Traditional two-dimensional data storage is reaching its limit. Now, squeezing a terabyte of data, the equivalent of 200 compact disks, on to a single CD-sized hologram may soon be possible. It is also believed it will be possible to read the data at one gigabit per second - 100 times faster than a DVD drive. The advance, reported in New Scientist, has been made possible by a new kind of polymer, developed at the Bayer Institute in Leverkusen, Germany. The scientists expect to make the technology work within five years. Bayer's new photo-addressable polymer (PAP) has chain-like molecules which become aligned when polarised laser light passes through and stay like that even after the beam has been turned off. The alignment can then be read by an unpolarised laser beam without affecting the data.

In four decades computers will be smarter than we are. Their software will imitate our brains so well that you won't know whether it's a person or machine you're dealing with on the phone or the Internet.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a big disappointment to many early backers, but that's because they expected too much too soon, according to Raymond Kurzweil, AI guru and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, January 1999), his third book.

Kurzweil is interested in finding a way to "reverse engineer" the human brain so that we can download everything about ourselves—our memories, our dreams, our personalities—into a computer, a process he calls "reinstantiation." Immortality at last.

The line between machines and people will blur even further as we age and we'll be inserting machines into people to replace aging or inadequate body and mind functions. Just as artificial hips now restore human body functions, so too will neural implants enhance our hearing, vision and memory.

Kurzweil, 50, is not just a dreamer. Over the past 25 years he has built and sold four companies. His first, Kurzweil Computer Products, built a reading machine for the blind and was bought by Xerox. One of its first customers was musician Stevie Wonder, whose friendship with Kurzweil led to the development of computerized music synthesizers.

FORBES recently met with Kurzweil.

Forbes: Is your new book science or science fiction?

K: If anything, my views are conservative. The predictions are based on technologies you can touch and feel today.

Forbes: Your book gets pretty weird: People scan their brains into a computer and create self-replicas.

K: By 2040 it will be routine. If you build a computer based on the design of the human brain and instantiate information from a human being onto that computer, it will emerge in the machine and claim to be that person. The machine will say, "I grew up in Brooklyn, I went to MIT, then I walked into a scanner and woke up here in the machine."

Forbes: How are you going to reproduce a human brain?

K: We can just copy it, bit by bit, connection by connection, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. Human neurons are not so vastly complicated that we can't understand them or replicate them. We've already replicated the input-output characteristics of clusters of hundreds of neurons.

Forbes: Would you reinstantiate yourself?

K: Probably. But I may end up jealous of the new Ray in that he shares my history, my desires and my longings, but will be in a far better position than old Ray to fulfill them. These are going to be very smart entities—much smarter than humans. And that's really where power lies. Ultimately these entities will have political power. They will have all the political power.

Forbes: This is good news?

K: Some people who've read the book have come away feeling depressed. They get the idea that human beings are ending, that civilization is ending. Actually we will continue, but in a much more profound way. We are going to become smarter by merging with our machines.

Forbes: A lot of folks will say, stop the world, I want to get off.

K: It's unstoppable. This is not an alien invasion. It's emerging from within our civilization. We're already pretty intimate with our computers. As we move forward, the nexus between machines and humans will become even more intimate.

Anti-gravity, a driving force of science fiction, may exist, say scientists. New evidence that the universe's expansion is speeding up may force astronomers to invoke anti-gravity in order to explain what they have seen. Astronomers told a Chicago conference that their studies of distant star explosions imply that there is another, exotic force pulling the universe outwards.

Since the universe began, it has been coasting outwards, inflating like a balloon. Until recently it was thought that gravity put a brake on the expansion. If anti-gravity exists, it means there is a new fundamental constituent of the universe which would cause big problems for current theories.

The computer chips that physicist Marvin Cohen and his colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have in mind are so small and powerful that four wine bottles could contain enough to store all the information in all the human brains in the world. A thread of the same circuits less than one-hundredth of an inch long could easily hold all the information in all the books ever written.

These theoretical computer circuits would be constructed from complex carbon molecules called nanotubes that have the same electrical properties as the silicon semiconductors used in most computers today. They would be a hundred times stronger than steel, as fast as a conventional supercomputer and, best of all, would assemble themselves. These are chips measured in nanometers: one billionth of a meter--the size of some viruses. They promise circuits 100 times smaller than the most miniature devices available today--computers that can be woven into clothing, painted onto walls, injected into the bloodstream or sprinkled like fairy dust in the air.

It is one vision of what lies beyond Silicon Valley, when the technology of conventional semiconductors has exhausted its possibilities and the cost of producing increasingly complex silicon chips becomes more than anyone can pay.

But scientists have yet to discover a way to assemble these molecules for nanocomputers into the flawless circuits that today's computers demand. It is not for want of trying. Already, scientists wielding electron beams like arc welders have built experimental structures thousands of times smaller than a human hair--gears that turn, pumps that operate, electric turbines only 60 microns in diameter that run on static electricity, transistors only 10 atoms in diameter.

IBM researchers recently built a working abacus in which carbon molecules slide along microscopic copper grooves. Not to be outdone, two Cornell University scientists crafted a guitar just 10 microns long, about the size of a single cell. They pluck its six silicon strings--each about 100 atoms wide--with an atomic force microscope.

Can the next 10 decades possibly bring as much that is new, different, illuminating, amazing, or horrifying as this century's basket of theories, discoveries, and inventions? We're so accustomed to rapid change that we have lost track of an essential truth: The past two centuries were not typical. The 20th century dawned with commuters in horse-drawn buggies, yet was already dreaming, halfway through, of the flying car and rockets to Mars. Inventors and engineers had pitched in with the telegraph, telephones, and electric lights; immense mills and foundries; locomotives and steel-boned buildings; armored war machines and automobiles.

Just think what has happened in the past 100 years or so. People have figured out DNA, and if we wanted to, we could clone people in pretty short order. Physicists have given us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants. Men have walked on the moon. The Internet is ushering in a completely connected world. Hand-held gadgets tell us just where we are, via satellite triangulation, and cell phones let us call hello from anywhere. It is hard to get lost, and hard to hide.

The three young men at the top of the stairs in MIT's Media Lab look pretty weird.

Leonard Foner resembles a collision between an oversized kid and a Nintendo machine. A chunky eyepiece, apparently scavenged from a camcorder, protrudes from his left eye, supported by Terminator sunglasses. A black vest girdled with circuits and computer hardware wraps his upper body, and a hard drive nestles in the small of his back.

His buddy, Thad Starner, looks less menacing. He sports clear plastic safety goggles and carries his computer in a shoulder bag.

The third researcher, Brad Rhodes, looks too jolly to be scary. His kinky hair is trying to escape from under a cap which has an eyepiece dangling from its brim. He clutches a small keypad in his left hand, and his fingers twitch furiously as he takes notes on a miniature computer.

They belong to a group of grad students who have dubbed themselves the 'borg. They are researching "wearables": personal--very personal--computers small enough to fit into eyeglasses and hip pouches but powerful enough to access the world's information.

By transcending the limits that nature imposed on our all-too-human flesh, researchers at MIT and elsewhere find themselves poking at the edges of fundamental questions. The answers may change forever what it means to be human.

In small pouches, the borg carry their processing chips, hard drives, wireless modems and batteries. They often have a miniature video monitor--sort of like a camcorder viewscreen--affixed to modified eyeglasses or suspended from a hat brim. Instead of a keyboard or a mouse, a handheld keypad allows them to enter data almost as fast as someone can talk. The wearable software can remind them of appointments, and let them take notes and surf the Internet.

But the potential is much greater. While the handheld electronic organizers of today can help schedule your life, those of the future may help you live it.

Soon, says 'borg Brad Rhodes, the wearables will be able to recognize speech and faces. And software he is developing, called a "remembrance agent," will watch over you 24 hours a day, every day, supplying you with the information you need in any given situation.

Example: You recognize someone but can't remember her name. Your wearable analyzes her face and scans a database of people you've met. The machine makes a match and displays the dossier on a tiny screen hanging in front of your eye or maybe whispers through tiny speakers in your ears. Now you know her name, occupation and any e-mail correspondence you may have had.

While you two talk, your wearable parses the chit-chat, tapping into global databases via a wireless modem for data relevant to your conversation. As you talk about how hot it's been lately, the agent sifts through newspaper clippings feeding you the latest news on, say, global warming. Data without end.

Wearables may be only an interim step. As disk drives and computer chips shrink and streamline, the next step may be to implant tiny computer parts under the skin or behind the ears. The electrical energy in your body could supply the power. Fillings in your teeth could be the antennae for your Internet connection, which could pump the data to a heads-up display built into your eyeglasses.

"The line between human and computer at some point will become completely blurred," predicted Alvin Toffler in his 1981 book "The Third Wave."

That kind of technology, admittedly, is years away, but the implications are troubling. Hacking the body to install a computer that becomes part of you, that grants instant access to the sum of human knowledge.… Well, it sounds almost godlike.