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The "Age of Spiritual Machines" guy, Ray Kurzweil, came to Philadelphia three years after that book had come out and gave a talk to the otherwise dull two-day conference sponsored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Kurzweil is never dull, though. Even
a routine account of his presence at that 2003 confab published in the
Philadelphia Inquirer suggests the sort of things - e.g. machines that wrote poems - this always-ahead-of-his-time fellow had in mind. "Our biological thinking is fixed. But our nonbiological thinking will grow exponentially."