If you know electronic synthesized music, you know the work of Ray Kurzweil. But the MIT futurist and transhumanist has many more inventions to his name than electronic keyboards. He’s also developed a cult following for his prediction of the merging of humans and computers, which he describes in his book The Singularity Is Near. And in a forthcoming book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he offers the most advanced explanation to date for how our brains work.

In the opening session of Techonomy 2012 in Tucson today, Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick interviewed Kurzweil on stage. Their conversation covered the exponential progression of software, how the brain works, what it will mean to think “in the Cloud” or have the intelligence of IBM’s Watson computer at our fingertips, and what functions humans will still have once computers can do the jobs of even the most educated among us. […]