Playing Ray Kurzweil: How technology's accelerating power will transform us

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Ray Kurzweil is an engineer who has radically advanced the fields of speech, text, and audio technology. He's also one of our finest thinkers, revered for his dizzying, yet convincing, writing on the advance of technology, the limits of biology, and the future of the human species.

Prolific inventor and outrageous visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain, and nanobots will be operating your consciousness. Kurzweil draws on years of research to show the speed at which technology is evolving, and projects forward into an almost unthinkable future to outline the ways we’ll use technology to augment our own capabilities, forever blurring the lines between human and machine.

Inventor, entrepreneur, visionary, Ray Kurzweil's accomplishments read as a startling series of firsts, a litany of technological breakthroughs we've come to take for granted. Kurzweil invented the first optical character recognition (OCR) software for transforming the written word into data, the first print-to-speech software for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and many electronic instruments.