Artificial intelligence might beat nanotech in the annihilation stakes–or in making heaven on earth. Raymond Kurzweil, a well informed computer insider, estimates that in about thirty years there will be programmed computers with human level intelligence. At first glance that suggests a world of science fiction robots–if we are lucky, obeying us and doing the dirty work. But if in thirty years computers are as smart as we are and if current rates of improvement–for computers but not for humans–continue, that means that in forty years we will be sharing the planet with beings at least as much smarter than we are as we are smarter than chimpanzees.[4] Kurzweil's solution is for us to get smarter too–to learn to do part of our thinking in silicon. That could give us a very strange world–populated by humans, human/machine combinations, machines programmed with the contents of a human mind that think they are that human, machines that have evolved their own intelligence, and much else.