Having trouble learning Chinese? There’s a pill for that.

In his latest TED Talk, famed American futurist and techno-utopian Nicholas Negroponte claims that within the next 30 years pills will replace our eyes as the main provider of new information to our brains.

“You’re going to swallow a pill and know English,” he predicted, “you’re going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare… [T]he way to do it is through the bloodstream. So once it’s in your bloodstream, it basically goes through and gets into the brain… and the different pieces get deposited in the right places.”

While the concept may sound ridiculous, Negroponte’s previous predictions about the future of information technology, such as the ascendance of wifi and e-readers, were also derided as outlandish at the time but were later proved accurate.

Over on this side of the world, netizens have been pointing out that the innovation was already predicted decades ago by the Japanese manga series Doraemon, wherein the eponymous robotic cat from the future brings with him a collection of pills capable of performing similar feats for their users.