Must read: the coming problem of our iPhones being more intelligent than us

Kurzweil, a renowned futurist and the director of engineering at Google, now says that the hardware needed to emulate the human brain may be ready even sooner than he predicted — in around 2020 — using technologies such as graphics processing units (GPUs), which are ideal for brain-software algorithms. He predicts that the complete brain software will take a little longer: until about 2029.

Add artificial intelligence to the advances in hardware, and you begin to realize why luminaries such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are worried about the creation of a “super intelligence.”  Musk fears that “we are summoning the demon.”  Hawking says it “could spell the end of the human race.”  And Gates wrote: “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”