The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“Startling in scope and bravado.” —Janet Maslin, _The New York Times_ “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.” —_Los Angeles Times_ “Elaborate, smart and persuasive.” —_The Boston Globe_ “A pleasure to read.” —_The Wall Street Journal_ One of _CBS News_’s Best Fall Books of 2005 • Among _St Louis Post-Dispatch_’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2005 • One of Amazon.com’s Best Science Books of 2005 A radical and optimistic view of the future course of human development from the bestselling author of _How to Create a Mind_ and _The Age of Spiritual Machines_ who Bill Gates calls “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence” 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 _The Age of Spiritual Machines_, 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.