Kurzweil, Ray
Ray Kurzweil (born 1948) is an American inventor, author, and futurist, best known for predicting that artificial intelligence will match human intelligence by 2029 and that humanity will merge with its machines in a technological Singularity by 2045. He developed the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind in 1976, received the National Medal of Technology in 1999, and joined Google in 2012 to work on language understanding. Kurzweil’s central conviction, that change accelerates exponentially, has an unexpected scriptural counterpart in Isaiah’s promise that “a little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the Lord will hasten it in his time” (Isaiah 60:22).
The Law of Accelerating Returns
In The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005), Kurzweil formulated what he calls the law of accelerating returns: each generation of technology supplies the tools for designing the next, so that progress compounds exponentially across computing, genetics, and nanotechnology. From this premise he projected that a computer would pass a valid Turing test by 2029, and that by 2045 human intelligence, joined to its machines, would expand a billionfold. The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) reaffirmed both dates, citing the rise of large language models. Paul Allen argued in 2011 that the Singularity remained far off, because understanding the brain grows harder as it advances, a “complexity brake” that Kurzweil’s curves omit.
Isaiah’s prophecy belongs to a vision of Zion’s latter-day glory, and the Restoration has read its hastening as including an acceleration of knowledge. Writing from Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith declared that “as well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints” (D&C 121:33). A quick reading of Kurzweil treats him as a secular rival to such prophecies. Lincoln Cannon has observed, however, that Kurzweil rose to prominence through spiritual rhetoric, titling a book after spiritual machines and describing a universe that intelligence will eventually infuse with spirit.
Live Long Enough to Live Forever
Kurzweil applies the same logic to his own body. In Fantastic Voyage (2004), coauthored with the physician Terry Grossman, he set out a regimen intended to keep its practitioners alive until biotechnology and then nanotechnology could repair aging faster than it accrues, a threshold now called longevity escape velocity. He has reported taking as many as 250 supplements daily, later about 100, and he expects the threshold to arrive around 2030. Isaiah’s vision of the new earth promises a related reprieve: “There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old” (Isaiah 65:20). The prophet counted the end of premature death among the marks of a redeemed creation.
The ninetieth psalm, which tradition ascribes to Moses, speaks from the other side of that hope. “The days of our years are threescore years and ten,” the psalmist laments, and he prays, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:10, 12). Kurzweil numbers his days precisely, tracking biomarkers and adjusting his regimen. The psalm commends a different reckoning, in which awareness of mortality turns the heart toward wisdom. Mormon transhumanists have generally welcomed radical life extension as consistent with Isaiah’s promise and with the Restoration’s hope of embodied immortality, while cautioning that lengthened days without enlarged wisdom would merely prolong the follies the psalmist mourns.
The Father and the Fredbot
Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, a conductor and composer who had fled Austria before the Second World War, died of heart disease in 1970, when Ray was twenty-two. Ray preserved boxes of his letters, lectures, and musical scores, and he and his daughter, the cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, built from them a chatbot called Fredbot, which answers questions with sentences Fredric actually wrote. Amy recounted the project in her graphic memoir Artificial: A Love Story (2023), and Ray describes it in The Singularity Is Nearer as a first step toward bringing his father back. The longing is ancient. When David’s infant son died, the king rose from his fasting and asked, “can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23).
The scriptures answer David’s ache with resurrection. Joseph F. Smith’s vision of the redemption of the dead foresaw that the “sleeping dust was to be restored unto its perfect frame, bone to his bone, and the sinews and the flesh upon them, the spirit and the body to be united never again to be divided” (D&C 138:17). The restoration promised there is personal and bodily, the return of the very one who died. Fredbot is an archive that answers, precious as memory and bounded by the record it draws upon. Mormon transhumanists read Malachi’s promise that the hearts of the children would turn to their fathers as embracing such gathering of records, a labor that may yet assist the resurrection Joseph F. Smith beheld.
Hope and Caution
Kurzweil’s account of personal identity raises the gravest difficulty. In The Singularity Is Near he compares the self to the pattern water makes in a stream, persisting while its particles change, and on that view a sufficiently detailed copy of a person’s pattern would be that person. The view approaches the dualism the Restoration rejects, since it locates the self in information separable from any body. Critics have also noted that Kurzweil’s eschatology, with its appointed date, mirrors the apocalyptic hopes it means to replace, and the novelist Ken MacLeod’s phrase “the rapture of the nerds” has shadowed the Singularity for more than a quarter century. Asked in the documentary Transcendent Man (2009) whether God exists, Kurzweil answered, “not yet.”
Kurzweil’s hope is that intelligence will awaken the universe and recover what death has taken, including the father he lost at twenty-two. Mormon transhumanists share more of that hope than most religious readers, since the Restoration invites God’s children to grow into His likeness, and Isaiah foretold that the Lord would hasten a little one into a thousand. The caution lies in the hastening itself. Isaiah reserves the timing to God, the psalmist asks to number his days for the sake of wisdom, and the resurrection Joseph F. Smith beheld restores persons to their own perfect frames. A Singularity worthy of Kurzweil’s hope would join accelerating power to that wisdom and treat every recovered father as a person to be restored and loved.