<p><b>“Startling in scope and bravado.” (Janet Maslin, </b><b><i>The New York Times</i></b><b>)</b></p> <p><b>“Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” (</b><b><i>Los Angeles Times</i></b><b>)</b></p> <p><b>“Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” (</b><b><i>The Boston Globe</i></b><b>)</b></p> <p><b>“A pleasure to read.” (</b><b><i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b><b>)</b></p> <p><b>One of </b><b><i>CBS News</i></b><b>’ Best Fall Books of 2005</b><br /> <b>Among </b><b><i>St Louis Post-Dispatch</i></b><b>’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005</b><br /> <b>One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005</b></p> <p><b>A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the best-selling author of </b><b><i>How to Create a Mind </i></b><b>and </b><b><i>The Singularity is Nearer</i></b> <b>who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”.</b></p> <p>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.</p>