The Wall Street Journal — February 10, 2014

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Ray Kurzweil says technology will make us smarter, healthier and more productive. Author, Google engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil tells Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker that advancing technologies will be integrated into ourselves.

He speaks at the Journal’s CIO Network conference in San Diego. Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker spoke with Mr. Kurzweil about what the future holds.

Mr. Baker: Before we get to the year 2045 or 2029, let’s look at some of the advances that we can expect to refine and develop over the next 10 years or so.

Mr. Kurzweil: One is that we’re transforming medicine from kind of a hit-or-miss affair where we find something, hit something, lower his blood pressure, don’t really know why this works, to where we can actually reprogram our biology as software. We have 23,000 little software programs inside us called genes. That’s not a metaphor. They are strings of data. They evolved when conditions were very different.