Are you smarter than your laptop?

Smarter than me!

Imagine a world in which millions of farmers in China can access most of human knowledge with devices they carry in their pockets.

Oops! That's true today.

Imagine a world in which your laptop has the power of Watson, the IBM super computer that emerged the victor against human competitors on "Jeopardy!".

Not far away, says Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and futurist.

The ratio of computer price to performance is now doubling in less than a year, so 90 servers would become the equivalent of one server in about seven years, and the equivalent of one personal computer within a decade. However, with the growth in cloud computing—in which supercomputer capability is increasingly available to anyone via the Internet—Watson-like capability will actually be available to you much sooner. 

Given this, I expect Watson-like "natural language processing" (the ability to "understand" ordinary English) to show up in Google, Bing and other search engines over the next five years.

"Jeopardy!", Kurzweil writes, involves understanding complexities of humor, puns, metaphors, analogies, ironies and other subtleties.

That's something I can't do today.