The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

"The Age of Spiritual Machines" is no list of predictions but a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century in which one advance or invention leads inexorably to another. Kurzweil forecasts: 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; paraplegics will be able to walk through a combination of nerve 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; virtual reality will enable you to be with your lover with full auditory, visual and eventually tactile realism. The upshot is that human identity will be called into question as never before, as a billion years of evolution are superseded in a mere hundred by machine technology that we ourselves have created. We will become cyborgs, but what will computers become?