<b><b><b>“Startling in scope and bravado.” —Janet Maslin, <i>The New York Times</i><br /><br />“Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” —<i>Los Angeles Times</i><br /><br /><b><b><b>“Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” —<i>The Boston Globe</i></b></b></b><br /><br />“A pleasure to read.” —<i>The Wall Street Journal</i><br /><br /></b>One of <i>CBS News</i>’s Best Fall Books of 2005 <b><b>• </b></b>Among <i>St Louis Post-Dispatch</i>’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 <b><b>• </b></b>One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005<br /><br />A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from t</b>he bestselling author of <i>How to Create a Mind </i>and <i>The Singularity is Nearer </i>who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”</b><br /><br />For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic <i>The Age of Spiritual Machines</i>, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.