Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we'd find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines were creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.

There is one brain organ that is optimised for understanding and articulating logical processes and that is the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex. Unlike the rest of the brain, this relatively recent evolutionary development is rather flat, only about 0.32 cm (0.12 in) thick and includes a mere 6 million neurons. This elaborately folded organ provides us with what little competence we do possess for understanding what we do and who we do it.

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.

The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.

Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.