Oct 18, 2004 - Claremont, Calif. -

Renowned author and futurist Ray Kurzweil will use the Teleportec system to appear three dimensionally to the audience during his lecture Wednesday, Oct. 20, in Galileo Hall, Harvey Mudd College. The presentation begins at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Teleported from his offices in Boston, Mass., Kurzweil's will deliver his lecture “The Coming Merger of Human and Machine" and be able to see the audience and they will see him as he discusses how, at the current rate of progress, the merger between human and machine is imminent. “The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade, so the 21st century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate,” says Kurzweil, called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes.

“Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity and bandwidth every year.”

“Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in the environment, our bodies and our brains, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, experience ‘beaming,’ and enhanced human intelligence,” Kurzweil says. “The implication will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the evolutionary process it spawned.”Kurzweil’s national best-selling book, “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (Viking), about the rise of intelligent machines, has achieved #1 status on Amazon in the science and artificial intelligence categories and has been published in nine languages. His three other books have received similar acclaim, and another book, “The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology” (Viking) is due in spring 2005.

A graduate of MIT (B.S., 1970), Kurzweil is widely regarded as one of the leading inventors of our time. He was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. His Web site, KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on future technologies.

Kurzweil has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, cybernetic art, and other areas of artificial intelligence. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office, in 2002, and received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the largest award in invention and innovation. He has received scores of national and international awards, including the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, and the 1994 Dickson Prize, Carnegie Mellon’s top science prize.After Kurzweil’s lecture, the Teleportec device will be briefly discussed by company representative Lene Andersen. Teleportec, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, was founded in Manchester, England, in 1999 by Duffie White, the inventor of the technology, David Booth, a design engineer, and John Steward.