Engy › Who's who in longevity › Ray Kurzweil
At a glance
- Ray Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and futurist. He worked on optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech, speech recognition and electronic keyboards, and received the National Medal of Technology in 1999.
- Since 2012 he has worked at Google on language and artificial intelligence.
- In The Singularity Is Near (2005) and The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) he predicts that technology, AI and biotech will accelerate so fast that humans and machines merge.
- With physician Terry Grossman he wrote health books such as Fantastic Voyage (2004) and Transcend (2009), built on the idea of ‘bridges’ to ever better technology to live longer.
- He is one of the best-known voices of transhumanism and talks about ‘longevity escape velocity’: the point where life expectancy rises faster than time passes.
- For longevity, he is influential mainly as a thinker about the future, less as a source of proven health advice.
- Takeaway: read his work as an inspiring vision of the future, but base daily choices on what works in human studies.
Criticism and nuance
Speculative predictions, megadoses of supplements