself - Guest / Himself
Nova ScienceNow
2011
TV Series documentary
Himself - Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.
Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia
2010
Documentary
Himself
The Singularity Is Near
2010
Documentary
Himself
Plug & Pray
2010
Documentary
Himself - Author
Roadtrip Nation
2009
TV Series documentary
Himself
Transcendent Man
2009
Documentary
Himself
How to Live Forever
2009
Documentary
Himself
Life Extended
2009
Documentary
Himself
NextWorld
2009
TV Series documentary
Himself
Visions of the Future
2007
TV Series documentary
Himself
The Real Superhumans and the Quest for the Future Fantastic
2007
TV Movie documentary
Himself
The Universe
2007
TV Series documentary
Himself - Author, 'The Singulrity is Near'
Horizon
2004-2006
TV Series documentary
Himself
The Daily Show
2006
TV Series
Himself
Technocalyps
2006
Documentary
Himself - Futurist
The Riddle of Einstein's Brain
2005
TV Movie documentary
Himself - Author (as Ray Kurzweil)
Modern Marvels
2004
TV Series documentary
Himself - Author, Fantastic Voyage
The Hard Problem: The Science Behind the Fiction
2004
Video documentary
Himself
Sentient Machines: Robotic Behavior
2004
Video documentary short
Himself
2001: HAL's Legacy
2001
TV Movie documentary
Himself
Great Books
2000
TV Series documentary
Himself
The Revenge of the Dead Indians
1993
Documentary
Himself
Giving Machines Some Thought
1986
Documentary
Himself
I've Got a Secret
1965
TV Series
Himself - Contestant
Archive Footage
Title
Year
Status
Character
What Makes Us Clever? A Horizon Guide to Intelligence
2011
TV Movie documentary
Himself
Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement
2007
Video documentary
Himself
Known for movies
Plug & Pray (2010) as Himself - Author
The Singularity Is Near (2010) as Director
Terms and Conditions May Apply (2013) as Himself - Futurist & Inventor
The Real Superhumans and the Quest for the Future Fantastic (2007) as Himself