I was in the Union Square Barnes & Noble recently, on a mission to find a copy of The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. But because I didn’t know what section it was in (General Science? Technology? Computers?), it took me awhile, and of course as I stood there I was treated to a lecture from one of New York’s self-appointed professors. This one had the definite look of a guy who let his mind-expansion experiments wash him out of grad school in the ’70s, and he was beating his hapless friend over the head with his gee-whiz scientific ramblings. We’re talking about the kind of guy who’s really excited to tell you that because of quantum mechanics, man, it’s like we’re all molecules, and there’s something really Buddhist about the Hubble Deep Field, and … well, I tried to tune him out. I really did. But I’m a trained scientist—hypersensitive to the sort of apocalyptic generalizations that can come out of a ’60s-era Berkeley bachelor’s degree, a lot of weed and a subscription to Popular Science—and so I couldn’t help but listen.

     It had a little synchronicity to it, as that guy no doubt would have put it, that I was there to get a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s latest book. Kurzweil is one of those maverick inventor types who’s bounced entrepreneurially all over the scientific and technical landscape—he’s the Kurzweil behind the Kurzweil synthesizers, he’s got an Artificial Intelligence company, and recently he’s been half of “Ray and Terry’s Longevity Products,” an online nutritional supplement business. He’s an inventor of the old school and he’s undeniably an incredibly smart guy. So when he offers up a theory about how the world works, you give him a chance to sell you. And over the last 10 years or so, he himself has become utterly sold on the idea that we’re headed toward the climax of our technological story, the apotheosis of our heroic tale of science. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which came out in September, is his latest and most thorough book to present this claim. At 672 pages, it’s a huge doorstop, and the bluntness of its title hits you between the eyes—something big is coming. And soon.

     As I hunted for it, Professor Burnout was on the other side of the Astronomy section, meandering his way to something like a point. “It’s all about getting past the human, right?” he said, poking his friend in the chest. “We’ve got—you know, animals have claws and fur and great ears and eyes and shit, and we’re—you know, we’ve got none of that. But we’ve got this”—he corkscrewed his finger at his skull—“so we’ve evolved to learn all this stuff, and we can make tools and we can see all this stuff and discover all this stuff and then we become … more than human.”

     There I was, pulling a book off the shelf about how we’re gong to become more than human, and the crazy guy at B&N was right on Kurzweil’s wavelength. Wheels within wheels, man.

     The idea of transcending our human, all-too-human selves is not exactly a new idea. In fact, it may well be the oldest idea of all. For most of human history, though, it’s been the sole purview of religious belief and practice. Modern science defined itself exactly by its open-endedness—unlike traditional closed religious systems, its answers are not in the back of the book—and by its detachment from any notion of the human. The ideal scientist was an all-seeing eye and an all-reasoning brain: passionless, collected, and logical, a mere vessel through which truth is revealed by experimentation and intuition.

     As a result, the End of the World As We Know It has not historically been a major science question, except in the sort of distant, irrelevant-to-me future when the sun burns out or the universe collapses in on itself. If people think about science and technology causing the end of the world, it’s in the sense of Science Gone Horribly Wrong, scenarios in which we’re punished for our technological hubris: nuclear war, environmental devastation, mutants fighting to the death in some sort of giant Thunderdome.

     The last hundred years, however, have given rise to ever more attempts to apply scientific understanding to our inner world (in addition to our outer world)—and with that has come ever more pervasive technologies of the self. Some of this is familiar and relatively mundane—eyeglasses, pacemakers, vaccinations, facelifts. In the last 30 years, though, our ideas of self-transformation have begun to work at more fundamental levels—genetic engineering, nanoengineering, brain modeling—and the dream of remaking ourselves in our own image. As the man said, we have the technology We can make you better, stronger, faster.

     The Singularity is the purported culmination of this tale of achievement over nature. Put simply, it represents the moment when computer engineering, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering come together and create an artificial entity that has the intellectual power of a human being, and the speed, efficiency, and power of a machine. A “thinking machine” similar to humans, it would think and act faster than us, and thus design and build its successor. Once that happens, that machine creates another, and another, and this happens so fast that we humans can’t even comprehend it. At that moment we cross a Singularity, a point beyond which we are unable to keep up with the changes propagated by our artificial creations, and all our ideas about the world become irrelevant—we are literally incapable of predicting what happens next. Ray Kurzweil and a few other major scholars argue that such a transformation is due to hit in about 40 years.

     It’s not all bad after the Singularity. Humans won’t control their world, but we will get to frolic in a Lawnmower Man-like playground of full-immersion virtual reality—with totally replaceable and modifiable bodies, and disease- and decay-free environs—secure in the knowledge that we’ve got it good. There’s a fear, of course, that our children will rise up like Zeus and make us, like Cronos, irrelevant, impotent and left behind. Kurzweil, though, guarantees that we’ll be able to get all our parts replaced and our brains enhanced, and thus join the reindeer games of our posthuman overlords.