Ray Kurzweil is a legendary inventor with a history of mind-blowing ideas. Now he’s onto something even bigger. If he’s right, the future will be a lot weirder and brighter than you think.

He is “an inventor whose work in artificial intelligence has dazzled technological sophisticates for four decades…. The magic that has enabled all his innovations has been the science of pattern recognition….

“By 2027, he predicts, computers will surpass humans in intelligence; by 2045 or so, we will reach the Singularity, a moment when technology is advancing so rapidly that ‘strictly biological’ humans will be unable to comprehend it….

“But a number of his predictions have had a funny way of coming true. Back in the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening).”