Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change

Ray Kurzweil is sitting in an office in San Francisco’s tallest building overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Over 45 minutes, speaking rapidly in monotone sentences dense with facts and ideas, Google’s director of engineering has outlined a future for the world that would seem incredible, were it not that this man has a 30-year track record of making seemingly bonkers predictions that have proved to be accurate. Among other things, Kurzweil predicted that the internet would become central to our lives when it was still a niche and unreliable network in the Eighties; he pinpointed when computers would be able to beat humans at chess, eight years before the world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue; and he foresaw the collapse of