Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is a prolific inventor and is involved in fields like OCR, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition. He did his undergraduate at MIT. In this talk, he emphasized the exponential growth of information technology. I think everyone can see that information technology is growing very fast. Just in the short span of my life so far, my daily life has transitioned from one that is almost devoid of electronic devices to one in which computers, smart phones, tablets etc are indispensable. However, I haven't thought too much about the actual growth speed before this talk. Grasping the concept of exponential growth is almost eye-opening. This really makes me feel very excited because the range of possibilities that technology can achieve is kind of unfathomable. It's exciting to live in this age of the world and I also feel an urgency in my work. I have to work fast, otherwise the work will be outdated very soon.