Kurzweil was the perfect engineer, confident that he could work out any puzzle put in front of him. As a newly minted graduate of MIT, he proclaimed to a friend that he wanted “to invent things so that the blind could see, and the deaf could hear, and the lame could walk.” At the age of twenty-seven, he created a machine that could read to the blind. To describe the invention hardly captures its audacity. The blind could place their book on a scanner that would then pour the text into a computer, which would then articulate the words—before Kurzweil’s machine, a flatbed scanner hadn’t existed.
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