Ray Kurweil

The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today [at Edge's REBOOTING CIVILIZATION II meeting on July 21, 2002] and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels. That's one role of intelligence. The theories that we heard on cosmology look at the evidence that exists in the world today to make inferences about what existed in the past so that we can develop models of how we got here.
RAY KURZWEIL was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, 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. He has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology. All of these technologies continue today as market leaders.