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If Ray Kurzweil Is Right (Again), You’ll Meet His Immortal Soul in the Cloud

The famed futurist remains inhumanly optimistic about the world and his own fate—and thinks the singularity is minutes away.

The 76-year-old scientist and engineer has spent much of his time on earth arguing that humans can not only take advantage of yet-to-be-invented medical advances to live longer, but also ultimately merge with machines, become hyperintelligent, and stick around indefinitely. Still, even though I’m bowled over by the technological advances that Kurzweil correctly predicted, I have trouble wrapping my (unaugmented) mind around his sunny scenario of our disembodied brains thriving hundreds of years from now in some kind of cloud consciousness. As we spoke, Kurzweil periodically reached into a backpack to pull out a few charts, all showing dramatic improvements in domains ranging from computing power to average global income.

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