Gigantic, a big big brain

Ten years ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin couldn’t stop talkingabout their excitement at the prospect of extending or replacing the human brain with computers. For the last several years, they’ve been much quieter about their mind-disruption project. I sense that a soldierin Google’s flak army warnedthem that in voicing their fantasies they riskedweirding people out. Renovating the species is a job best done on the sly.

Still, we’llalways have Ray Kurzweil. (I mean that literally.) When, in 2...