Ray Kurzweil

Biography

American inventor and futurist, born in New York in 1948 and educated at MIT. He developed one of the first CCD flatbed scanners and the first commercial speech-recognition system, received the National Medal of Technology in 1999 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He later turned to forecasting, formulating the "law of accelerating returns" — the claim that information technology advances exponentially rather than linearly — and in The Singularity Is Near (2005) extended that argument to a hypothetical "technological singularity" around 2045. He is currently a director of engineering at Google, working on natural language processing.