In Search of the Sixth Sense

Fast Company interviews Ray Kurzweil in In Search of the Sixth Sense:

FC: You’re also working on a product to predict changes in the stock market.

Kurzweil: The company is called Fat Kat. Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adapted Technologies. I founded it about five years ago. We have a blue-ribbon group of investors. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. He and John Doerr run Kleiner Perkins. He is our lead investor. Mike Brown is another lead investor -- he’s on our board. He was chief financial officer of Microsoft for many years, and chairman of Nasdaq. And we have a number of other prominent high-tech people backing us. And the concept is applying my field, pattern recognition, to the stock market, particularly to short-term movements of stocks. And if you look at a particular stock it looks like an electric cardiogram. It constantly goes up and down. These little movements look random, and there’s certainly a very large random component to the movement, but its not entirely unpredictable because companies have relationships with one another. They own each other. They’re in supply chains with each other. They’re in industries with each other. There’s all kinds of influences. If you see certain movements in certain stocks, that’s putting out all kinds of ripple patterns and it ultimately will reflect itself in other movements in other securities. In fact the speed with which those reverberations or implications occur is speeding up with the more rapid dissemination of information. We look at data from 10-15 years ago, and we can see similar patterns today. But the patterns 15 years ago were moving much more slowly. Right now, there’s an announcement, and 30 minutes later it's old news because it's been all over the Internet. Whereas, 15 years ago, it would take days for the information to move around. So we actually see very similar patterns. They just move more quickly.