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

I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents.

Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.

In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic.

The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense.

What we found was that rather than being haphazardly arranged or independent pathways, we find that all of the pathways of the brain taken together fit together in a single exceedingly simple structure. They basically look like a cube. They basically run in three perpendicular directions, and in each one of those three directions the pathways are highly parallel to each other and arranged in arrays. So, instead of independent spaghettis, we see that the connectivity of the brain is, in a sense, a single coherent structure.

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.