Raymond Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields as diverse as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil

In this clip, Ray discusses why we should consider ourselves to be "patterns of information," and how using this conception we can imagine a future when non-biological systems can be both conscious and match (or exceed) present levels of human intelligence.