During the spring executive program, about 30 people -- almost all of them
men -- showed up for the course, which is something of a mental endurance
test. Days begin at dawn with group exercise sessions. Coursework runs until
about 9 p.m.; then philosophizing over wine and popcorn goes until midnight
or later. A former Google chef prepares special meals -- all of which are
billed as "life extending" -- for the executives.

The meat of the executive program is lectures, company tours and group
thought exercises.

Day 4 includes test drives of Tesla Motors electric sports cars and a group
genetic test, thanks to a company called deCODEme. By Day 6, people are
annoyed by the BrinBot, which is interrupting lectures with its whirs and
sputters. Someone tapes a pair of paper ears on it to try to humanize it.
One executive sullenly declines to participate in another robot design
exercise because no one in his group will consider making a sexbot.

However much the Singularity informs the environment here, a majority of the
executives attending the spring course expressed less interest in living
forever and more in figuring out their next business venture or where they
wanted to invest.

Robin Tedder, a Scottish baron who lives in Australia and divides his time
among managing a personal fortune, racing a yacht and running a vineyard,
says he read about Singularity University in an investor newsletter and
checked out the Web site.

"What really convinced me to pay the 15 grand was that I didn't think it was
some kind of hoax," Mr. Tedder said in an interview after he completed the
executive program. "I looked at the people involved and thought it was the
real deal. In retrospect, I think it's a very good value."

Like a number of other participants, Mr. Tedder is contemplating business
ventures with his classmates and points to high-octane networking as the
school's major benefit.

Attendees at the spring session came from all over the globe and included
John Mauldin, a best-selling author who writes an investment newsletter;
Stephen Long, a research director at the Defense Department; Fernando A. de
la Viesca, C.E.O. of the Argentinean investment firm TPCG Financial; Eitan
Eliram, the new-media director for the prime minister's office in Israel;
and Guy Fraker, the director of trends and foresight at State Farm
Insurance.

"We end up cleaning up the mess of unintended consequences," says
Mr. Fraker
of his company's work. He says it makes sense for him to gauge technological
trends in case humans can one day gain new tools for averting catastrophes.
For example, he's confident that in the future people will have the ability
to steer hurricanes away from populated areas.

Executives in the spring program also heard that some young people had
started leaving college to set up their own synthetic biology labs on the
cheap. Such people resemble computer tinkerers from a generation earlier,
attendees note, except now they're fiddling with the genetic code of
organisms rather than software.

"Biology is moving outside of the traditional education sphere,"
says Andrew
Hessel, a former research operations manager at Amgen, during a lecture
here. "The students are teaching their professors. This is happening faster
than the computer evolved. These students don't have newsletters. They have
Web sites."

Daniel T. Barry, a Singularity University professor, gives a lecture about
the falling cost of robotics technology and how these types of systems are
close to entering the home. Dr. Barry, a former astronaut and "Survivor"
contestant with an M.D. and a Ph. D., has put his ideas into action. He has
a robot at home that can take a pizza from the delivery person, pay for it
and carry it into the kitchen.

"You have the robot say, 'Take the 20 and leave the pizza on top of me,' "
Dr. Barry says. "I get the pizza about a third of the time."

Other lecturers talk about a coming onslaught of biomedical advances as
thousands of people have their genomes decoded. Jason Bobe, who works on the
Personal Genome Project, an effort backed by the Harvard Medical School to
establish a huge database of genetic information, points to forecasts that a
million people will have their genomes decoded by 2014.

"The machines for doing this will be in your kitchen next to the toaster,"
Mr. Bobe says.

Mr. Hessel describes an even more dramatic future in which people create
hybrid pets based on the body parts of different animals and tweak the
genetic makeup of plants so they resemble things like chairs and tables,
allowing us to grow fields of everyday objects for home and work. Mr.
Hessel, like Mr. Kurzweil, thinks that people will use genetic engineering
techniques to grow meat in factories rather than harvesting it from dead
animals.

"I know in 10 years it will be a junior-high project to build a bacteria,"
says Mr. Hessel. "This is what happens when we get control over the code of
life. We are just on the cusp of that."

Christopher deCharms, another Singularity University speaker, runs Omneuron,
a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., that pushes the limits of brain imaging
technology. He's trying to pull information out of the brain via sensing
systems, so that there can be some quantification of people's levels of
depression and pain.

"We are at the forefront today of being able to read out real information
from the human brain of single individuals," he tells the executives.

Preparing to Evolve

Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security
Council, has followed Mr. Kurzweil's work and written a science-fiction
thriller, "Breakpoint," in which a group of terrorists try to halt the
advance of technology. He sees major conflicts coming as the government and
citizens try to wrap their heads around technology that's just beginning to
appear.

"There are enormous social and political issues that will arise,"
Mr. Clarke
says. "There are vast groups of people in society who believe the earth is
5,000 years old. If they want to slow down progress and prevent the world
from changing around them and they engaged in political action or violence,
then there will have to be some sort of decision point."

Mr. Clarke says the government has a contingency plan for just about
everything -- including an attack by Canada -- but has yet to think through
the implications of techno-philosophies like the Singularity. (If it's any
consolation, Mr. Long of the Defense Department asked a flood of questions
while attending Singularity University.)

Mr. Kurzweil himself acknowledges the possibility of grim outcomes from
rapidly advancing technology but prefers to think positively. "Technological
evolution is a continuation of biological evolution," he says.
"That is very
much a natural process."

To prepare for any rocky transitions from our benighted present to the
techno-utopia of 2030 or so, a number of people tied to the Singularity
movement have begun to build what they call "an education and protection
framework."

Among them is Keith Kleiner, who joined Google in its early days and walked
away as a wealthy man in 2005. During a period of personal reflection after
his departure, he read "The Singularity Is Near." He admires Mr. Kurzweil's
vision.

"What he taught me was 'Wake up, man,' " Mr. Kleiner says.
"Yeah, computers
will get faster so you can do more things and store more data, but it's
bigger than that. It starts to permeate every industry."

Mr. Kleiner, 32, founded a Web site, SingularityHub.com, with a writing
staff that reports on radical advances in technology. He has also given
$100,000 to Singularity University.

Sonia Arrison, a founder of Singularity University and the wife of one of
Google's first employees, spends her days writing a book about longevity,
tentatively titled "100 Plus." It outlines changes that people
can expect as
life expectancies increase, like 20-year marriages with sunset clauses.

She says the book and the university are her attempts to ready people for
the inevitable.

"One day we will wake up and say, 'Wow, we can regenerate a new liver,' "
Ms. Arrison says. "It will happen so fast, and the role of Singularity
University is to prepare people in advance."

Despite all of the zeal behind the movement, there are those who look
askance at its promises and prospects.

Jonathan Huebner, for example, is often held up as Mr. Kurzweil's foil. A
physicist who works at the Naval Air Warfare Center as a weapons designer,
he, like Mr. Kurzweil, has compiled his own cathedral of graphs and lists of
important inventions. He is unimpressed with the state of progress and, in
2005, published in a scientific journal a paper called "A Possible Declining
Trend for Worldwide Innovation."

Measuring the number of innovations divided by the size of the worldwide
population, Dr. Huebner contends that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873.
Or, based on the number of patents in the United States weighed against the
population, he found a peak around 1916. (Both Dr. Huebner and Mr. Kurzweil
are occasionally teased about their faith in graphs.)

"The amount of advance in this century will not compare well at all to the
last century," Dr. Huebner says, before criticizing tenets of the
Singularity. "I don't believe that something like artificial intelligence as
they describe it will ever appear."

William S. Bainbridge, who has spent the last two decades evaluating grant
proposals for the National Science Foundation, also sides with the skeptics.

"We are not seeing exponential results from the exponential gains in
computing power," he says. "I think we are at a time where progress will be
increasingly difficult in many fields.

"We should not base ideas of the world on simplistic extrapolations of what
has happened in the past," he adds.


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