The Age of Spiritual Machines: How We Will Live, Work and Think in the New Age of Intelligent Machines

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Phoenix, 1999 - Artificial intelligence - 436 pages
By 2020 computers will equal the capacity of the human brain; people will have relationships with virtual personalities. 10 years later machines will have the computing capacity of 1,000 brains; they will learn on their own, create their own literature and claim to be conscious. By the end of the century there will no longer be any clear distinction between humans and computers. Most conscious entities will not have a permanent physical presence and life expectancy will no longer be a viable term in relation to intelligent beings. Ray Kurzweil is a leading technologist and author of the prize-winning The Age of Intelligent Machines. He is also one of the world's leading inventors and entrepreneurs in the field of artificial intelligence.

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About the author (1999)

Ray Kurzweil was born on February 12, 1948. He was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He has received numerous awards including the MIT-Lemelson Prize and the National Medal of Technology. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. He has written several books including The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Singularity Is Near, and How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.

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