Ray Kurzweil: Computers Will Not Rob Us of Our Humanity. They Will Make Us More Profoundly Human.

Join us live at Entrepreneur's Accelerate Your Business event series in Chicago or Denver. If visionaries such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are to be believed, artificial intelligence will create a frightening, dystopian future where mortals are at the mercy of their robot overlords. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who also happens to be Google's director of engineering, is far more optimistic. In a talk with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson held Monday night as part of the 7 Days of Genius Festival, he said that the rise of artificial intelligence won't destroy or enslave us -- instead, it will turbocharge our creative humanity. Computer intelligence is accelerating at an exponential rate: By 2029, computers will reach the level of human intelligence, predicts Kurzweil.