Ray Kurzweil - Futurist

Imagine my surprise, Dear Reader, upon reading that 'famed futurist' Ray Kurzweil had visited Halifax earlier this month.
Who is Ray Kurzweil, and what is a 'futurist'?

-- Kurzweil, currently the director of engineering at Google, has a 40-plus-year history of developing ideas on the cutting edge of technology from the idea stage to full-blown reality.
-- A 'futurist,' according to the Association of Professional Futurists -- there really IS one -- 'is a person who studies the future in order to help people understand, anticipate, prepare for and gain advantage from coming changes.'
Ray Kurzweil has been described as 'the restless genius' by The Wall Street Journal, and 'the ultimate thinking machine' by Forbes.
In reporting on his keynote speech at the Big Data for Productivity Congess, the Halifax Chronicle Herald stated, 'Futurist believes immortality is within humanity's grasp.'
In the mid 1970s, he set out to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. He was the principal inventor, at Bell Labs, of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and the first text-to-speech synthesizer.
That's when we met him.
Our technology class at Boston College (Education of the Visually Handicapped) went on a field trip to his lab at M-I-T, in February, 1976, shortly after he had unveiled the Kurzweil Reading Machine.
The lab, about the size of a couple of large classrooms put together, was the usual mess, with reports and papers and electronic gear strewn all over the desks. The reading machine parts and wires took up about half the room.
He escorted us to a table containing a flatbed scanner, placed a book facedown on it, and, following a brief delay, we heard the spoken text, clearly and legibly, from a wall speaker!
We students, of course, who had read all about fumbled attempts to carry out what we had just seen and heard, pointed out that we were a bit skeptical.
So he asked if anyone have brought a book or an article. Luckily, a classmate had done so, and produced it.
Kurzweil placed it on the scanner, and again, the scanned text was spoken from the speaker!
We were sold!
Humbled, but sold; mumbling apologies, but sold.
We got our first Reading Machine at our Halifax School a couple of years later. It had already 'shrunk' to the size of a concole TV set.
He had already sold the technology by then, and had turned his efforts to developing a music synthesizer.
His awards are many:
-- In 1978, he won the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his invention of the Kurzweil Reading Machine.
-- He has received 20 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
-- He received a Technical Grammy last year, recognizing his diverse technical and creative accomplishments, notably for the creation of a new generation of music synthesizers, as inspired by Stevie Wonder.
Today, at Google, he works in such areas as robotics, 3D printing, and biotechnology.
As discussed in the Chronicle Herald, he has stated that we are 10 to 15 years away from life expectancy gaining by a year every year.
Who knows?
Stay tuned. But, don't scoff!