If CIOs think they have a challenging job today, look what's on the horizon.

In the fourth of a five-part interview, the IT innovator and futurist Ray Kurzweil sees the Internet rapidly evolving to a world-wide mesh, tied together by an unimaginable number of devices, including ones embedded in the environment, on our clothing, and inside our bodies. Devices now spokes on the network, such as cell phones and wireless PDAs, will become nodes. Search engines of the future won't wait for us to ask; they'll anticipate the information we'll seek.

Will such massive networking ensure job security for future CIOs? I ponder what Kurzweil's cyrstal ball says about that.

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Earlier Podcasts of the Kurzweil interview:

* Singularity explained.
* Thinking machines with emotions.
* Civil liberties for machines.

Later Podcast:

* Privacy threatened. Check out the Podcast Directory at InformationWeek.com on Friday.