Here's the trick: By then, computers will possess emotions and personality. "When I talk about computers reaching human levels of intelligence, I'm not talking about logical intelligence," Kurzweil said at an event in New York on Monday night. "It is being funny, and expressing a loving sentiment... That is the cutting edge of human intelligence." The futurist spoke about AI and the future of technology with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil made a thought-provoking presentation at a recent trade show for medical device companies, MD&M, in Anaheim, California. At one point during his 45-minute talk he shifted his attention to solar. Explaining the accelerating rate of technical progress, Kurzweil said technical developments form very predictable trajectories, and those trajectories are exponential. Consider the progress of the computing industry, he said. He spoke about his cell phone, which he said is several billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer he used as an undergraduate at MIT. "I went to MIT because it was so advanced that it actually had a computer in the late 1960s," Kurzweil said.

Ray Kurzweil wants to set the record straight on artificial intelligence. Yeah, sure, some elements of the narrative about developing computers that can think like humans have been exaggerated. But--A.I. technology is already much more advanced than you probably think it is. That was the theme of a conversation between Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, and CNBC's Bob Pisani at the Exponential Finance conference in New York City on Wednesday. Kurzweil, named one of Inc. magazine's "26 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs" back in 2005--we referred to him as "Edison's rightful heir"--is an inventor and futurist responsible for the first machine to recognize printed text and the first print-to-speech reading device, among other inventions.