The Age of Intelligent Machines

Front Cover
Viking, 1992 - Computers - 565 pages
Winner, 1990, category of Computer Science, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

In The Age of Intelligent Machines, inventor and visionary computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil probes the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, from its earliest philosophical and mathematical roots to tantalizing glimpses of 21st-century machines with superior intelligence and truly prodigious speed and memory. Generously illustrated and easily accessible to the nonspecialist, this book provides the background needed for a full understanding of the enormous scientific potential represented by intelligent machines as well as their equally profound philosophic, economic, and social implications.

Running alongside Kurzweil's historical and scientific narrative are 23 articles examining contemporary issues in artificial intelligence.

Raymond Kurzweil is the founder and chairman of Kurzweil Applied Intelligence and the Kurzweil Reading Machine division of Xerox. He was the principal developer of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and other significant advances in artificial intelligence technology.

Articles by: Charles Ames. Margaret A. Boden. Harold Cohen. Daniel C. Dennett. Edward A. Feigenbaum. K. Fuchi. George Gilder. Douglas R. Hofstadter. Michael Lebowitz. Margaret Litven. Blaine Mathieu. Marvin Minsky. Allen Newell. Brian W. Oakley. Seymour Papert. Jeff Pepper. Roger Schank and Christopher Owens. Sherry Turkle. Mitchell Waldrop.

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About the author (1992)

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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