Volume 1, Issue 3 
3rd Quarter, 2006


How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil

page 10 of 15

All of this is driving economic growth, even on a per capita bases.  Underlying this is exponential growth in the value of a human Kurzweil Quotehour of labor, which went from $30 to $130 in 45 years. And the adoption of these technologies is exponential. Here is the adoption of e-commerce; it's now a trillion dollars, which is already meaningful on the world stage. You might say, wasn't there a boom and a bust in e-commerce? There's a similar graph for telecommunications; there was a boom and a bust there also. 

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Image 18: E-commerce Revenues in the United States

But the boom and bust was strictly a capital market phenomenon, a Wall Street phenomenon. Wall Street looked at the Internet and said, "Wow, this is going to transform every business model."  Thus all the values went off the charts and then a year later, when every business model had not been turned on its head, they said, "I guess that was wrong," and everything went the other way. The actual adoption is exponential, but that does not mean instantaneous. It is now getting some real traction, with a trillion dollars of e-commerce revenue. We do have companies that are basically e-commerce companies, like Google for example, with close to a hundred billion dollar market cap, and Ebay, which actually harnesses the value of the net. Yet the adoption is very smooth exponential growth. In fact, when you see this boom and bust phenomenon, it is generally a harbinger of a real revolution.  There was a little one for AI in the 1980's. In the 19th century, there was a boom and bust for the railroads, and so on.  Information technology, narrowly defined, will be a majority of the economy by 2020. It is already deeply influential in every other aspect of the economy. 

One of my companies does speech synthesis, which we also developed in another one of my companies, and commercial language text translation. This speech to speech language translation system, which is basically a translating telephone, will be a routine feature of your cell phones early in the next decade. 

The speech sounds natural but this is the latest generation of speech synthesis, which is synthesized with concatenated diphones, and has pretty good inflection. We introduced a product recently, which is a pocket-size reading machine for the blind (http://www.knfbreader.com/).

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Image 19: Reader for the Blind

It uses this kind of speech synthesis and optical character recognition and some intelligent image processing. We introduced it at the National Federation of the Blind convention. It fits in your shirt pocket, so a blind person if they are at this meeting they can take the handouts and read them. Just by snapping the picture and it reads it out loud. It does the OCR and the image cleanup.

Let me quickly mention some scenarios, but then get to the issue of promise and peril. Computers are getting smaller. They are already under our arms, in our pockets, and they will soon be in our clothing. We are developing some intelligent clothing in United Therapeutics in a joint venture with Kurzweil Technologies. It will be like an undershirt that will actually monitor your health. If you collapse on the golf course, it will call 911 and direct the ambulance by GPS. 

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