Ray Kurzweil swallows roughly a hundred supplement pills a day, monitors his biochemistry obsessively, and has a contract to be suspended in liquid nitrogen the moment his heart stops, all because he believes he can outrun death. He is also one of the most decorated inventors in American history.

This deep dive traces how a child prodigy tinkering with electronics in Queens became a polarizing futurist, following the inventions that altered human accessibility, his staggering and sometimes flawed predictions, and his quest to merge human consciousness with machines.

• His teenage music-composing computer and his early college-matching algorithm sold for a fortune
• The Omnifont OCR breakthrough and the Kurzweil Reading Machine that Stevie Wonder bought first
• The K250 synthesizer that helped define 1980s pop music
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