From Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.’s new Wall Street Journal interview with the ever-fascinating Ray Kurzweil:

“Mr. Kurzweil’s frank efforts to outwit death have earned him an exaggerated reputation for solemnity, even caused some to portray him as a humorless obsessive. This is wrong. Like the best comedians, especially the best Jewish comedians, he doesn’t tell you when to laugh. Of the pushback he receives from certain theologians who insist death is necessary and ennobling, he snarks, ‘Oh, death, that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing.’

‘People say, ‘Oh, only the rich are going to have these technologies you speak of.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, like cellphones.’

To listen to Mr. Kurzweil or read his several books (the latest: How to Create a Mind) is to be flummoxed by a series of forecasts that hardly seem realizable in the next 40 years. But this is merely a flaw in my brain, he assures me. Humans are wired to expect ‘linear’ change from their world. They have a hard time grasping the ‘accelerating, exponential’ change that is the nature of information technology.

‘A kid in Africa with a smartphone is walking around with a trillion dollars of computation circa 1970,’ he says. Project that rate forward, and everything will change dramatically in the next few decades.

‘I’m right on the cusp,’ he adds. ‘I think some of us will make it through’—he means baby boomers, who can hope to experience practical immortality if they hang on for another 15 years.”