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.

TR Associate Editor Rebecca Zacks visited Kurzweil at the Wellesley Hills, Mass., offices of Kurzweil Technologies, one of the half-dozen high-tech companies he has founded since selling his first major enterprise to Xerox in 1980. The son of a composer and trained as an MIT undergraduate in both computer science and creative writing, Kurzweil moves deftly from music and art to computer processors and nanotechnology to immortality, evolution and God. And though his manner and his gray pinstriped suit are remarkably subdued, his ideas about the future are explosive.