Futurist Ray Kurzweil optimistically predicts much longer life expectancies, cures for cancer and heart disease, flying cars and robot butlers.

Humans will become capable of feats that now seem impossible — for many of us, in our lifetime — in large part due to expected advances in brain research, posits the inventor and author in his new book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, due out next month.

Key to his predictions, which he’s also outlined in a series of other books including The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near, is the law of accelerating returns. Kurzweil suggests the pace of information technology advances will grow at an exponential pace until sometime near the end of the century. […]