The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ray Kurzweil.md

category	tags	summary	relations	created	updated
Technologists	Person Singularitarianism Transhumanism Google ArtificialIntelligence	Inventor and futurist who popularized the technological singularity, co-founded the Singularity Summit with Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Singularity University at NASA Ames, and joined Google in 2012.	type with role start fn founded Singularity Summit co-founder with Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky 2006 1 type with start fn founded Singularity University 2008-09-20 3 type with role start fn employed_by Google director of engineering 2012-12 2	2026-09-22	2026-09-22

Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor, author and futurist. In The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005) he popularized the Singularitarianism, the idea, named by Vernor Vinge in 1993, of a point at which machine intelligence outruns human understanding, and set out a "law of accelerating returns" with forecasts for 2029 and 2045.¹ On December 14, 2012, he announced that Google had hired him as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing.²

The Singularity Summit and Singularity University

In 2006 Peter Thiel, who had begun funding Eliezer Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence the year before, joined Yudkowsky and Kurzweil in founding the Singularity Summit, first held at Stanford; in December 2012 Singularity University acquired the summit and the institute sold it the "Singularity" name, and the institute became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.¹ Singularity University was founded on September 20, 2008, at a founders conference hosted by S. Pete Worden, director of the NASA Ames Research Center, by a group that included Kurzweil, the X Prize chairman Peter Diamandis, and Robert Richards and Michael Simpson of the International Space University; NASA later clarified that its personnel were not founders. It was housed at the NASA Research Park at Ames.³

Thiel later turned on the risk wing of the movement: in 2025 he named Yudkowsky one of the "legionnaires of the Antichrist" in a private lecture series.⁴ Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru grouped Kurzweil's singularitarianism with transhumanism, extropianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism in their TESCREAL bundle.⁵

Footnotes

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1. Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999; The Singularity Is Near, Viking, 2005; Hagey, Keach. The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. W. W. Norton, 2025, on Thiel's funding of the Singularity Institute from 2005 and the 2006 summit; Machine Intelligence Research Institute, "Singularity Summit" archive, https://intelligence.org/singularitysummit/ ; "Singularity Summit 2012 Is Coming To San Francisco October 13-14," Singularity Hub, August 29, 2012, and the December 2012 acquisition announcement. ↩︎

2. Taylor, Colleen. "Ray Kurzweil Joins Google In Full-Time Engineering Director Role; Will Focus On Machine Learning, Language Processing." TechCrunch, December 14, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/ray-kurzweil-joins-google-as-engineering-director-focusing-on-machine-learning-and-language-tech/ ↩︎

3. NASA. "NASA Ames Becomes Home To Newly Launched Singularity University," February 3, 2009, with later clarification. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-ames-becomes-home-to-newly-launched-singularity-university/ ↩︎

4. "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures.'" Washington Post, October 10, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ ↩︎

5. Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence." First Monday 29, no. 4, April 2024. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 ↩︎