Publisher's Synopsis
Ray Kurzweil is 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. A decade ago, he predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and that a computer would beat the world's chess champion.;In this volume, rather than providing a list of predictions, he offers 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, he asserts, paraplegics will be able to walk through a combination of merve 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 The upshot is that human identity will be called into question as never before, as a billion years of evolution are superseded in a mere hundred by machine technology that we ourselves have created.
