Dr. Ray Kurzweil received an honorary doctorate degree from Landmark College of Putney, Vermont today. Landmark College is the nation’s premier college for high-potential students with learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Ray Kurzweil’s impact on students with learning disabilities has been immeasurable,” noted Landmark president Lynda J. Katz, Ph.D. “The extraordinary strides some of our students make at Landmark College would simply not be possible were it not for the path that Dr. Kurzweil blazed for them. He is a true pioneer and innovator, and an extraordinary man, whom Landmark College is pleased to recognize with an honorary Doctorate.”

Landmark College has integrated Kurzweil Educational Systems’ Kurzweil 3000 text to speech software — which is based on Kurzweil’s original inventions of the first omni-font optical character recognition and the first text-to-speech synthesizer — into its innovative program for students with learning disabilities. Dr. Kurzweil also invented the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind.

In a speech at the convocation, Kurzweil explained that his interest in forecasting technology trends developed because he “realized the world was a different place by the time an invention was completed.” This led to his “law of accelerating returns,” showing that technological change is exponential. His forecasts for the next few decades include augmentation of human abilities by reverse-engineering and downloading the brain; full-immersion, shared, virtual-reality environments; and machine superintelligence surpassing human intelligence.