Struggling to find time in a busy schedule for yet another interview, Ray Kurzweil jokes that the media frenzy surrounding him these days only happens "every thousand years." That's because the inventor and entrepreneur who brought us such products as the Kurzweil electronic keyboard, a text-to-speech reading machine for the blind and voice-recognition software is also one of the most audacious-and, some say, accurate-futurists around. Kurzweil's fearlessly detailed predictions make his latest book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, a must-read for the turn of the millennium.

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