"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 JournalOne 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 2005A 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.