He said: ‘I believe that within the next 20 years we will have thousands of nanobot computer machines in our blood that will heal our bodies, improve our performance, and even be able to back up all the contents of our brains, just as you backup your files on a computer.

‘That means they would back up every thought, every experience, everything that makes us an individual.’

‘It may sound far-fetched but in the early 1980s, people thought I was crazy for predicting the emergence of the world wide web by the middle of the 1990s; but it happened, and on the schedule I predicted.’