When Man & Machine Merge

"Right now, people think it's irresponsible not to back up our PCs," Kurzweil says. "But increasingly, we'll be backing up the information in our brains. People will think it was remarkable that we couldn't back up our brains in 2010."

Kurzweil is very specific about when this epic shift will take place. By 2045, he predicts, machines and humans will merge, redefining life as we know it. The moment is known as the Singularity, referring to the term used in astrophysics to describe the point inside a black hole where the ordinary laws of physics cease to apply. To prepare himself and the rest of the world for the era of conscious machines, Kurzweil has turned himself into the chief prophet of the coming Techno Rapture. He crisscrosses the globe to rally top scientists, hosts an annual Singularity Summit that draws leaders from places like Google and MIT, and has even developed his own line of nutritional supplements to extend people's lives until the day when their existence can be endlessly preserved by technology. At 61, Kurzweil pops 150 of his own pills every day, determined to live long enough to see the day when, thanks to machines, he will never age.

To say that Kurzweil's prediction is controversial is to understate the scientific firestorm it has generated. No less a pragmatist than Bill Gates has hailed Kurzweil's vision, calling him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." But to other leading thinkers, Kurzweil has gone off the deep end, venturing into an almost messianic fervor with his promises of life everlasting. "The Singularity is a new religion — and a particularly kooky one at that," says Jaron Lanier, a top computer scientist who pioneered the realm of virtual reality. "The Singularity is the coming of the Messiah, heaven on Earth, the Armageddon, the end of times. And fanatics always think that the end of time comes in their own lifetime."

Kurzweil shrugs off such criticism: He has the self-confidence of a man who is used to being so far ahead of the curve that others can't see where he's headed. The only time he falters is when he's asked if he could be wrong about the Singularity. For a moment he stares blankly into space, as if receiving an otherworldly transmission. But he's actually just crunching numbers, mentally double-checking his complex calculations about what will happen between now and 2045.

"Maybe the Singularity takes a few years longer to get here," he finally replies. "But I can't really imagine that I'm significantly off."

Kurzweil makes no secret of the deep personal need that has driven him to pursue the Singularity. It all comes back to the shadowy portrait that looms over the desk in his office in suburban Boston. The middle-aged man in the painting shares Kurzweil's eyes and receding hairline: his late father, Fredric.

"I have 50 boxes of his things at home — his letters and music and bills and doctoral thesis," Kurzweil says. "He was a pack rat like me."

As a boy growing up in Queens in the 1950s, Ray worked hard to please his father. An acclaimed composer from Vienna, Fredric began giving Ray piano lessons at age six. But Ray already had another obsession: invention. While other kids were out playing stickball, Kurzweil sat in bed reading books like Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire — dusty copies of which now line his desk between two feline bookends. It wasn't just the giant robots and atomic earth blasters that sparked his imagination — it was the nascent promise they offered to a geeky young kid. "The moral of the tales was simple," Kurzweil later wrote. "There is no problem so great that it cannot be overcome through application of creative human thought. That simple paradigm has animated all my subsequent endeavors."

Encouraged by his father, Ray spent his weekends trolling for spare parts in junky electronics stores in Manhattan, building backyard rockets and eventually learning to code on a computer. Their relationship was both lovingly paternal and chummily nerdy. "We talked a lot about the nature of music and mathematical structure, and the fact that computers and music had natural affinity to each other," Kurzweil recalls, glancing up at the portrait over his desk. "He said, 'Someday you'll get involved in creating synthetic music, using computers.' He recognized that eventually computers could do a better job."

In 1965, taking his father's prophecy to heart, the 16-year-old inventor appeared as a guest on the game show I've Got a Secret. The gawky young Ray appeared in a stiff suit playing a dissonant song on a piano; the secret was that the tune had been composed by a computer program he created. The music-composition program won him first place in the International Science Fair, and the first of several invitations to the White House. But today, 44 years later, what Kurzweil remembers is not the accolades but how pleased the invention made his dad.