Ray Kurzweil - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Ray Kurzweil

Title: Inventor and futurist

Position: 14    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Future-gazing and building innovative real-world techs

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• Craig Mundie
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• Don Grice

Ray Kurzweil bills himself as an inventor and futurist. He is also clearly a thinker of near philosophical proportions, a novelist, an entrepreneur, a businessman and a techie.

Technologies Kurzweil lays claim to developing - and commercialising - include the first CCD flat-bed scanner, a text-to-speech synthesiser, voice recognition software and a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. He's also working on an automated language translation tool that will mean you can speak in your own language and be heard in someone else's. Once only the stuff of science fiction, he demoed a prototype running on a mobile phone earlier this year.

He's written extensively on AI and robotics too - detailing a future where real and virtual realities merge in what he describes as "an augmented reality environment".

The vibrancy of Kurzweil's future-gazing and the innovative real-world technologies he has developed are more than enough to make him an Agenda Setter. As one panellist pragmatically puts it, "he's done some good stuff in many different spheres".