Sometimes during the course of a week, you hear two people who are so harmoniously unalike they seem almost to define the poles of human intellectual reach and temperament.

I felt this way when I heard these different profiles on CBC Radio's Ideas. One was on the inventor and author Ray Kurzweil and the other on the writer and farmer Wendell Berry.

Both men could not be more at odds, but when they spun their respective tales, they sounded like the melodious dueling banjos in the 1970's film Deliverance.

Adding to the counterpoint, both men have voices that match their ideas: Kurzweil's is upbeat and chipper, while Berry's is full of sweet and sad lament.

In brief, Kurzweil is the visionary techno-geek who believes science will save us. Berry is the classical man of caution who feels that technology and science have run amok and are ruining our lives, not to mention the planet.

The factory farm

Berry, as presented by my colleague, David Cayley, is beautifully spoken. The portrait is part of Cayley's series, "How to Think About Science."

Berry is in his 70s now and has been writing fiction and essays for almost half a century. He also farms in the hill country of Kentucky.

In his measured and cultivated manner, he tells us how science has devastated that countryside.

Berry says he has no beef against science — when it is employed wisely and when it knows its limits. But the technology that agribusiness employs is like a great man-made tsunami. It sweeps over the land and degrades the local ecosystems.

Good farming is supposed to be attuned to local conditions. But agribusiness sees the landscape as a uniform factory fit only for production and profit.

We have heard these complaints before, of course, but rarely so achingly portrayed.

With Berry, there is no wariness about "the idiocy of rural life," to use Karl Marx's phrase, no urge to get free from the confines of back-breaking labour.

There is no desire here, either, about wanting to move from the backwoods to the city. In fact, Berry did the reverse and returned to the country. When you hear him speak, it seems as if farming is like writing, a labour of love.

Dream on

Berry's books include Life is a Miracle and The Unsettling of America. Like the late Canadian philosopher George Grant, his voice is a lament for a nation.

Agribusiness defenders may say, as one said to me, "dream on:" North America and, increasingly, the world are city-centric and farms must feed these many millions of urban dwellers. Food is a commodity. You can be romantic all you want, but sentiment won't keep humanity from starving.

True, I am not planning to return to the countryside or even grow vegetables in a garden in the backyard. The landscape of my world is largely human made. My kids played video games and could not have cared less about fetching frogs from the local pond, now long paved over.

What price I pay in terms of soul or health for my food, I pay without thinking.

Berry wants us to think about the choices we make in a world run by all but totalitarian technologists. They are like gods. They want us to believe that what they do to ensure the food supply is inevitable, part of our common fate.

Depressed, I take a breath and turn on the radio a few days later. Now I hear the voice of Ray Kurzweil and suddenly I am in a different mental universe.

Kurzweil is an equally remarkable and brilliant human being. In the portrait presented by our host on Ideas, Paul Kennedy, Kurwzeil is the man with the key to how technology and science will save us.

A modern-day Thomas Edison

A New York-born inventor and futurist, Kurzweil has been called a modern-day Thomas Edison. As a teenager, Kurzweil wrote sophisticated computer software, which he continued to do as a student at MIT. No flipping burgers for him to get through school: He sold his student company for roughly $100,000, a considerable sum in the 1960s.

Kurzweil is best known for inventing a computer program that turns written text into voice. The blind musician Stevie Wonder bought the first Kurzweil Reading Machine. Many other inventions and products followed.

Kurzweil calls himself an engineer and wears the title like a badge of honour.

In his Ideas portrait, we hear Kurzweil the visionary. Instead of recognizing the limits of science, as Wendell Berry might have it, Kurzweil insists we drastically underestimate just how transforming science has been for human culture.

Science and technology, he says, will literally make us superhuman.

The law of accelerating returns

Kurzweil's vision is based on the idea of exponential growth. Simply put, the larger a number gets, the faster it grows. Growth compounds itself in a fantastic, spiraling manner. Our limited, linear minds, Kurzweil tells us, have not been prepared by evolution to comprehend it.

When Kurzweil was a student at MIT, a single computer took up an entire room and the whole university had to share it. Now, decades later, the computer in the modern cellphone is a thousand times more powerful.

The power of information technology doubles every year. By the law of exponential growth, in 25 years, computers will be a billion times more powerful. And these computers will be much smaller as well.

Because of exponential growth, we all live by what Kurzweil calls "the law of accelerating returns." Just take our lifespans. A thousand years ago, our ancestors, on average, lived into their 20s (they reproduced and died). By 1800, they were surviving into their mid-30s; by 1900, it was nearly 50. Now the average age in the West is approaching 80.

You may ask, as does Berry, what kind of life will be there for us in the crowded future, crammed into warehouses and consuming who can tell what? Ah, but here is where the new revolution in what is called nanotechnology enters the equation.

In the not too distant future, nanobots will float through our bloodstream, repairing cells and making us healthier. Computers will not only become more powerful, they will be able to perform all the important human functions.

We will all be cyborgs — part human, part machine.

The process has already begun with experimental mini-computers implanted in certain patients.

Don't want to be part of this machine future? Illness awaits you and you will have the diminished intelligence of those banjo pickers in Deliverance, by comparison to the super-enhanced rest of the world.

Brave new future

Kurzweil himself is gladly awaiting this techno-future. He takes hundreds of supplements to help him survive until the right technology is in place to continue his life as a cyborg. One day, he hopes to download his consciousness onto a computer chip, presumably to be uploaded by some future human at some later date.

Kurzweil's vision is the eternal, human hope of overcoming death. You do not need religion or imagined resurrections to make this happen. Technology will redeem us.

And by the way, this climate change business. That is just a technical problem as well.

Kurzweil does envision some bumps in the road to this brave new future, such as terrorists getting a hold of viruses and the like. But he firmly believes that we as a species have the capacity to surmount these difficulties.

Paul Kennedy called Ray Kurzweil the most optimistic person he has ever met. I was exhilarated just hearing the man talk on the radio.

Between the sweet laments of Berry and the utopian riffs of Kurzweil, what a human future is open to all of us! On Monday I chose one future and on Wednesday, I found myself believing in another. The future awaits me. I just have to change the channel.