After reading his much blogged-about interview in Wired, I would first like to express my admiration for Ray Kurzweil, both for the scope of his ambition and the depth of his desire. While some distract themselves with empty consolations or pseudo-poetic dithering, Kurzweil points out what all of us really want. In contemporary culture, I think only Woody Allen has reached such scope and depth with succinctness: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” Woody said. “I want to achieve it through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the minds of my fellow man. I want to live on in my apartment.” The difference between the artist Allen and the futurist Kurzweil is that the former is after the perfect line, and the latter is after the perfect being.

Ray Kurzweil does not expect to die.

What will save him from death is the singularity, a concept formulated by the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann which describes the point in scientific progress after which human technology will become more powerful than human biology, and we will thus become masters of our fate. In a series of books (most recently, The Singularity is Near), Kurzweil develops a series of predictions as to what the singularity will bring to the human race; Wired sums it up here:

“Kurzweil transformed the singularity from an interesting speculation into a social movement. His best-selling books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near cover everything from unsolved problems in neuroscience to the question of whether intelligent machines should have legal rights. But the crucial thing that Kurzweil did was to make the end of the human era seem actionable: He argues that while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant. The first AIs will be created, he says, as add-ons to human intelligence, modeled on our actual brains and used to extend our human reach. AIs will help us see and hear better. They will give us better memories and help us fight disease. Eventually, AIs will allow us to conquer death itself. The singularity won’t destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immortalize us.” [Emphasis mine.]

Kurzweil is not a crackpot. He is, by all accounts, an accomplished inventor, who has developed technologies in speech recognition and optimal character recognition that have allowed the blind to read and communicate. And while some might see his refusal to accept the reality of death as the symptom of a man who has refused to grow up, I see it as the naked expression of something that usually lies deeply ensconced within our selves, protected from daylight. Not for Kurzweil our modern bourgeois consolations of “memorials,” “legacy,” or even “old age.” It’s everything or nothing, eternal life or eternal death, and I can hardly fathom the despair that Kurzweil would have experienced had he been born ten or twenty years earlier than he did, old enough to see the future but not to reach it. As it is, he is managing his life carefully, for the next few decades in his life will be a season of Advent: he “takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day,” and spends “one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments.” “If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century,” his interviewer comments, “it would be a shame to die in the interim.” As for the future, Kurzweil has already catalogued predictions—in The Age of Spiritual Machines, he makes predictions for the years 2009, 2019, 2029, 2049, 2072, and 2099 (all available here). But the most interesting prediction, which is slated for “thousands of years from now,” is: “Intelligent beings consider the fate of the universe.”

This is the second thing I want to write. I ask the reader to bear with some geekiness. Not from Homer or Faust or the Epic of Gilgamesh, but from Star Trek, a show borne of the same technological optimism that is shared by Kurzweil.

Ray Kurzweil, technological genius, should surely be geeky enough to know that this prediction was already anticipated back in 1996 in “Death Wish,” an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, by far the worst of the Star Trek series. In it, a member of a mysterious race known as the “Q”, who have evolved to such a level of technological sophistication that they are immortal and can travel instantaneously throughout space and time, asks Captain Janeway of the U.S.S. Voyager for asylum. “Quinn,” as he calls himself, desires to become human so that he may commit suicide. The Q Continuum (the unfathomable non-place where the Q “live”) has condemned Quinn, claiming that his suicide could have destructive repercussions amongst the Q. A trial is set up, with Janeway as judge. In the most poignant scene of the episode, Janeway visits the Q Continuum, which has taken on the form of a saloon alongside an abandoned highway, for the benefit of Janeway’s limited cognitive capacity. All of the Q she encounters are silent, out of boredom; as Quinn explains to her, once every corner of the universe has been explored, and every second of time visited, things get boring. There is nothing left to do. “I am ready to die.”

What is fascinating about the Q is the way in which their very existence questions the optimistic technological premises of Star Trek. In another series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard tells a Q, “What Hamlet said with irony I say with conviction: ‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!’” and yet it is the Q who saves the starship Enterprise from destruction in a later episode—after ordering Picard to get on his knees and beg for rescue. “The Final Frontier” is indeed a frontier, and given the fact that our aspirations are limitless, well, what will we do once we reach that frontier?

Perhaps Ray Kurzweil should be asking himself these questions now, instead of postponing them by a thousand years. Albert Camus, in a less sanguine age, wrote that “whether or not life is worth living” is the first philosophical question. How do we resolve the conflict between an infinite human desire and a finite universe? Even a universe that stretches forward infinitely in time can grow boring and confining. It’s interesting that the scribblers of Star Trek were more sensitive to these questions than a man who aspires to become one of their characters. It’s also interesting that an uncharacteristically good episode in an otherwise mediocre science fiction television series can open a mind up to ask questions that are properly called religious.