The recipient of nineteen honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents, Ray Kurzweil’s accolades are almost too many to list. A prolific inventor, Kurzweil created the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.

His book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times best seller. and is considered one of the best books about futurism and transhumanism ever written.

Mr. Kurzweil was hired by Google in December as Director of Engineering to “work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.” He has agreed to take a short break from creating and predicting the future in order to answer your questions.

As usual, you’re invited to ask as many questions as you’d like, but please divide them, one question per post.