Brainiac dreams

Ray Kurzweil is perhaps best known for his speech software, but future
machines, he says, will do more than listen and talk. Extrapolating like there
was no tomorrow, in The Age of Spiritual Machines he tells us that tomorrow will
belong not to people but to the hyper-intelligent beings they have created. No
bad thing, you might think, if all that people can write is books as brash as
this. Published by Penguin, £14.95, ISBN 0140282025.