Ray Kurzweil is more than an inventor. Sure, he gave us 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.

But Kurzweil is more than that. He is keenly focused on exploring how biological systems (mostly human) will merge with artificial intelligence in ways that will impact science, economics, politics, medicine, education and everything in between. […]