It might sound silly to you or I, but Ray Kurzweil prays for machine intelligence. Kurzweil is popularly known as one of the high priests of transhumanism, or the belief that technology will eventually supersede human biology. He shows up in Google and the World Brain to explain the so-called singularity, or that moment in time — in 2045, if Kurzweil is right — when machines finally outpace human intelligence. After Lewis completed his film, Kurzweil became Google’s new director of engineering.

And it can be that — and indeed I’ve done debate shows with Ray Kurzweil, and I think we’re very entertaining — but the problem with it is that it serves as a sort of way of framing less extreme things that are happening, which are actually destroying people’s lives more slowly. […]