Science award

Ray Kurzweil will receive the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor in technology in the US, the White House announced this week. Mr. Kurzweil has a proven track record of assessing technological change and determining what is likely to occur with the increase in the processing power of microchips.

He is best known for innovative work on voice-recognition software. Stevie Wonder was one of his first customers. A bond between them led to the development of music synthesizers. He has written two ground-breaking books: "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" and "The Age of Intelligent Machines" (interviewed 3/1/99).

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