To infinity -- and beyond?

Feb. 12, 1948
Ray Kurzweil born in Queens, N.Y.

1964
Invents musical composition computer and wins appearance on TV show “What’s my Secret?”

1973
Invents first character recognition technology capable of recognizing commonly used fonts.

1976
Creates first reading machine for the blind.

1978
Using character recognition software, invents data-entry machine used to create electronic archives of newspapers and periodicals.

1983
Creates first music synthesizer able to convincingly reproduce sounds of real instruments.

1987
Markets first large-vocabulary speech-recognition system.

2003
Starts trial run of his FatKat artificial-intelligence investing program; reports stock market returns of 80-100% over

next two years.

January 2006
Scheduled rollout of the first pocket reading machine for the blind.

2009
Kurzweil predicts supercomputers will have matched the hardware capacity of the human brain.

2019
Life expectancy at birth will exceed one hundred years.

2029
The entire human brain will have been mapped and “decoded.” A basic home computer will have the capacity of 1000 human brains.

2045
The Singularity: the pace and scale of technological change exceeds the comprehension of unenhanced human intelligence.

2099<
Bodies become obsolete, or at best optional. Minds are software dispersed across a global network, expanding beyond the Earth. Kurzweil celebrates his 151st birthday.