My Father the Inventor
Ray Kurzweil
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, futurist, author, and philosopher, born in Queens, New York, in 1948. Among his many inventions are the CCD flatbed scanner, the omni-font optical character recognition system, a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first high-quality music synthesizer. He was one of the first scientists to predict the rise of artificial intelligence and has written eleven books on the subject. He is currently a director of engineering for Google. He and his wife, Sonya, have two children, Ethan and Amy.
my father is famous for being a big thinker, motivated by a desire to create a better future. He’s also a provider, and is equally motivated to support his family. Though he now spends his days at the Googleplex, my father was inspired not by the tech gurus of Silicon Valley but by his artist parents and the legacy of his ancestors in Vienna (his great-grandmother started the first school in Europe that provided higher education for girls). From them he inherited a creative, entrepreneurial streak and a desire to do good.
His parents fled Vienna in 1938 and settled in Queens. His mother was an illustrator and a painter. His father was a classical pianist, conductor, and composer who made his living mostly through teaching; he passed away when my father was twenty-two. My grandfather struggled with the dueling responsibilities of honoring his passion and providing; a musician’s life in America was much less lucrative than it had been in the city he was forced to flee. From an early age, my dad was driven to help the family get by, first in small ways (with a paper route, for example) and later, when his inventions began earning him prizes and awards, in more significant ones.
My father likes to brag that he knew he wanted to be an inventor—to change the world—at age five. But I suspect that this ambition transcended an individual desire for achievement and recognition. I believe he wanted to liberate his parents from financial hardship so they could pursue their passions, as they encouraged him to pursue his.
At fifteen, he wrote his first computer program: pattern recognition software that analyzed and imitated the works of classical composers, a harbinger of the Kurzweil synthesizer he’d invent in the 1980s. He graduated from MIT in 1970 with degrees in Computer Science and Creative Writing. In 1974, he started Kurzweil Computer Products, the company responsible for the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which helps the blind and those with reading impairments. He sold KCP in 1980. My mother talks about this sale as a pivotal moment in our nuclear family history, one that finally gave us some financial stability.
In addition to being an innovative scientific thinker, my father has been a writer for as long as I’ve known him. When his first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, came out in 1990, I was four. It was a giant book, literally. The cover was blue and purple and green and printed with futuristic 3-D spheres. I knew not everyone wrote a book, and I was proud my father had. I remember paging through it in bed when I was maybe ten. I couldn’t understand the content. All I remember is the book’s heft.
The Age of Spiritual Machines came out when I was thirteen, old enough to comprehend some of it. This book catered to less technologically savvy readers; at the end of each chapter was a dialogue with a fictional character named Molly, and the reports from her voyages into the future read like stories. These fictional interludes really helped me see the future world my father imagined. I don’t remember if his vision surprised me. In my memory, his ideas are like his smell: they’ve just always been around.
My father deeply believes in his vision of the Singularity—that we’ll soon spend more and more time in an increasingly immersive virtual reality, that AI will transform human life beyond our current imagination. He thinks technology and intelligence can solve any human problem. But while in his books and lectures he espouses these beliefs eloquently and passionately, he doesn’t evangelize in private. He accepts other worldviews. Although ethnically Jewish, he grew up attending a Unitarian church. That faith’s credo is “Many paths to the truth.” I don’t think my father feels that religious observance is incompatible with his techno-optimism, and he accedes to my mother’s desire to participate in Jewish rituals. I think he sees many religious ideas as describing something like the Singularity, just with different words.
Publicly, my father is sometimes cast as an extremist: “Ray versus the Luddites.” He’s confident and can be stubborn, but he’s also a good listener. Privately, if you tell him something he hasn’t heard before, he’ll say, “That’s interesting,” and later incorporate the idea into his thinking. When he started at Google, he was honored to join an organization with such smart people who share his interests. Work has always been the most meaningful way for my father to connect with other people, including me.
Ray with Amy (thirteen years old) at her bat mitzvah in Boston, 1999
The first time I worked with my dad in a professional capacity was in 2000, when he gave a TED Talk demonstrating the potential of virtual reality. Using motion capture technology, he transformed himself into a rock star named “Ramona.” He’d move, and the avatar would move with him. The ludicrous transformation was meant to showcase a vision of a future in which you can be what you want to be. He needed backup and asked me to participate, since I, then fourteen years old, was a dancer and loved to perform. I was transformed in virtual reality into three big middle-aged men modeled on the organizer of the conference. (It was supposed to be funny.) The experience gave me a taste of the intensity of my father’s world: weeks of hours-long rehearsals in a heavy suit, a trip from Boston to California, a packed audience, a film crew following us the whole time. It was both exhausting and exciting.
My father is an idealist. He has modeled a professional life of passion, and he’s steered me away from compromising mine. He’s worked tirelessly so he can think and create on his own terms and with the people he’s loyal to. When I decided that I wanted to be a writer and an illustrator, to pick up the mantle of my grandparents and all the struggles the artistic life entails, I felt that the tenacity required for this path was in my blood. I’m grateful for a life in which I, like the virtual beings of my father’s future, can be what I want to be.