Ray Kurzweil ’70 receives the 2025 Robert A. Muh Alumni Award

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has announced that author, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil ’70 has been recognized with the 2025 Robert A. Muh Alumni Award.

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.

“I am truly honored to receive the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award,” Kurzweil says. “I’ve built my life and career on the belief that the power of ideas can change the world. There is a solution to every problem, we just have to think of it.” 

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 will be honored on campus this fall, when he will deliver the Muh Award Lecture. The lecture, which is free and open to the MIT community and the general public, will be held Wednesday, October 8 at 5 p.m. in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall.

“Ray is an extraordinary figure,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “He is intellectually omnivorous and also enormously creative. I couldn’t be happier about his selection as the recipient of the 2025 Robert A. Muh Alumni Award.”

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.

“Intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and creative problem solving— all central to the humanities, arts, and social sciences—are going to be more important than ever as we merge with technology,” Kurzweil says.