The Promise of Rapture for the High-Tech Elite

Ray Kurzweil, the influential technologist, came to the Palace of Fine Arts theater in San Francisco a few days ago to promote his vision of “the Singularity.” One attendee admiringly described it as “the cult Rapture of the Nerds.”

It was a much more fitting prelude to the Easter holidays than Mr. Kurzweil would like to think.

The Singularity, as he explains it, is a point in the near future when rapidly escalating technological advances will allow the most evolved humans (i.e., Mr. Kurzweil and his early-adopting followers) to incorporate technology into their bodies. Doing so will allow them to live hundreds of years and perhaps forever. Mr. Kurzweil wrote a book on the subject in 2005 and has been proselytizing ever since. The quick sell: Join me in outsmarting death.

This vision has obvious appeal to the Silicon Valley set, which holds sacred the belief that technology can solve most any problem; Google’s co-founder Larry Page, and a long list of other tech celebrities, helped establish Singularity University, where rich or deep-thinking techies try to get an edge on the future.

New Agers, too, find something alluring in the idea of man transcending the mere self and attaching to a more grandiose vision of the human project.

Yet there is a flip side to the Singularity, a distinctly unmodern religiosity of the sort that often horrifies high-powered engineers and sophisticated citizens of the New Economy. Mr. Kurzweil offers the best of both worlds, as it were: an answer to existential questions and the ageless quest for immortality, wrapped in a package of science and innovation.

Michael Lindvall, a theologian and pastor of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, pegs Mr. Kurzweil’s Singularity dogma as a modern iteration of the Gnosticism prevalent in the second and third centuries.

Gnosticism “was basically the idea that people save themselves by being smart,” Mr. Lindvall said. “By knowing these secret things, you would become cognoscenti, one of the few, elitist. Gnostics looked down on the hoi polloi Christian masses.”

Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired magazine and an influential technology theorist himself, is not an adherent of the Singularity, but has spoken at length with Mr. Kurzweil about it and certainly sees the appeal.

“It attracts people who are scientific, rational, not religious,” Mr. Kelly said, “and it offers them the same comforting idea that heaven offers to someone more religious.”

Mr. Kurzweil said, via e-mail, that any comparison of Singularity to religion was “incorrect.”

“Religions emerged in pre-scientific times” he wrote, and are “based on faith and not science.”

“We need to update our understanding of the destiny of our human-machine civilization based on what science now tells us,” he added. “The bottom line is that my thesis is based on a detailed scientific analysis of the history of technology and not on faith.”

Certainly, some of Mr. Kurzweil’s adherents seemed overcome with religious fervor at his recent San Francisco appearance. “His fans notoriously swarm the stage, like they are doing here!” an event organizer barked at other staff members during a V.I.P. reception, warning them to be alert.

Mr. Kurzweil predicts the Singularity will occur in about 2040. Mr. Kelly suggests he so tirelessly promotes it in hopes of speeding things along. In 2040, Mr. Kurzweil would be 92. He obsesses over his diet and consumes 150 pills a day to stave off aging.

Thoughts of mortality produce “profoundly sad and lonely feelings,” Mr. Kurzweil said in “Transcendent Man,” a filmed accompaniment to his live presentation. “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.” (The German words “kurz weil,” by the way, translate into “short time,” so perhaps Mr. Kurzweil was predestined to obsess over ways to extend his life.)

Ken Marks, a local mathematician, was one of 700 or so who came to hear Mr. Kurzweil — and he was skeptical about the whole thing. His objections were scientific, rather than theological, saying that the Singularity ignored the scientific principle of complementary pairs. Like space and time, or electric force and magnetic force, “death and life are a complementary pair,” Mr. Marks said. “Death is intrinsic to life.”

“If you do not have death, you do not have life,” he said.

Mr. Kelly suggests such scientific nitpicking wouldn’t hold much sway with Mr. Kurzweil, though he, too, is a man of science.

“The remarkable thing about Ray is that he has no doubt,” Mr. Kelly said. “He has an answer for every objection. His certainty is unwavering.”

Is that faith, in the traditional sense? “Exactly,” Mr. Kelly said. “He has faith.”