“Within a quarter-century, we will have completed the reverse engineering of the human brain and will understand its principles of operation,” says Ray Kurzweil in Time Magazine’s Feb. 9, 2003 issue on “The Secret of Life.”

The special issue explores how cracking the DNA code has changed how we live and features an invited panel of scientists and science writers who imagine the world 50 years from now.

Kurzweil says that by then, we will then be able to implement “biologically inspired” methods of information processing using far more powerful computational technology that “combines our human strengths in pattern recognition and emotional and artistic intelligence with the speed, capacity and knowledge sharing of machines.”

The emergence of this new form of intelligence will exceed human intelligence and “will have profound implications for all aspects of human endeavor, including the nature of work, learning, government, warfare, the arts and our concept of ourselves. Our biological intelligence is for all practical purposes fixed, whereas nonbiological intelligence is at least doubling in power every year, so by 2053, it will dominate.”