Rating: 
Summary: One of the best books I have ever read
Review: This book was nothing short of a scientific revelation for me. After reading it I found myself thinking about the points made in it for weeks afterward. My poor friends had to endure my constant babbling and many bought the book just so they wouldn't have to listen to me any longer. This book changes the way you will look at the future and will put many vague notions you might have about where technology is going into sharp focus. A must read for anyone interested in technology and the future.
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Summary: Self promotion at its finest
Review: If anyone who reads this desires to predict the future, I highly recommend incorporating your specified field of employment in your prediction. In fact you should probably write a book explaining why the certain field that you so happen to be involved in will most certainly have a huge impact on the future. Take it from me I'm an expert on this stuff. Mr. Kurzweil is obviously a genius of the highest caliber and although not included as suggested reading in his book he would highly recommend two books that may aid other ambitious authors. His first new recommendation to any author with the intention of securing their job is "Virus Of The Mind: The New Science of the Meme" by Richard Brodie. This book should help the ambitious author devise a sure-fire method guaranteed to convince their audience of how truly important they will become in the future. Secondly, "The Art of War" by Sun Tsu will teach the ambitious author how to use their newly acquired understanding of the Meme. Unfortunately my book, "RichieRobotic: The One and Only True God" Is not selling well due to poor distribution.
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Summary: A prediction worth studying
Review: I have never read a book by Kurzweil before. If you follow his advice and read the book as you like it is astounding.He is also expressing himself in a way easy to understand for us people not having english as our native tounge.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Sci-fi and vision
Review: Superbly articulated view of where technology may lead with plenty of justification. Having a character appear peiodically thatl ives through the century is creative and highly effective. Great book for visionary thinking and planning as we move forward (and out of our bodies?)
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Summary: Must read for anyone interested in how things may pan out
Review: I bought the book after attending a symposium organised by DougHofstadter at Stanford and featuring Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec(among others.) It really is a best seller in the US - at least intech book terms - WAKE UP Britian! The central theme of this book (and Moravec's Mind Children and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind and Paul & Cox's Beyond Humanity), is that we are approaching the crossover ie we are roughly 20 years away from when machine intelligence will overtake human intelligence. And that once this happens, machine intelligence will accelerate into uncharted waters. I think that a convincing case is built that we are on track to do this within approximately this time span. It's quite possible to nit-pick over much of what Kurzweil says - but that's not the point. The point is the general vision of where we are headed. Kurzweil's view is that there is a 50% plus chance that humanity will make it through this transitory phase (ie the next century), that we will successfully combat the comming threats of self replicating biotech pathogens, software pathogens and self replicating nanopathogens, to complete the process of integration with our technology - and abandonment of our biological roots that we are now in the early/final stages of. Early because we are currently only fractionally fused with our technology (language, books, machines etc). Final because the maybe 40,000 year process is, because of the exponential acceleration of technological development, perhaps only 50-100 years or so away from completion. I guess this is likely to seem utterly far fetched to 99.9% of the public - just as would mobile phones, the internet and robotic jet travel have seemed beyond belief to a 1900 audience. My belief is that these guys are very much on the right track. Bottom line - If you are interested in how this century might pan out, this is as good a place to start as any. END
Rating:
Summary: Two thumbs up!
Review: Visionary works like this are by their very nature speculative. How can one predict the future, except by looking at the past? The patterns that men and nature itself have followed are profoudly woven into Kurzweil's vision of what the future "might" hold. And what an exciting future it would be. I read this book months ago and it is still as fresh in my mind as it was then. Most notably, his discourse on nanotechnology was as frightening as it was inspiring. I highly recommend this book.
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Summary: Arrogant, sensationalist pseudoscience
Review: This book begins by introducing a few interesting ideas about the advancement of technology, and I was hoping for an intelligent discussion of at least some of them. No such luck. Instead, the author makes wild claims with no support whatsoever. Give me a break!
Rating: 
Summary: Two books in one
Review: The Age of Spiritual Machines is really two books in one. The first (5 stars) presents "laws" dealing with technology. If you want to know why "life" just seems to be getting faster and a little more crazy every day, read this book (because it is and you "ain't seen nothing yet"). Mr. Kurzweil's thesis that our technologies are now entering the steep incline of exponential growth is well reasoned and presented and, if you really understand the implications, both exciting and terrifying. What is missing here is a corollary to his Law of Accelerating Returns, the "Law of Decreasing Predictability" (in short, the more complex the technology, the less chance we have of understanding how it will behave over time). The second book (1 star), beginning somewhere between chapters 4 and 6, deals not with the accelerating growth of technology but predictions of (speculations about) the forms this technology might take. The reasoning and presentation qualities that make the first book worth reading are not here. (There is, however, a rather bizarre 3rd-person form of narcissism in Kurzweil's dialogues with "Molly" that should interest psych majors...) Had Kurzweil seriously addressed the unpredictability of complex systems, the reasons software advancements lag behind hardware performance (and how his Law of Accelerating Returns applies), the fact that no one will understand how machines complex enough to exceed human intelligence work (or break down), the steps we should be taking NOW to minimize the obvious risks (and maximize the advantages), etc., this would have been a much better book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but quickly looses force
Review: The first two chapters I found to be interesting, particularly the equation of evolution with technology. After that intial proposition was flushed out I found the book to be boring. I am not at all against the progress of technology, but I found his answers against the misuse of the technology lacking. And while his industry knowledge is varied, and his attempts into philosphy interesting overall he does not address several key issues. I fear his optimistic world-view of the future is rooted in an illusion of the present world-situation for more than 4 billion people in countries where the technological power of the latest Pentium XIIII billion is not the driving force. If he is right about the inevitablity and increasingly rapid march of technology (and I think he is) I should hope that there is an equal increasingly rapid march of humanism. His typical answer seems to be that "in the future technology will solve ... X". Historically not only has that sort of thinking been determential to those of the current generation who are simply used to fuel some utopia of the next, but it betrays the power of the vision that he holds. In short he is on to something, he is smart man who understands technology in a very organic and useful way, but there is so much more that could have been addressed. To that effect considering the space he take to flesh out his predictions, and then essentially restate them, or plug his own innovations, it hardly seems a pragmatic matter but one simply based a lack of will. Which seems to me the scarest prospect of all.
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Summary: Filled to the brim with arrogance
Review: I found the first two parts quite informative while the third and last part, about Mr. Kurzweil vision of the future, was truly painful to read. It read like it was already generated by one of rather limited prose-generating programs described in the book. Discussion of art in the future demonstrated Kurzweil's lack of understanding what art is all about and where it is coming from. It's not about generating something that looks like art and being able to sell it, it comes from the need to express. In the wonderful world of Mr. Kurzweil there will be no need to express anything. Being myself involved in research in one of the cuttin-edge field described in the book, in no way opposing the progress of technology, and generally being an optimist, I found the book scary. It is scary because it shows the hollow arrogance, lack of sense of responsibility, lack of understanding of anything around the world but the author's stock market value, and above all, because Kurzweil's line of thought seems to be a very influential one in America. As Carl Sagan put it in "Pale Blue Dot": "Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish." For a far less arrogant and more responsible view where the technology might be taking us, see the article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" by Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems in the April 2000 edition of Wired magazine.
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