Ray Kurzweil

At age seventeen, Ray Kurzweil devised a computer program that wrote music; while at MIT, he invented and sold for $100,000 another that helped students pick colleges. A pioneer of text-to-speech and flatbed scanners, he now presents himself as herald of the Singularity. In addition to his belief in the coming union between man and machine, the author and inventor believes that humans can “reprogram” their biochemistry and slow down the aging process with a daily regimen of vitamins and nutritional supplements, of which he takes around two hundred. In 2008 Kurzweil co-founded Singularity University, which purports to “address humanity’s grand challenges.”