The Speculist

Ray Kurzweil gets the first word in James Gardner's new book:

The explosive nature of exponential growth means it may only take a quarter of a millennium to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes. The ongoing expansion of our future superintelligence will then require moving out into the rest of the universe, where we may engineer new universes.

Sure, you could not read the whole thing, but what would be the point of that?

Or you could just the buy the book:

Whatever. We're flexible.

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

In addition to Kurzweil's forward, don't miss the excerpt of Gardner's book that was published at KurzweilAI.

The book is the story of an idea, and the idea is quite simple: The best way to think about life, intelligence, and the universe is that they are not separate things, but are different aspects of a single phenomenon... To state this proposition from the opposite perspective, the universe is coming to life and waking up through the processes of our lives and thoughts, and, very probably, through the lives and thoughts of countless other beings scattered throughout the cosmos.