1980s THROWBACK: "STEVIE WONDER AND THE KURZWEIL READING MACHINE"

n 1976 Stevie Wonder saw a segment on the NBC Today show featuring a blind man like himself demonstrating a machine that Wonder knew he immediately needed to have. The machine was able to read text on a page and speak the words out loud, and it had been made to work specifically for blind people.
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The device was the Kurzweil Reading Machine, named for its inventor Ray Kurzweil. So the blind singer contacted Kurzweil’s company. After a quick demo he became the company’s first official customer. So began a long friendship between the inventor and the musician. The 2 would eventually collaborate to produce a ground-breaking musical instrument that uses artificial intelligence to create sounds.

Some form of artificial intelligence has been at the foundation of all Kurzweil’s inventions. He has spent his career building tech that can learn + think in the ways humans do.

One of the unique human capabilities is the ability to recognize patterns — this is still something humans do better than machines, and it is crucial to many of the tasks only humans can do. Building machines that learn patterns can, in Kurzweil’s mind, create inventions that augment human intelligence and help us overcome the challenges such as disabilities. This conviction led him to invent the reading machine that would later captivate Wonder.

Science and technology luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking PhD have publicly warned of the challenges and threats humanity faces from artificial intelligence. But Kurzweil says artificial intelligence in some form or another is already all around us, and it has made us wealthier and more productive.