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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.)