If a human and a computer both read a single page of comedy, the human would be at an enormous advantage. The computer wouldn't have a chance. But if we asked both a human and a computer to read 200 million pages, the tables are turned. The human wouldn't know where to begin and the computer would go on to win Jeopardy!

The futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil explains how computational power lies in its scalability...