Immortality, Inc.

by Chip Walter

  Kurzweil had that effect on people. He was remarkably effective at describing truly outlandish concepts, and then making them sound sensible. Ideas like living forever, or machines melding with the human race to create a species of superhumans; all of it couched in a world where technology was accelerating at a blistering pace. Initially, this talk could come across like the wildest sort of science fiction. But Kurzweil’s personality and writing had this restrained, laid-back vibe that was so quietly methodical and logical, and so laden with science, that after a while people would find themselves thinking You know, I believe he might actually be onto something!

  And truthfully, you couldn’t dismiss the man. His many inventions included the K250 music synthesizer, also known as the Kurzweil piano, a machine that could flawlessly imitate the sound of a grand piano (and just about any other instrument); hardware and software that created the first flatbed scanners; the first machines to read and synthesize written words for the blind; some of the earliest speech-recognition software; and a variety of other futuristic and humanitarian technologies.

  People take these advancements for granted now, but they didn’t before Kurzweil created them. For his achievements, President Clinton awarded him the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, 14 years before Levinson received his medal and eight years before Venter got his. Levinson himself told me that Kurzweil’s books and ideas on the Singularity, as well as his thinking on rapid exponential growth, influenced his thinking at Calico.

  Among Kurzweil’s edgier ideas was his belief that by 2045, the human race would meld with advanced artificial intelligence. That sort of thinking had made him a darling of the transhumanist movement—or, as it was known in some circles, the H+ Community (H standing for human). “Transhumanism” had been around in one form or another since Julian Huxley (the brother of Aldous, who wrote Brave New World) coined the term in a 1957 article. Transhumanism was, he said, “man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.”

  That was the idea: the improvement of humankind by any means possible. Take the human race to new, some might say, angelic, levels. Max More, an Oxford University graduate and the CEO of Alcor, had long been one of the leading lights in the H+ Community; he and Kurzweil had known one another since the early 2000s, when Kurzweil first signed up to become a cryonaut. Bill Maris had developed an interest in transhumanism too and was planning on becoming an Alcor member like Kurzweil, once he completed all the paperwork.

  There was, in fact, nothing about Ray Kurzweil that any right-minded person could possibly describe as normal. Eccentric maybe; quirky, brilliant, nerdy, even rebellious in a quiet, mannerly sort of way. But normal? No. He took hundreds of supplements a day to maximally extend his life, and exercised on a crazy-looking $14,000 contraption called a QuickGym/ROM machine that looked like a Dr. Seuss bamboozler. He was at once a thoroughly sincere idealist and a shameless self-promoter. Way ahead of his time, in 2001, he even created a virtual female rock star version of himself, named Ramona, who performed at a TED event with Kurzweil wearing sensors that projected the avatar of the digital singer onto a giant screen. All of this was just fine with Kurzweil. The way he saw it, why would anyone want to dwell inside the numbing mediocrity of the bell curve when playing outside of it was so much more fun?

  Kurzweil had always been built this way. In 1952, when he was just five, he would roam the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens, his childhood home, in search of the stuff he required to make his inventions. He hauled broken bicycles and radios, gears and gadgets, and all manner of parts back to the house. In those days, five-year-old kids—even small and curious ones with inky hair and dark, inquisitive eyes—could get away with that sort of thing and not get hurt. It was a simpler time: the age of Nancy Drew mysteries and the Hardy Boys and, for Kurzweil, Tom Swift, boy scientist—Swift by name and swift by nature!—whose adventures he devoured, wide-eyed. What could be better than to be a kid-scientist just like Tom, traveling the globe with inventions that kept bad guys at bay and made the world a better place?

  After a while, people in Jackson Heights began to wonder what was up with the little kid who hauled around all this junk. So one day a couple of 10-year-old girls just came right out and asked him.

  “Well,” he said pretty matter-of-factly. “I am going to build machines that can do…anything.”

  They just looked at him.

  “You know, machines that can fly anywhere, or see through walls. When I figure out how to put these things together the right way, I’ll be able to solve any problem in the world!” Just like Tom Swift.

  They rolled their eyes and laughed, amused but not mocking.

  “Well, that’s quite an imagination you have there.”

  If they only knew.

  Later, Kurzweil traded his solitary Jackson Heights excursions for adolescent trips to Canal Street in Manhattan, where he trolled the parts stores in endless fascination. Canal Street, even in the 1960s, was nerd heaven. You could find just about anything on Earth there—relay switches, capacitors, vacuum tubes, wire by the yards—the sorts of things that were capable of moving information from one place to another in a blink. By the time Kurzweil was in high school, the pilgrimages primarily involved searches for the devices he needed to build his very own thinking machine.

  Kurzweil had developed a certain familiarity with thinking machines because he was actually working with one: an IBM 1620. It resided on 105th Street in Spanish Harlem at the Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital. At the time, you could count the number of computers in New York on one hand. The 1620 was a monstrosity, but it was a brilliant numbers cruncher. Kurzweil’s job was to program the hospital’s accounts, which he did, mostly working the midnight to 8 a.m. shift in high school. While he was at it, he completely revamped and automated the hospital’s accounting system.

  Around this time Kurzweil decided to compete in the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search. The talent search was the biggest of deals if you were one of those high school students in the 1960s; only the nerdiest cream of the crop made it to the top rungs of the competition. Eight of the finalists would one day win the Nobel Prize, and five would win either the National Medal of Technology and Innovation or the National Medal of Science. Including Kurzweil.

  Not surprisingly, Kurzweil’s entry in the talent search was out of the ordinary. He loved music. His father was a Viennese concert pianist, composer, and music educator who had conducted symphony orchestras and opera companies at Queens College in New York, Chatham College in Pittsburgh, and the St. Louis Grand Opera. He had even performed as a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall. Music, art, science, and technology were all subjects that regularly came up for discussion at the family dinner table. So Ray found himself wondering: Could a machine learn to make music?

  Well, clearly that was silly. Anyone who knew anything about computers in those days knew they were for crunching census numbers or calculating ballistic trajectories and payrolls. But music?

  Yet, in Kurzweil’s mind, why not? Tom Swift! Any problem could be solved, right? And so he put together his presentation, and began to build the machine.

  In 1965, after hundreds of hours of labor, and round after round of competitions, Kurzweil was named a finalist. There’s a picture of young Ray and some of the other finalists meeting the 36th president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kurzweil is standing right there with him, shaking the great man’s hand.

  Soon after his White House trip, Kurzweil received a letter in the mail. Would he be interested in being a featured guest on I’ve Got a Secret, one of the nation’s most popular television shows? The producers had come across his music project and thought it might make a good segment.

  It was slick the way they set up the whole show. Kurzweil would be introduced by the host, Steve Allen, as the man with the “secret.” Steve Allen was a legend. In the 1960s, he was one of the best known personalities in America. He had been the origina
l host of The Tonight Show, had written several hit songs, was a playwright, author, and musician—a real main-street Renaissance man.

  Once he was introduced, Kurzweil’s job was to play a short piece of music on the piano. After that was done, the interrogation would begin. A panel of star personalities were assembled to grill him in the style of the game “20 Questions” until they either figured out the secret or gave up, stumped.

  Kurzweil was nervous about only one thing. He had no problem speaking live in front of millions of people or meeting the famous Steve Allen. No, the thing that petrified him was playing the little piece of music on the piano. Earlier in his life he had performed at a piano recital, and right in the middle of playing, the next bar of music disappeared out of his head: a massive white, paralyzing blank! He recovered, but only by starting over from the beginning, and never got over the unspeakable embarrassment.

  So for the show he practiced and practiced. But how could he be sure he wouldn’t make the same mistake? The mind was a strange and mysterious thing. Even if the music was embedded deep in the gray matter behind his forehead, even after repeated practices, it could all still fail him. The human brain was flawed that way.

  At last, the evening came. Raymond Kurzweil, the nice, diminutive Jewish boy from Queens, walks on stage. Steve Allen towers over him. Ray looks remarkably calm for a shy teenager facing the hordes of viewers as he peers at the other end of those huge, cyclopean studio cameras. His hair is black and thick. His face is dimpled and handsome. And he is ready. “My name is Raymond Kurzweil. And I’m from Queens,” he says.

  There, to his left, is the piano—just a simple upright, its sheet of music beckoning him. He sits down and begins to play this short, very lyric, classical melody. And it all goes down without a hitch, even if the piano is pretty badly out of tune. Immense relief! His brain didn’t fail him.

  Next, he sits down with Steve Allen and the panel starts in. One of the first questions comes from Bess Myerson, a former Miss America. She asks him if he composed the music.

  “It’s very unlikely sounding,” she says. “Did you write it?”

  A slight shake of the head, and a close-lipped smile, “No, I didn’t.”

  There are a few more panel questions, but no one is making any progress, and then it’s Henry Morgan’s turn. Morgan (his real name was Henry Lerner Von Ost, Jr.) was a famous radio personality—sort of the Howard Stern of his time—and a master of the ad-lib. But here, there is no ad-libbing. Morgan just looks at Kurzweil and comes right out with it. “Was that thing written by a computer?”

  If Kurzweil is disappointed, he doesn’t show it. He just flashes this big-kid grin and nods, seemingly thrilled. But it turns out this is really only part of the secret. Because if this “thing” was in fact written by a computer, how did that happen?

  Well, Ray explains to the audience, he built it. “By feeding it certain relationships in music, I was able to program it so that it would write music in the style of Mozart,” says Ray. A computer that writes its own music! And this mere boy, this kid, actually builds the thing with his own hands from collected parts that he has gathered and fitted together like some terrifically complicated typewriter? And then he instructs the computer to create the music in this alien language called Fortran? A language for talking to computers! Imagine that.

  But there’s more: Steve Allen now reveals the computer itself. A curtain parts and there the thing is—a machine that writes music! But wasn’t music the exclusive domain of the human mind, not machines? And weren’t computers usually the size of rooms? Not that Kurzweil’s machine was small. It was still about the size of a grand piano and then some. But wow, this kid had built it!

  Steve Allen turns to Kurzweil and asks, “Ray, how old are you?”

  “Seventeen years old,” Ray answers.

  There’s a pause as Allen regards the young man. “Do your parents know what you’re up to?”

  Thunderous laughter. That was classic Steve Allen. His famous wit. But then, the teenager calmly replies, absolutely deadpan: “My father is a musician, and he doesn’t care for the competition.” More thunderous laughter. Did he just upstage Steve Allen?!

  “Raymond,” Allen says, “I’m amazed that anyone can do anything at all of this sort. And I predict a great future for you.”

  And with that, Ray walks off the stage: the junk kid from Queens who makes music with artificially intelligent machines.

  * * *

  —

  IT WASN’T LONG AFTER his debut on national television that Ray Kurzweil found his way to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in high school he had sought out and written to Marvin Minsky, then considered one of the two great artificial intelligence experts in the world, to see if he might be able to apply to his school. The other expert was Cornell’s Frank Rosenblatt. Both men agreed to meet with Kurzweil, but it was Minsky who soon arranged for his acceptance to MIT.6

  From the beginning of his arrival on campus in the fall of 1967, the act of attending class became almost a hobby for Kurzweil. At least that’s the way it seemed to Aaron Kleiner, Kurzweil’s freshman roommate.7 Kurzweil and Kleiner both were cut from the same cloth—hardworking, mathematically gifted kids from the East Coast. They both joined the same fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi, your run-of-the-mill 1960s frat house. Ray immediately became the social chairman, and under his stewardship the rock bands and songs he lined up for dances were totally rad and the parties right on! Around the fraternity, they called Kurzweil the “Phantom,” because one minute he was there, talking, meeting, spouting ideas, and the next he was gone, sometimes for days. No one knew where the hell he went, and when he returned, he never offered any explanations.

  One night, Kleiner was at the frat house, sweating over a physics final, when the Phantom sauntered by and saw him studying.

  “Oh, yeah,” Kurzweil said, slightly distracted, “We have that physics exam tomorrow, don’t we?”

  Kleiner thought, You’re just remembering this now? The night before the exam?

  “Can you lend me your book?” Kurzweil asked. Kleiner was reluctant. He was a good egg and all, and wanted to help out the Phantom. Hell, the man didn’t even have a copy of the book. But Physics 802 at MIT was not easy, and he needed every minute himself to cram.

  “Just for a little bit,” Kurzweil nudged.

  So Kleiner took a short break while Kurzweil looked over the book. Not long afterward, Kleiner returned, and Kurzweil started asking him questions. They were awful! He’s going to bomb this test like the Enola Gay.

  “Let me borrow the book a little longer,” Kurzweil said. Once again, Kleiner was less than happy, but what could he do? The guy needed help! A half hour later, Kurzweil returned a second time. Again he began with the questions, but this time he knew it cold! How could this be?

  The next day Kleiner and Kurzweil filed into some nameless MIT classroom and sat down to take the test. Kurzweil aced it. Kleiner managed a C. A “C”! After days bleeding from the forehead! After months attending every class—not one of which Kurzweil has even drifted by the whole semester—he pages through the book for an hour and aces it?

  The man was an alien.

  Given his aptitude for mathematics, anyone who didn’t know Kurzweil might have assumed he would go on to acquire his master’s and Ph.D., and then settle in among the ivy-covered palisades of academia. Kurzweil could have worked with Minsky and been the pick of the scholarly litter. But that’s not the way it went.

  Instead, he simply began creating whatever new and absorbing ideas engaged the Kurzweilian cranium. He called these intrigues his “projects,” and they spilled out in endless streams. Before he graduated, he sold his first company—the Select College Consulting program—to Harcourt, Brace & World for a cool $100,000 plus royalties. (Turns out, that was where the Phantom was spending most of his college time.)

  The thing that caught Harcourt, Brace’s attention was the computer program Kurzweil wrote. It optimized methods
for helping high school students find the college of their choice by loading more than two million facts about 3,000 colleges into one of New England’s most advanced computers, at a cost of $1,000 an hour—a kind of computer dating service for college.

  After that, Kurzweil became a hopeless serial entrepreneur. He had little interest in academics except as a starting point. He wanted to do things, not just think about them. Make an impact. In time he created nine companies, each one based on his various inventions, like the Kurzweil piano.

  The seminal concept behind each of these inventions was “pattern recognition,” a concept at the heart of his view of artificial intelligence. Everything to Kurzweil was a pattern, from human consciousness to the sound of a plucked violin string to the letter “B” (what defines the “B”-ness of a “B”?). His inventioneering made him very acceptable sums of money, and also led to an assortment of prestigious prizes: the Lemelson-MIT Prize, Carnegie Mellon’s Dickson Prize, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award. Kurzweil soon found himself operating more in the mold of Edison or Buckminster Fuller than your average, workaday academic: a gifted inventor who sprayed ideas, software, and gadgets around like confetti.

  But all of that would come later. For now, Kurzweil was simply enjoying the benisons of life at MIT. He liked the room-size computers, the constant projects, and the ethereal confines of one of Cambridge’s finest schools. He was young and smart and a baby boomer. What could be better than that?

  And then Ray got the phone call from his father.

  It was the late summer of 1970, just before his senior year. Kurzweil could hear the melancholy tone of his father’s voice. He was lonely, his father said, and he missed Ray. That was strange. Kurzweil could hardly recall a time when his father spoke with that sort of emotion. Something had to be up.

  While Kurzweil was still a teen building his machines, he had begun to notice his dad slowing down. Fredric hadn’t been dealt a very good genetic hand and suffered from what, in those days, they called “a weak heart.” The first heart attack came when Ray was 15. In those days, nothing could be done about heart disease. Nevertheless, Fredric soldiered on. He even founded the music department at Queensborough Community College.