Ray Kurzweil ’70 to deliver Robert A. Muh Award Lecture

Ray Kurzweil ’70, the 2025 Robert A. Muh Alumni Award winner, is the featured speaker at this year’s event. The free lecture, “Reinventing intelligence,” begins at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, October 8 in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall, 201 Amherst Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The biennial Muh Alumni Award recognizes the tremendous achievements of MIT degree holders, celebrating leaders in one of the Institute’s humanities, arts, or social science fields. The prize was founded in 2000 by Robert Muh ’59 and his wife Berit, on the occasion of the school’s 50th anniversary. 

Kurzweil is a Principal Researcher and AI Visionary at Google. Kurzweil also served on the MIT Board of Trustees from 2005- 2012. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Literature from MIT in 1970.

In a description of his Muh Award lecture, Kurzweil says, “By 2029, computers will reach human level intelligence and then quickly soar past us. This is not an alien invasion. Al is coming from within us and will reflect our humanity. Soon it will transform the physical world – medicine, energy, manufacturing, everything we care about. By 2045, we will fully merge with it an expand our intelligence a millionfold, unlocking new levels of consciousness that are unimaginable today.”

A leading developer in AI for more than six decades, Kurzweil was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time Magazine taking the number one spot in the thinkers category, noting his “eerily prescient predictions about AI.” He was also selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” PBS selected him as one of the “sixteen revolutionaries who made America.”

Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software.

Kurzweil has written five national best-selling books including “The Singularity Is Near” and “How to Create A Mind,” both New York Times best sellers, and “Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine,” winner of multiple young adult fiction awards. His latest book, “The Singularity Is Nearer,” debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. 

Kurzweil received a Grammy Award in 2015 for outstanding achievements in music technology, for his invention of the Kurzweil K250. He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holder of twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and an honoree of three U.S. presidents.