The format is a combination of monograph and anthology with contributed essays by artificial intelligence experts such as Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, and Marvin Minsky.

[9] The field of artificial intelligence presupposes that the human brain is a machine, and that an alternative implementation could be built, as a computer program, which would have the same faculties as the real thing.

Kurzweil traces the philosophical underpinnings of this tenet, as well as the opposing view that properties such as consciousness and free will are unique to the human mind.

[10] Kurzweil also presents the mathematical roots of artificial intelligence including contributions by Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, and Kurt Gödel.

[13] Kurzweil traces various ways of doing pattern recognition, from the rise and fall of perceptrons to random neural nets and decision trees, finally explaining that intelligence is a hierarchy of heterogeneous processes "communicating and influencing each other".

[21] As a high school student Kurzweil built a computer which could compose music and demonstrated it on the national TV show I've Got a Secret.

If these trends continue, Kurzweil argues, we will see a "translating telephone" by 2010, intelligent assistants by the mid-1990s, and a "completely driverless car" by "well into the first half" of the 21st century.

[30] All the advanced capability will alter the domain of warfare as well, leading to laser and particle beam weapons, and planes without human pilots.

[31] Medicine will entail computer diagnosticians, coordinated data banks of patient histories, realistic simulations for drug designers, and robotically assisted surgery.

[33] Kurzweil concludes the book by explaining that all of these advances will challenge us; as computers do ever more tasks that used to be our sole domain, as our intelligence is rivaled and then eclipsed by machines, he feels we will need to figure out what makes us human.

[34] Sprinkled throughout the book are 23 essays, 4 of them by Kurzweil himself and 19 others by invited authors: Margaret Litvin, Daniel Dennett, Mitchell Waldrop, Sherry Turkle, Blaine Mathieu, Seymour Papert, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Edward Feigenbaum, Jeff Pepper, K. Fuchi, Brian Oakley, Harold Cohen, Charles Ames, Michael Lebowitz, Roger Schank and Christopher Owens, Allen Newell, Margaret Boden, and George Gilder.

[35] The book closes with a "chronology" listing events from the age of the dinosaurs to the year 2070,[36] fifty pages of end notes and suggested readings,[37] a glossary[38] and an index.

[39] Jay Garfield in the New York Times wrote that Kurzweil is "clear, current and informative" when writing about areas he has worked directly in, but "sloppy and vague" when talking about philosophy, logic and psychology.

Of the prediction for a "translating telephone" by the first decade of the 21st century, Garfield says Kurzweil overlooks "the mammoth difficulties that confront anyone who tries to accomplish such a task".

[42] Linda Strauss, writing for Science, Technology, & Human Values, calls the book "a rich assemblage of glittering parts, rather awkwardly joined".