Ray Kurzweil (1948-), inventor, entrepreneur, futurologist and writer, is an emblematic figure of transhumanism. (1) R. Kurzweil’s parents are among the many educated Europeans who emigrated to the United States because of the Second World War. His father was a music director.
His wife is a clinical psychologist and teaches at Harvard Medical School.
Kurzweil claims that it was at the age of five that he decided to become an inventor. He describes having built up a collection of construction toy components and electronic gadgets from the neighbourhood at a very young age: « I had the idea that if I could put these elements in the right way, I could solve any problem », and was very early fascinated by science fiction. He also says he discovered the computer at the age of twelve, and recalls that at that time there were, according to him, only a dozen computers in all of New York, where he lived. One of his uncles, an engineer, introduced him to programming and the basics of computer science (2). At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first computer program. Two years later, he was invited to a television show and presented a piano piece composed on software he had developed and a computer he had built. At the age of eighteen, he won a first prize at a competition, which allowed him to be congratulated by President Lyndon Johnson at the White House. During his career, he was also received by Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Obama, respectively, for various tributes.
While still in high school, he visited Mr. Minsky and studied with him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1968, he created a company in which he invented software to direct graduate students to the school that would best suit them. A little later, he sold this company for the plump sum for the time of a hundred thousand dollars. In 1974 he founded « Kurzweil computer products inc. » and developed software capable of recognizing written texts in any format. He took a new step by creating a machine for the blind people, that could read written texts aloud (3).
Ray Kurzweil and his « Reading machine »
This machine was also sold and marketed in 1978 to authenticate signatures on computerized documents. After selling his company again, he became a consultant and followed up his machines with the various buyers until 1995.
Afterwards, he became interested in electronic music and, after meeting Stevie Wonder in 1982, he began to create synthesizers that could reproduce the sounds of the original instruments as closely as possible. He took the opportunity to create a new company, « Kurzweil music system », thanks to the invention, in 1984, of the « K 250 », a high-performance synthesizer with which a single user could compose and play an entire orchestral piece. Once again, in 1990, he sold to a Korean company.
Ray Kurzweil and Stevie Wonder
In parallel with his synthesizer business, he also created an artificial intelligence application company « KAI » (Kurzweil Applied Intelligence) to develop one of the first speech recognition systems, still approximate, but already marketable, from 1987. During the 1990s, he founded the Medical Learning Company, a company for medical studies, including software for medical students or doctors, interactive with computer-simulated patients. In 1996, he also set up the « Kurzweil educational systems » to use digital technology to help patients with visual problems, dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at school. He created, among other things, the site « KurzweilCyberArt.com », for visual arts creation, but also to compose poems automatically, which leaves a little perplexing… In 1999, he set up an investment fund called « FatKat ». In 1999, in his book « The Age of the Mind Machines », he predicted that computers would one day be better than the most prominent financial specialists to make the best decisions about profitable investments. Also in 1999, he was awarded the National Medal for Innovation and Technology, a high scientific award in the United States.
At the end of 2012, R. Kurzweil was hired by Google to work on new projects including learning machines, with the ambition of making « natural » languages understandable by the Google search engine.
This brief overview of the career of entrepreneur and inventor, approved by the person concerned, is enough to win the admiration of many. But the character is more complex than that and leaves, in some respects, doubtful… Let us first consider that in a site that seems to have been created by him (4), on the biography page, the first sentences are as follows: « Ray Kurzweil was described as « the last genius » by the Wall Street newspaper and as « the ultimate thinking machine » by Forbes magazine, ranked eighth among the entrepreneurs of the United States, and who proclaimed him worthy heir to Thomas Edison. (The media) PBS named him one of the sixteen revolutionaries who made America (…) He is considered one of the best inventors, thinkers and futurists in the world, with a record of predictions made over the past thirty years. « The rest of this presentation reflects this short passage. Alongside the undeniable qualities of the researcher, we therefore see the appearance of an undeniable oversized ego. For R. Kurzweil, everything is possible and there seems to be no limit to the potential of his mind. It is probably this refusal of limits coupled with the conviction of being an exceptional man that led him to enroll in the « Alcor Foundation for the Extension of Life », a company currently (2017) run by Max More (1964-), a figure of transhumanism, who proposes either the cryonization (very low temperature conservation) of the entire body for two hundred thousand dollars (plus ten thousand if one is not a North American), or, for a lower cost, only the brain. In other words, when he is declared dead, Kurzweil’s idea is to be infused with « cryoprotectors », vitrified in liquid nitrogen and stored until technological advances can bring him back to life. To complete the picture, it is also worth mentioning a very particular relationship between R. Kurzweil and his health: From the age of 35, when he was discovered to be impaired by glucose intolerance and the first signs of type 2 diabetes, like his father, he met a doctor whose unconventional prescriptions he shared and implemented: daily consumption of hundreds of supplements in the form of pills, chemical treatment by IV, consumption of red wine and others.
Thus R. Kurzweil ingested « two hundred and fifty supplements, eight to ten glasses of alkaline water and ten cups of green tea » per day and consumed a certain number of glasses of wine per week in order to « reprogram his biochemistry » (5). Later it decreased to 150 dietary supplements in the form of pills (6). He has written several books on health, the main idea of the first is that our diet should not contain more than 10% fat. The title of the second is: « Fantastic Journey: Living long enough to live forever. »
Ray Kurzweil does sport in his own way
These elements become clearer when we know that R. Kurzweil, was deeply affected by the sudden death of his father from a heart attack at the age of 58. Upset, R. Kurzweil has since made a fixation on death, which will become enemy number one. Between denial and denial of his father’s death, he still keeps hundreds of boxes filled with various documents on his father, in the hope of one day bringing him back to life thanks to artificial intelligence. « I have all his letters, and even his electricity bills, » he told the Financial Times. There are 8 mm films, photographs, many vinyl records of his music. The idea is to create an avatar from all this information, to recreate my father’s personality. Let those who remember him not be able to distinguish him from the real Fredric Kurzweil. » (7)
Extending the prospective considerations of some authors of the sixties and following on the unexploited potential of the human brain, as attested for example by the books « Neurological » (1976) and « Your brain is god » (1988) of Timothy Leary (1920-1996), professor of psychology and important contester of the society of that time, R. Kurzweil is also very interested in the possible developments of our brains, but as much T. Leary was counting on the use of drugs, especially LSD, to create a new society, as much as R. Kurzweil, a few decades later, is relying mainly on technology to achieve this. He considers that the latter will soon make it possible to create synthetic neocortexes based on the same principles as human brains and that these synthetic neocortexes can serve as an extension of the human brain. He estimates that the human brain has about three hundred million pattern recognizers and suggests that, thanks to these artificial technological extensions, we should go from three hundred million to one billion….
Kurzweil, like other transhumanists, stressed the very serious potential dangers of the future uses of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. For example, he fears a loss of control in the multiplication of some nanoparticles or the use of nanotechnologies for terrorist purposes. However, he adopts a resolutely offensive attitude, considering that in any case the current movement cannot be stopped because, if we wanted to do so, we would have to install a totalitarianism that would relegate these dangerous uses of technologies to an underground circulation, beyond the knowledge of the responsible scientists. In order not to deprive ourselves of the many advantages and profits associated with new technologies, he therefore suggests that we move ever further forward so that these responsible scientists develop ever more defensive technologies in the face of destructive technologies. This point of view seems to me to be highly questionable.
In his 1999 book « The Age of the Machines of the Mind », R. Kurzweil proposes the « law of accelerated return », thus expressing that we would be in a moment of exponential acceleration of the evolution of different knowledge and operating systems. To name this turning point in human evolution that we are about to enter, it uses the expression « technological singularity », borrowed from the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge (1944-). This theory is based on a hypothetical generalization of Moore’s law, which assumes a doubling of computer computing power every eighteen months, an empirical law that seems to have been verified to date.
In 2006, in « The Singularity is near » « R. Kurzweil develops his vision of the future: the exponential progress of artificial intelligence, the arrival of technological singularity, the transfer of our mind to machines and, finally, eternal life. The first step on this long road: the use of nanorobots, DNA strands that will circulate in the body to heal us: « Over the next 25 years, we will overcome almost all diseases and aging, » says Kurzweil, convinced that we are on the verge of understanding the « software of life ».
In 2009, in collaboration with Google and in a research centre in NASA, R. Kurzweil announced the creation of « The University of Singularity ». In describing its objectives, it states that its mission is « to bring together, educate and inspire a set of leaders who will strive to understand and facilitate the development of the exponential advancement of expanding technologies and to apply, focus and guide the use of these tools to deepen humanity’s great challenges. « At each session of this university, about forty selected students participate by paying substantial fees for a nine-week work program.
If we summarize a little bit the quickly gathered elements of the known life of this man characteristic of a certain North American state of mind, we have a brilliant scientific mind that allows him a productive investment of calculable rationality, but this brilliant mind, nourished as it is laudable by imaginary utopias, plunges into a theoretical claim that is both debatable and dangerous. Eventually promoting an unbridled advance in the sciences of calculation, which is certainly not impossible, he adopts an attitude of rushing forward in this matter, an attitude that reinforces an illusion of all power and flatters an oversized ego. Its theoretical hypotheses, in particular on technological singularity, even if they start from a real observation of ongoing societal change, have only the veneer of scientificity, are eminently subjective and lead to ultimately elitist behaviour. These hypotheses ignore human subjectivity and therefore the irrational aspects of its functioning, in particular the existence of the Unconscious does not seem to touch it.
Finally, his conceptions concerning death, shared by a number of transhumanists, are strictly speaking delusional and devoid of any scientificity. While we can understand the trauma caused by the death of his father, this does not allow for a pseudo-technological delirium leading to an illusory belief in individual immortality for a few supposed elites. Under the guise of the best intentions in the world, we are witnessing individualistic selfishness pushed to its extremes. This speech seems extremely dangerous to me. First of all, because it is false: the reality is that we are not nearly through with dying. For the mind transformed into software, some « great » men have not waited for this to leave a significant and admirable trace in humanity by transmitting their precious thoughts to us, but they are obviously well and truly definitely dead, and it will continue to be so despite the cryogenic and very lucrative delusions of some of them. But in my opinion, it is above all dangerous because, at the level of living beings as a whole, we have a real and fundamental contemporary problem with death and this problem has to a very large extent been generated by a misuse of scientific knowledge, inter alia through technology and chemistry, because of which we have already killed a large part of the living organism that is the Earth, killed a very large part of the bird species and eighty percent of the known insect species (in Europe), slaughtered a very large number of wild animal species, started to slaughter a large part of the fish and poisoned the very large majority of the others with petroleum-based plastic products. Not to mention the way in which food animals are chosified and then slaughtered. Alongside the prodigious evolution of knowledge and the technology associated with it, it is surprising to see how much the apologists of technology, in sad echoes of their illusions of immortality, are in denial of the way in which its misuse currently asymptotically spreads death in a very worrying way.
Philippe Decan Nantes March 2019
Translated with deepl and with my apologies for eventual mistakes.
Notes :
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil , most of the following elements of this man’s life are directly inspired by this English version dedicated to him
(2) Interview by Ingrid Winckelgren in « Scientific American » in December 2012, on the website: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/streams-of-consciousness/on-tv-ray-kurzweil-tells-me-how-to-build-a-brain
(3) In 2005, he marketed a machine consisting of a digital camera and a handheld computer, a machine much smaller than the one designed some thirty years earlier, but still designed to help the blind to hear written texts.
(4) http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-biography
(5) The page of the quotation is unfortunately now not available on the Internet….
(6) In an interview with CNN in 2008, transcribed on: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/30/gb.01.html
(7) https://usbeketrica.com/article/ray-kurzweil-l-homme-qui-voulait-faire-revivre-son-papa Article published in issue 19 of Usbek & Rica. Author: Fabien Benoit.
(8)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=8XWXJDgbeP0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=ZreGeZ8w4qE
Philippe Decan 