Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-five-year track record of accurate predictions and six decades developing artificial intelligence — longer than any other living person. The Wall Street Journal called him "the restless genius"; Forbes, "the ultimate thinking machine"; and Inc. named him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." He was the principal inventor of 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, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
A graduate of MIT, Kurzweil received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary doctorates, and has been honored by three U.S. presidents. He is the author of five national bestsellers, including The Singularity Is Near (2005) and its 2024 sequel The Singularity Is Nearer, and co-founded the Singularity University with Google and NASA. He continues to work at the frontier of AI, most recently as a principal AI researcher and visionary at Google.