Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, thinker, and futurist famous for forecasting the pace of technology and predicting the world of tomorrow.

In this video, Kurzweil predicts when he thinks we’ll get programmable matter—or the ability to manipulate everyday objects at the atomic level—and what that means not just for the things around you, but for you as a person.

According to Kurzweil, beginning with virtual reality in the digital realm and moving into the physical with programmable matter, people will make themselves into avatars of other people, or even each other.