![]() Still, by addressing (if not quite satisfactorily) the overpowering distinction between intelligence and consciousness, and by addressing the difference between a giant database and an intuitive machine, this book serves as a very provocative, if not very persuasive, view of the future from a man who has studied and shaped it. More problematic is Kurzweil's self-congratulatory tone. Still others are more realizable: human-embedded computers will track the location of practically anyone, at any time. Other projections-e.g., that most diseases will be reversible or preventable-are less strange but seem similarly Panglossian. ![]() If Kurzweil has it right, in the next few decades humans will download books directly into their brains, run off with virtual secretaries and exist ""as software,"" as we become more like computers and computers become more like us. Along the way, he makes some bizarre predictions. Using clunky prose and an awkward dialogue with a woman from the future, he sets up the history of evolution and technology and then offers a whirlwind tour through the next 100 years. The author is the inventor of reading and speech-recognition machines, among other technologies, but he isn't much of a writer. In his utopian vision of the 21st century, our lives will change not merely incrementally but fundamentally. According to the law of accelerating returns, explains futurist Kurzweil (The Age of Intelligent Machines), technological gains are made at an exponential rate.
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