Spiritualities, ethics, and implications of human enhancement and artificial intelligence

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world's leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists,with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called 'the restlessgenius' by The Wall Street Journal and 'the ultimate thinking machine' byForbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc.Magazine, which described him as 'the rightful heir to Thomas Edison'. PBSselected him as one of the 'sixteen revolutionaries who made America'.Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the firstomni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech readingmachine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first musicsynthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestralinstruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speechrecognition. Among Ray's many honors, he received a Grammy Award foroutstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of theNational Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hallof Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S.presidents. Ray has written five national best-selling books, including NewYork Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create AMind (2012).