Are you ready for the merger of human beings and computers? How about tinkering with our genes to allow us to eat as much as we want without getting fat? How would you like to live indefinitely? Ray Kurzweil believes that if you make it into the 2020's, you'll be part of a new world that will have all of this and more.

Kurzweil has spent most of his life decades ahead of the rest of us. He invented the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first music synthesizer to accurately simulate a grand piano and other instruments, the first pocket-size print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first widely marketed speech-recognition device, and many other innovations.

In recent years, he has concentrated on re-examining the technology of life itself.

But are we prepared for the future Kurzweil envisions? Everyone wants a cure for cancer, but do we want microscopic computers controlling our bodies?

Kurzweil, who is 60, is looking forward to it. He follows a strict diet and takes150 vitamin supplements a day to make sure he's around to participate and potentially live indefinitely.

Kurzweil will inaugurate the third season of the Caroline Werner Gannett Project at the Rochester Institute of Technology on Wednesday, September 17. (The title of his talk is the same as his recent book: "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.") In addition to his talk, there will be a "Kurzweilfest" with a panel of faculty members, business people, and students discussing his work on September 15. All events are free. (More information: www.cwgp.org)

The Gannett Project brings to RIT world-class artists, scientists, scholars, and inventors who ask unconventional questions.

During the project's first two years, speakers ranged from philosopher Daniel Dennett to writer and cartoonist, Lynda Barry. Illustrator-designer Maria Kalman and jazz musician DD Jackson are among the speakers in this year's series, "Visionaries in Motion II: the Human Imprint."

But no one embodies that theme more than Kurzweil.

"Ray Kurzweil is a perfect pioneering futurist for us with his stunning record of invention and innovation in business and finance, technologies, artificial intelligence, various sciences, and health," says Dr. Mary Lynn Broe, Caroline Werner Gannett Professor of Humanities.

In a recent interview, Kurzweil talked about his vision of the future. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

City: Some of your predictions sound like science fiction. What do you base them on?

Kurzweil: When I was a student [at Massachusetts Institute of Technology] 40 years ago, MIT shared one computer, taking up half a building. The computer in your cellphone is a million times smaller, a million times cheaper, and a thousand times more powerful.

Every aspect of information technology, even genetic sequencing, has doubled every year, and the price has come down by half every year. Halfway through the Genome Project, skeptics said, "I told you this project wasn't going to work. You're halfway through this 15-year project and you've only finished 1 percent." But that was right on schedule; it had been doubling every year, but doubling little numbers. Once it reached 1 percent it went to 2, 4, 8, 16, 32; seven doublings gets you to 100 percent.

Many other aspects of information technology - the size of the internet, the amount of data we move around every year, telecommunication speeds, the spatial resolution of brain scanning, the amount of data we're getting from the brain - progresses in the same exponential fashion. Computers that now fit in your pocket will fit inside a blood cell, and they'll be very powerful.

That brings us to your theory that microscopic computers will play a large roll in health care in the future.

We'll have blood-cell-size devices, millions of nanobots, keeping us healthy from inside our bodies and interacting with biological neurons in our brains. If this sounds futuristic, we already have a first generation of blood-cell-size devices keeping animals healthy.

One scientist cured Type 1 diabetes in rats with a blood-cell-size device that releases insulin in a controlled fashion and blocks antibodies. At MIT they have a blood-cell-size device that can detect cancer cells and destroy them in the blood stream. Go out 25 years, and these devices will be a billion times more capable and 100,000 times smaller.

When do you see all of this happening?

We will have both the hardware and the software to simulate the whole range of human intelligence by 2029. We'll get the software by reverse-engineering the human brain. Once computers reach human levels of intelligence, they'll combine the flexibility and subtleness of human intelligence with ways machines are already superior to us. They can remember billions of things accurately; I'm pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers.

So humans will become part machine?

It's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to compete with us; we're going to merge with this technology. We'll be putting it inside ourselves, but we'll be essentially making ourselves smarter. We already do that with computers. The fact that you can take a computer out of your pocket and with a few keystrokes access all of human knowledge is certainly an extension of human intelligence. We routinely do intellectual feats that would be impossible without machines.

If you go out to the 2020's and 2030's and you talk to an average biological human, you'll be talking to a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence. There will be, ultimately, millions of nanobots inside that person keeping them healthy, extending their intelligence, putting their brains on the internet, providing full-immersion virtual reality, incorporating all the senses within the nervous system.

If you get to 2045, by my calculations the non-biological portion of our intelligence will be a billion times more capable than the biological portions. We will be principally non-biological. That doesn't mean we'll have done away with the biological part, but the action will be with the non-biological part. We will have multiplied our intelligence a billion-fold.

Your book, "Fantastic Voyage" [written with Terry Grossman] is about life extension and the possibility of living indefinitely.

We talk about three bridges to radical life extension. Bridge 1 is about keeping yourself healthy and slowing down the aging process, which I have succeeded in doing, according to biological aging tests. When I was 40, I came out at 38. I'm now 60, and I come out 40.

The goal of Bridge 1 is to get to Bridge 2 - about 15 years away - the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, being able to reprogram the information processes underlying biology.

We have the genome as of a few years ago; we have the means of actually changing our genes as adults. New forms of gene therapy can add new genes, and we can turn on and off enzymes.

Fifteen years from now, we'll be adding more than a year every year not just to infant life expectancy but to your life expectancy, so there will be a tipping point where you'll be extending your life expectancy by more time than is going by, and the sands of time will start to run in rather than run out.

Bridge 3, 20 to 25 years from now, will bring us to the nanotechnology revolution, where we can go beyond the limitations of biology and extend ourselves with this intimate merger with nanotechnology.

Life expectancy was 37 in 1800. There was no sanitation and no understanding of the germ theory of disease. People got bacterial infections, and there were no antibiotics. Schubert and Mozart died in their 30's; that was typical. Life expectancy was 48 in 1900. When Social Security was put in in 1935, 62 - when you could start receiving Social Security - was considered old. Now, if you watch Mick Jagger prancing around at 65, he doesn't seem particularly old.

This process will go into high gear as we get to the mature phase of the biotechnology revolution. We can treat the information processes in our bodies as software and reprogram and update it. You don't go very long without updating the software in your cellphone, but we've gone thousands of years without updating the software in our bodies.

One example is the fat insulin receptor gene, which basically says: Hold on to every calorie, because next hunting season may not work out well. That was a great idea 1000 years ago; it's not a great idea today in an era of abundance. It underlies an epidemic of obesity.

When that gene was turned off in animal experiments, the animals ate ravenously and remained slim. They didn't get diabetes, heart disease; they lived 20 percent longer than normal mice. Several pharmaceutical companies are rushing to bring fat insulin receptor gene inhibitors to the human market. That's just one of 22,000 genes we'd like to tinker with.

That sort of thing can change as a result of evolution. Are we speeding up evolution?

Biological evolution is continuing, but the cutting edge of evolution is technological evolution. Biological evolution moves at such a slow pace, it's really not relevant. Technological evolution is thousands of times faster and getting faster still.

Do these technologies raise ethical question the way something like cloning does?

I'd be careful of the word "ethics." There are legitimate ethical issues having to do with the safety and deployment of these technologies. Technology has always been a double-edged sword. Ever since fire and stone tools, we've used technology to enhance our creativity and well-being on one hand, but it's also used to magnify our destructiveness on the other.

These new technologies are even more powerful than 20th-century technologies. Biotechnology can, I believe within a decade or so, overcome cancer and heart disease, but it could also be applied by a bio-terrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more deadly, more communicable, or more stealthy.

Where ethics comes in is to deploy standards for responsible practitioners to prevent accidental problems. There's a set of ethical guidelines for biotechnology, and it's actually worked well for the last couple of decades.

The other issue is somebody who intends to be destructive like a bio-terrorist. For that, we need a rapid response system like we have for software viruses. I've been working with the government to develop rapid responses. We have the technology to do it. We can sequence a virus in one day; it took us five years to sequence HIV. We can apply RNA interference to turn off biological viruses.

Sometimes the word "ethics" is applied to the idea that we should not change biology, that it's immoral to change who we are. I don't agree with that. In my view, we are the species who change who we are, and if we didn't do that our life expectancy would still be 23. We haven't stayed on the ground, we haven't stayed on the planet, we haven't stayed with the limitation of our biology.

Do you see any problem in not making room for new generations if we have the ability to live indefinitely?

I don't think that's a problem. If you imagine today with our limitation of resources, a dramatic reduction in the death rate would put a strain on resources. But the same technologies leading to dramatic extensions in life will also provide dramatic increases in resources.

I just wrote the report for the National Academy of Engineering on energy. We're calling for completely replacing fossil fuels with solar energy in 20 years. We're doubling the amount of solar energy every two years. We're only seven or eight doublings from it meeting 100 percent of our energy needs.

If we captured one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on earth, we'd meet 100 percent of our needs. We haven't been able to do that because until recently solar panels have been heavy, inefficient, expensive. The new generation, revolutionized by nanotechnology, are much more efficient, lightweight, cost-effective.

[Google co-founder] Larry Page and I, who jointly worked on this, believe we're less than five years from a tipping point where the cost per watt of solar energy will be less than the cost per watt of fossil-fuel energy. The same thing will be true of water and basically all the material resources we need. We'll have desk-top nano-fabrication units where you can take an information file and create physical products.

Right now I can email you an attachment, and you can turn it into a movie or sound recording. Those used to be physical products. On your Kindle, you can download books wirelessly from Amazon. In the future, I'll be able to email an attachment you can turn into a blouse or a module to build a home. Basically, all of the physical things we need will be information.

A desk-top nano-factory will take input materials, which have a variety of the atoms and molecular building blocks needed. It will be an inexpensive input stock and will, through a massively parallel fabrication process that's computer controlled, basically build, at the molecular level, physical products from information descriptions.

Will we ever be able, in a Star Trek-like way, to beam people from one place to another?

In terms of scanning a person, that sort of thing will ultimately be feasible in that we can capture the information that constitutes a person. That will take longer. That's a 2040 scenario.

In your discussion of artificial intelligence, you debate the implications of philosopher John Searle's Chinese Room Analogy, in which a man or a computer, by following rules, can answer question in Chinese without really understanding Chinese. To extend that idea, a computer can compose music, but can a computer ever compose a Beethoven sonata?

Yes, once it's achieved the full range of human intelligence. One of the advantages of the machine form of human intelligence is that it can operate at high levels of human performance in every field. The reason a computer composing music today doesn't seem like Beethoven is because it's not yet operating at human levels.

John Searle makes the argument that the computer doesn't seem to be operating with the deep understanding of a person. When he makes that analogy, people think of the computer programs they know, which don't have that level of complexity.

You can apply Searle's argument to the human brain itself and prove, according to Searle, that the brain itself has no understanding, because a neuron, which he acknowledges is just a machine, still operates by the law of physics. There's no magical substance in the brain. Once we capture the essence of those methods, we'll be able to capture its capabilities.

But can a computer have, for lack of a better term, a soul or spirit, something most people believe machines could never have, no matter how exponentially they progress?

The key mystery is consciousness, and consciousness is actually not a scientific issue because it's really only apparent to its possessor. We only assume other human beings are conscious; we have no way of experiencing someone else's consciousness.

There's no machine we could envision where we could slide it in and a green light comes on saying, Yeah, this one's conscious, this one's not conscious, that doesn't have some philosophical assumptions built into the machine. Searle might build in the assumption that it has to be biological. [Philosopher] Daniel Dennett would build in a different assumption, that it had to have circuits that reflect on itself.

So when does a computer cross over into consciousness?

This is the heart of my prediction: When we encounter entities that seem conscious and human-like - that unlike today's characters in video games, really have the subtle cues that go along with their emotional statements, and when they say "I'm jealous" or "I'm angry" it's really convincing - then we will come to believe that these entities are conscious, even though they're not biological.

But that's not strictly a philosophical demonstration that they're conscious. Philosophers will say, "Yes, Ray Kurzweil's Ramona avatar [Kurzweil's virtual-reality alter-ego, with whom you can chat on KurzweilAI.net] certainly seems conscious. She's very funny and engaging, but she's not biological. So she's not conscious, just an illusion."

Do you personally believe she is, or will be conscious?

I think so. There's no reason not to consider her conscious if she seems conscious, any more than we consider people to be conscious. For that matter, some people don't seem all that conscious.

This world that you see in the future, is it a better world than the one we have?

It's a good question. There are some risks that are pretty fundamental, some of which exist now. There are 20,000 thermonuclear weapons from the cold war that still exist. They're still on a hair-trigger. It's never mentioned in the presidential debates. So, a half-century ago, we created an existential risk to the survival of our species which didn't exist before. These new technologies could be comparably dangerous.

I'm optimistic. I think you can make a strong argument that human life is far better off due to technology. If you go back 300 years, it was described well by Thomas Hobbes as disaster-prone, poverty-prone, disease-filled, short, brutish. People struggled to survive and worked very, very hard in difficult conditions. That was the plight of 99 percent of humans.

So we've come a long way. There's still a lot of suffering in our midst. I think we'll have the technology to overcome that suffering. We have to work on the down side of these technologies. I believe it will be a better life. That's why I want to be around to see it.