The national bestseller by the "ultimate thinking machine" ( Forbes ) whose predictions for the future are startling, provocative--and closer to fruition than you think.

Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century--an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.

" The Age of Spiritual Machines will blow your mind. . . . Kurzweil lays out a scenario that might seem like science fiction if it weren't coming from a proven entrepreneur."-- San Francisco Chronicle

The Age of Spiritual Machines appeared on national bestseller lists, including the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle

Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines , won the Association of American Publishers Award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990