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Ray Kurzweil, called a "restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal, is responsible for some of the most compelling technology of our era. The brains behind the Kurzweil Reading Machine (which helps Stevie Wonder read his mail), the Kurzweil synthesizer, and the voice-recognition program that appears on Windows 98, he is also a formidable thinker who a decade ago predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and that a computer would beat the world chess champion. Finally, someone with the authority to speak about the future also has the courage and imagination to do so. The Age of Spiritual Machines is no list of predictions but a framework for envisioning the 21st century in which one advance or invention leads inexorably to another. After establishing that technology is growing exponentially, Kurzweil forecasts that computers will exceed the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain by 2020, with the other attributes of human intelligence not far behind. By that time paraplegics will be able to walk by using a combination of nerve stimulation and robotic devices. You will be able to choose the personality of your automated computer assistant, who will conduct business on your behalf with other automated personalities. A mere nine years later, you will be able to enhance your intelligence with neural implants. The upshot is that human identity will be called into question as never before, as a billion years of evolution are superseded in a mere hundred by machine technology that we ourselves have created. We will become cyborgs, but what will computers become?

"...Kurzweil makes the convincing case that technological development will proceed at such a breakneck pace over the next 30, 50, and 100 years that by the end of the next century our species should, for all intents and purposes, be merged with its technology."

Paul Bennett, Wired, February 1999

"It's not for everyone, and you have to be in the right mood, but THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES delivers extraordinarily stimulating brain candy. Ray Kurzweil assembles impressive evidence to show that the cost-effectiveness of computing is growing at an incredible rate--and not just in microprocessors....Kurzweil is on to something in this book, and readers will have to make their peace with the radical implications of his arguments."

John Jordan, Upside, 08/17/1999

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence: Search Results