8 shocking predictions for life after 2020 from Google's genius futurist

Ray Kurzweil is the world's foremost futurist, authoring bestsellers like "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and "How to Create a Mind."

He's so influential that Google hired him to lead its artificial intelligence efforts. 

Kurzweil is known for making predictions, which are right about 86% of the time. 

Here are some of his most promising (and terrifying) visions of the 2020s and beyond.

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By the 2030s, "nanobots" will plug our brains straight into the cloud.

These nanobots, Kurzweil said in a webinar earlier this year, will give us "full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system." 

In other words, our brains will be connected to the cloud.

"Just like how we can wirelessly expand the power of our smartphones 10,000-fold in the cloud today," he says "we'll be able to expand our neocortex in the cloud."

So we'll be able to live, basically, in a virtual world — Matrix style.

Those nanobots will also lead to "radical life extension."

Earlier this month, Kurzweil said that nanobots will "finish the job" of the natural human immune system. 

We'll be able to defeat any disease, even cancer. 

This leads to what futurists call "radical life extension." Kurzweil, like other futurists, considered death a disease to be cured — and nanobots are one of the ways to cure it. 

And they'll make us way funnier.

Kurzweil thinks that our cyborgification will make us more, not less, human. As Kathleen Miles noted at the Huffington Post, nanobots and the like won't just increase our logical intelligence, but our emotional intelligence. 

"We're going to ... create deeper levels of expression," he said. 

Say Kurzweil runs into Google cofounder Larry Page while moseying down the street. If he wanted to say something clever to his boss, he won't need to rely on his brain's computing power. He'll be able to accelerate his wit digitally. 

"I'll be able to access [something clever to say] in the cloud— just like I can multiply intelligence with my smartphone thousands fold today," Kurzweil says.