In his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that computers will be as smart as humans by 2029, and that by 2045, “computers will be billions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence,” Kurzweil wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Singularity, for those mere mortals who are unaware, is the theoretical emergence of a super-intelligence through technological means. First proposed by mathematician John von Neumann, it is the time when “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” […]