Word: kurzweil
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just when it seemed Radiohead had cornered the market for man-against-machine concept albums, Canadian alt-rockers Our Lady Peace (OLP) are hoping to capitalize on the current fascination with odd futuristic visions with their fourth album, Spiritual Machines. The band credits Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, with providing both the album's title and its inspiration. Kurzweil, known for his work in advanced speech recognition, is convinced that the line between human society and technology is becoming increasingly blurred and that computers will eventually become our companions and teachers...
...which is planning new attractions around a live Rug Rats entertainment show and the Animal Planet TV show, officials lined up a deal to provide free round-trip transportation for Disneyland guests to Universal, less than an hour from Anaheim. "We can offer the real Hollywood experience," says Larry Kurzweil, president and COO of Universal Studios Hollywood...
...comparison isn't that farfetched. By age 16, Kurzweil had built his first computer and sold software to IBM. His first major breakthrough, the Kurzweil Reading Machine, allowed blind people to read any document by simply feeding pages into an optical scanner that recognized characters. The computer then "spoke" the words aloud. In 1982, at the urging of Stevie Wonder, Kurzweil built what became the first synthesizer able to reproduce rich, orchestral sounds accurately; it is now widely used by pop musicians...
...music professor and an artist, Kurzweil appeared as a teenager on the TV game show I've Got a Secret (on which comedian Henry Morgan guessed Kurzweil's "secret" device--one that could write original music based on music it had "heard"). In college Kurzweil played piano, wrote poetry and studied creative writing with Lillian Hellman...
Though renowned philosophy professor John R. Searle has called some of Kurzweil's visions "preposterous," several of his predictions about cyberdevelopments of the 1990s--Does a computer beating a world chess champion sound familiar?--have proved dead...