Geek gift: Amazon's Kindle is an amazing device. Because e-paper reflects light like traditional paper, there is no eyestrain. It also comes with built-in, free high-speed Internet access so you can download books from anywhere on the go. It's a bit pricey, but for a bookworm it's a pretty cool device.
Ultimate invention: Wireless power. I read about a recent experiment at MIT that transferred power over a two-meter distance, powering a 60-watt lightbulb. Imagine a city blanketed in wireless power—I'd be the first to toss my laptop’s brick power adapter.
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Ray Kurzweil
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Author, inventor and philosopher
Geek gift: A Nokia N82 phone, which has just about everything from GPS to a five-megapixel camera with good lenses and a real xenon flash.
Ultimate invention: Virtual displays using devices in our eyeglasses that beam images directly to the retina. Prototypes of these already exist. So my vision of computing and communicating in the future includes retina-mounted devices that can create stationary virtual displays even as we move our heads, and full-immersion visual-auditory virtual reality and augmented real reality. We'll be online all the time with very high-bandwidth wireless communication. Computing and communication will be a self-organizing mesh of nodes, so if you need a million computers for a second, it will be available to you. We'll live in a blend of real and virtual reality, and it won't always be clear where one stops and the other begins.