The machine age

Ray Kurzweil is an acclaimed artificial intelligence innovator and entrepreneur known for developing technologies such as optical character recognition and speech synthesis and recognition. He wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines as a sequel to The Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT Press, 1990), which attracted considerable attention when it first appeared. In his new book, Kurzweil extends his predictions into the next century— machine intelligence will surpass ours, and humans will merge with machine intelligence and evolve into postbiological “spiritual machines,” freed from the limitations of “biological hardware.”