Ray Kurzweil
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants.
Sir Isaac Newton

Kurzweil Curve

The Kurzweil Curve serves as the conceptual framework for all Singularity Consultants. It is a picture that is permanently planted into a Singularity Consultant’s subconscious. The graph is the original from the bible of the Singularity Consultant…”The Singularity is Near (2005)”. It serves as a visual representation of Kurzweil’s core thesis, a little thing called “the Law of Accelerating Returns” or “L.O.A.R.s Law” if you prefer. It simply states that “fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories”. Put more simply, it’s a picture of when computers will be smarter than humans.

Kurzweil stood on the shoulders of geniuses like Newton, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Alan Turing writing The Singularity is Near. He has made 147 predictions since the 1990’s about technology and has an 86% accuracy rate. And the 14% where he says he got it wrong, we personally think he got it mostly right...we’ll give him a pass when he erroneously predicted self driving cars by 2009. He was a year off in predicting when technology would beat the greatest chess player in the world.

Lastly, Kurzweil’s original definition of the Singularity he articulated in The Singularity is Near still holds today. Kurzweil defined the Singularity as:
Ray Kurzweil
Moore’s Law is just the beginning: The power of technology will keep growing exponentially, says Kurzweil. By 2050, you’ll be able to buy a device with the computational capacity of all mankind for the price of a nice refrigerator today.

"... a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself."

As recently as October 5, 2017, he still stands by his original predictions regarding the dates this will all happen:

“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” 2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”7

Thank you Ray.