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 looks ahead to a time in the not-too-distant future when we’ll be able to connect our brains to computers in the cloud.

Individual computers and mobile devices are already billions of times more powerful than their predecessors decades ago, Kurzweil says, but the most interesting things they can do—search the internet, translate a language, answer spoken questions and requests—are made possible by each device’s connection to the millions of computers living in the cloud.

In the future, Kurzweil believes we’ll do away with secondary devices like smartphones in lieu of a direct connection from brain to cloud—and what happens next will be very interesting indeed.

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