The Sweeney Agency

About Ray Kurzweil - Expert on Innovation, Technology and Trends:

Ray Kurzweil has been described as the restless genius by the Wall Street Journal, and the ultimate thinking machine by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the rightful heir to Thomas Edison, and PBS included Ray as one of 16 revolutionaries who made America, along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He gives over fifty presentations around the world each year. In 2009 he was the keynote speaker in eight countries to influential groups including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Fortune Magazine, Procter & Gamble, Lockheed Martin, Credit Suisse, TED, and Edwards Lifesciences. Kurzweil often shapes his presentations towards innovation, health and medicine, education, business and investing, energy and disabilities and assistive technologies.

Kurzweil’s presentations are rich with content. His PowerPoint is a key tool in helping audiences visualize exponential trends and future scenarios with multiple up-to-date charts, graphs, animated images, and imbedded movies. He often engages in extended Q&A and on-stage dialogues following his lectures.

Kurzweil’s far reaching and optimistic views on the future of technology and its implications for society resonate with a wide range of audiences including top U.S. security officials, senior healthcare policy makers, private investors, scientists, business executives, and academic communities. His research and remarks focus on the exponential growth of technology (in his terms 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.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray 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. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office.

He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Ray has written six books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

What Ray Kurzweil Talks About:

Ray 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.

Innovation/Invention
Mr. Kurzweil has a presentation that describes a program for innovation, how to foster it in an organization, and how to bring inventions to market. He explains how the law of accelerating returns and the exponential growth of information technology are accelerating opportunities for innovation.

Disabilities and Assistive Technologies
Mr. 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 any handicaps.

Business/Investing
Mr. 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.

Education
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.

Health and Longevity
Mr. Kurzweil addresses many medical and health related audiences on the merger of science, technology, and medicine and its impact on the healthcare industry and human longevity. He explains that as medicine becomes an information technology it will be subject to the laws of accelerating returns, meaning that it will be a thousand times more powerful than today in ten years, and a million times more powerful in 20 years.