As hundreds of movies have gleefully told us, our eventual subjugation by robots is inevitable. According to a new interview with Ray Kurzweil we’ll be helping by implanting them into our own brains (BBC).

Founder of the Kurzweil Technologies company, Kurzweil is a futurologist who has actually got things right in the past including when computers would beat humans at chess. So his claims may stand a closer look. As well as speculating that we will soon be embedding nano-robots into our bodies, he thinks machines themselves will achieve ‘human level intelligence’ by 2029.

“We’re already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. … We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told the BBC.

Even though he apparently counts Alien and The Matrix as among his favourite movies, he added this caveat: “But that’s not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us.”

Mind you if those robots want to get up to our level they’re going to have to get serious. The latest one to come to the Great Beyond’s attention monitors your brainwave patterns and does an interpretive dance based on the results (that’s the video above, in case you were wondering). It’s part of an exhibition entitled BRAINWAVE: Common Senses, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York (featured recently in Nature; subscription required).