In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw-one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.

I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things. From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century.

The White Plague by Frank Herbert