{"id":19761,"date":"2017-03-15T13:52:33","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T12:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ferrovial.com\/blog\/en\/?p=19761"},"modified":"2025-12-12T00:41:38","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:41:38","slug":"predictions-of-ray-kurzweil-change-is-coming-get-ready","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ferrovial.com\/blog\/en\/2017\/03\/predictions-of-ray-kurzweil-change-is-coming-get-ready\/","title":{"rendered":"The predictions of Ray Kurzweil….Change is coming, get ready!"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I heard about Ray Kurzweil<\/a> for the first time, and what I heard generated such an interest in me that I immediately started searching for more information on him. For those of you who don\u2019t know him, Ray Kurzweil is Google\u2019s Director of Engineering, an entrepreneur, an expert in artificial intelligence and the world\u2019s most important futurist. And, surprisingly, this brilliant mind is not very well known at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A bit of background on Ray Kurzweil<\/strong><\/h2>\n

His father was a musician and his mother a visual artist. Ray dreamed of being a famous magician until his uncle explained to him how a computer worked, and from that moment onwards he realised that through technology he would be able to truly work magic.<\/p>\n

At the age of 15, he was already developing his first programmes. At 17, he was invited to the television programme I\u2019ve got a secret <\/em>where he played a piece on the piano: the secret was that the piece had been composed by a computer which he himself had built and programmed.<\/p>\n

He created the first ever Chatbot<\/a> and named it Ramona, having had the idea when he was only eight (a version still exists today; those of you who wish to do so can find it by searching on Google), and he led the team that created Apple\u2019s SIRI.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"ray<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1974 he founded the Kurzweil Computer Products<\/a> company and developed the first optical character recognition (OCR) system. Based on this technology, he went on to invent the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first machine ever to read text aloud and thus particularly useful for blind and visually impaired people.<\/p>\n

The best Tech-nostradamus.\u00a0<\/em>The predictions of Ray Kurzweil<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In 1990, when technology was not yet giving any indication of how far we would actually get, he wrote a book called \u201cThe Age of Intelligent Machines\u201d<\/strong> in which he made a large number of predictions, many of which have already happened, some of them with only a small difference of a couple of years between his predictions and reality. To mention but a few:<\/p>\n