Mr. Kurzweil credits a low-fat, vegetable-rich diet and regular exercise for
his trim frame, and says he conquered diabetes decades ago by changing what
he ate and later reprogramming his body with supplements. He currently takes
about 150 pills a day and has regular intravenous procedures. He is also
co-writer of a pair of health books, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to
Live Forever" and "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever."

Mr. Kurzweil routinely taps into early memories that explain his lifelong
passion for inventing. "My parents gave me all these construction toys, and
sometimes I would put things together, and they would do something cool," he
says. "I got the idea that you could change the world for the better with
invention -- that you could put things together in just the right way, and
they would have transcendent effects.

"That was kind of the religion of my family: the power of human ideas."

A child prodigy, he stunned television audiences in 1965, when he was 17,
with a computer he had built that composed music. A couple of years later,
in college, he developed a computer program that would seek the best college
fit for high school students. A New York publishing house bought the company
for $100,000, plus royalties.

"Most of us were going to school to get knowledge and a degree," says Aaron
Kleiner, who studied with Mr. Kurzweil at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and later became his business partner. "He saw school as a tool
that let him do what he needed to do."

Some of Mr. Kurzweil's better-known inventions include the first
print-scanning systems that converted text to speech and allowed the blind
to read standard texts, as well as sophisticated electronic keyboards and
voice-recognition software. He has made millions selling his inventions, and
his companies continue developing other products, like software for
securities traders and e-readers for digital publications.

He began his march toward the Singularity around 1980, when he started
plotting things like the speed of chips and memory capacity inside computers
and realized that some elements of information technology improved at
predictable -- and exponential -- rates.

"With 30 linear steps, you get to 30," he often says in speeches.
"With 30
steps exponentially, you get to one billion. The price-performance of
computers has improved one billion times since I was a student. In 25 years,
a computer as powerful as today's smartphones will be the size of a blood
cell."

His fascination with exponential trends eventually led him to construct an
elaborate philosophy, illustrated in charts, that provided an analytical
backbone for the Singularity and other ideas that had been floating around
science-fiction circles for decades.

As far back as the 1950s, John von Neumann, the mathematician, is said to
have talked about a "singularity" -- an event in which the
always-accelerating pace of technology would alter the course of human
affairs. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, computer
scientist and math professor, wrote a research paper called "The Coming
Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era."

"Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman
intelligence," Mr. Vinge wrote. "Shortly after, the human era will be
ended."

In "The Singularity Is Near," Mr. Kurzweil posits that technological
progress in this century will be 1,000 times greater than that of the last
century. He writes about humans trumping biology by filling their bodies
with nanoscale creatures that can repair cells and by allowing their minds
to tap into super-intelligent computers.

Mr. Kurzweil writes: "Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the
human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants),
the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has
been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year.

"Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our
intelligence," he continues. "This is the destiny of the universe."

The underlying premise of the Singularity responds to people's insecurity
about the speed of social and technological change in the computer era. Mr.
Kurzweil posits that the computer and the Internet have changed society much
faster than electricity, phones or television, and that the next great leap
will occur when industries like medicine and energy start moving at the same
exponential pace as I.T.

He believes that this latter stage will occur when we learn to manipulate
DNA more effectively and arrange atoms and have readily available computers
that surpass the human brain.

In 1970, well before the era of nanobot doctors, Mr. Kurzweil's father,
Fredric, died of a heart attack at his home in Queens. Fredric was 58, and
Ray was 22. Since then, Mr. Kurzweil has filled a storage space with his
father's effects -- photographs, letters, bills and newspaper clippings. In
a world where computers and humans merge, Mr. Kurzweil expects that these
documents can be combined with memories harvested from his own brain, and
then possibly with Fredric's DNA, to effect a partial resurrection of his
father.

By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by
similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity
starts to come into full flower.

Despite such optimism, some Singularitarians aren't all that fond of Mr.
Kurzweil.

"I think he's a genius and has certainly brought a lot of these ideas into
the public discourse," says James J. Hughes, the executive director of the
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit that studies the
implications of advancing technology. "But there are plenty of people that
say he has hijacked the Singularity term."

Mr. Kurzweil says that he is simply trying to put analytical clothing on the
concept so that people can think more clearly about the future. And
regardless of any debate about his intentions, if you're encountering the
Singularity in the business world and elsewhere today, it's most likely his
take.

Bursts of Innovation

Peter H. Diamandis, 49, is a small man with a wide, bright smile and a thick
mound of dark hair. He routinely holds meetings by cellphone and can usually
be found typing away on his laptop. He went to medical school to make his
mother happy but has always dreamed of heading to outer space.

He is also a firm believer in the Singularity and is a technocelebrity in
his own right, primarily through his role in commercializing space travel.
At a recent Singularity University lunch, he hopped up to make a speech
peppered with passion and conviction.

"My target is to live 700 years," he declared.

The students chuckled.

"I say that seriously," he retorted.

The NASA site, the Ames Research Center, houses an odd collection of unusual
buildings, including a giant wind tunnel, a huge supercomputing center and a
flight simulator facility with equipment capable throwing people 60 feet
into the air.

Today, the government operates NASA Ames as a bustling,
public-sector-meets-private-sector technology bazaar. Start-ups,
universities and corporations have set up shop here, and Google plans to
build a new campus here over the next few years that will include housing
for workers.

A nondescript structure, Building 20, is the Singularity University
headquarters, and most students stay in nearby apartments on the NASA land.
Mr. Kurzweil set up the school with Mr. Diamandis, who, as chief executive
of the X Prize Foundation, doled out $10 million in 2004 to a team that sent
a private spacecraft 100 kilometers above the earth. Google has offered $30
million in rewards for an X Prize project intended to inspire a private team
to send a robot to the moon. And a $10 million prize will go to the first
team that can sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days at a cost of $10,000 or
less each -- which, in theory, would turn an expensive, complex lab exercise
into an ordinary affair.

Mr. Diamandis champions the idea that large prizes inspire rapid bursts of
innovation and may pave a path to that 700-year lifetime.

"I don't think it's a matter of if," he says. "I think it's
a matter of how.
You and I have a decent shot, and for kids being born today, I think it will
be a matter of choice."

For the most part, Mr. Kurzweil serves as a figurehead of Singularity
University, while Mr. Diamandis steers the institution. He pitches the
graduate student program as a way to train young, inspired people to think
exponentially and solve the world's biggest problems -- to develop projects
that will "change the lives of one billion people," as the in-house mantra
goes.

Mr. Diamandis hopes that the university can create an unrivaled network of
graduates and bold thinkers -- a Harvard Business School for the future --
who can put its ideas into action. Along with that goal, he's considering
creating a venture capital fund to help turn the university's big ideas into
big businesses. As some of their favored student creations, school leaders
point to a rapid disaster alert-and-response system and a venture that lets
individuals rent their cars to other people via cellphone.

Devin Fidler, a former student, is in the midst of securing funding for a
company that will build a portable machine that squirts out a cement-like
goop that allows builders to erect an entire house, layer by layer. Such
technology could almost eliminate labor costs and bring better housing to
low-income areas.

Mr. Diamandis has certainly built a selective institution. More than 1,600
people applied for just 40 spots in the inaugural graduate program held last
year. A second, 10-week graduate program will kick off this month with 80
students, culled from 1,200 applicants.

One incoming student, David Dalrymple, is an 18-year-old working on his
doctorate from M.I.T.. He says he plans to start a research institute
someday to explore artificial intelligence, medicine, space systems and
energy. (He met Mr. Kurzweil at a White House dinner, and at the age of 8
accepted the offer to have Mr. Kurzweil serve as his mentor.)


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