Ray Kurzweil

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 technological singularity, 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