I'd be really curious to get a copy of the OCR software. I'd like to disassemble it and see what the fuss was about. I can hardly get tesseract to reliably work.
<unnecessary sarcasm>Maybe Ray should jump in and fix tesseract for us.</unnecessary sarcasm>
All you need to do is look in the history book and realize that he was one of the few pepople working in that field. A more concrete thing was his text-to-speech synthesis.
Anyway. I see no point in defending Ray or any of his ideas. Just saying that the man isn't stupid and have done quite a few inventions.
To brush him of, as much as I disagree with some of his points, simply because he makes outragous claims seems a tad self-defeating.
Sometimes it's easy to disregard someone completely just because one think they take it too far.
Imagine how a Davinci might look today.
I do not buy Rays ideas on this matter either but there sure is a discussion worth having in there. Even despite some of the claims he makes.