Ray Kurzweil control over the flow of information. In the book, Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to predict that computers would beat the best human players "by the year 2000". In May 1997, chess World Champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue computer in a well-publicized chess match. Perhaps most significantly, Kurzweil foresaw the explosive growth in worldwide Internet use that began in the 1990s. At the time of the publication of "The Age of Intelligent Machines", there were only 2.6 million Internet users in the world, and the medium was unreliable,
The Deep Blue Good-by time, we see the American culture change, from the Kennedy years in "The Deep Blue Good-bye" through the upheaval of hippie counterculture and the sexual revolution of the late 60s and 70s until the last book in the series at the end of the Reagan years in the mid-80s. As a chronicler of the cultural zeitgeist, MacDonald has been compared favorably with Charles Dickens. Reading the McGee novels in sequence therefore gives the reader a fascinating experience of seeing McGee change through the decades as American culture also changes. When MacDonald created the character, he was to be called Dallas