(Wikipedia.)

Ray Kurzweil's official title at Google is director of engineering, but we're starting to suspect Larry keeps him around as a kind of science-fictional mascot for the programmers. Case in point: This Wired Q&A, in which he reminds everyone of his belief that one day soon, death will hold no dominion over technologists.

After chatting about Steve Jobs (fun fact, it's actually impossible to get into the Wired offices without passing a brief quiz about Steve Jobs*), interviewer Stephen Levy asked his thoughts on one of the Silicon Valley demigod's famous quotes: “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent.”

Well, Ray Kurzweil thinks that's bullshit.

"This is what I call a deathist statement, part of a millennium-old rationalization of death as a good thing. It once seemed to make sense, because up until very recently you could not make a plausibly sound argument where life could be indefinitely extended. So religion, which emerged in prescientific times, did the next best thing, which is to say, ‘Oh, that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing.” We rationalized that because we did have to accept it. But in my mind death is a tragedy."

Pretty sure Mr. Kurzweil isn't the only person who thinks death sucks?

"It’s not the case that there are only a fixed number of positions, and if old people don’t die off, there’s no room for young people to come up with new ideas, because we’re constantly expanding knowledge.... Knowledge is growing exponentially. It’s doubling approximately every year."

Right, but there might not be enough literal room for the extra people. Guess that's what Mars is for.

At any rate, he believes we're just 15 years away from "a tipping point in longevity." So if you think Ray Kurzweil's right, go right ahead and eat that burger from the Heart Attack Grill. (We'll pass.)

*Not a true statement.

(Wikipedia.)

Last month, Ray Kurzweil, the unofficial president of the singularity booster club, took a job at Google. This, of course, inspired much breathless speculation about just how a company in possession of an enormous treasure trove of our data plans to employ such a thinker.

Well today we got a bit of a hint, thanks to an event at Singularity U., wherein X Prize chairman Peter Diamandis and Mr. Kurzweil interviewed each other. Vivek Wadhwa, naturally, live-tweeted their discussion from the audience--and it sounds like a doozy:

We imagine that at Google, the term "unlimited resources" is taken rather literally.

This of course inspires us to speculate about what sort of personality a Google-engineered AI would have. Will it bear an eerie resemblance to Eric Schmidt or even (more ominously) Larry Page? Or will the apple fall farther from the tree, with all those Gchats and Android data points producing not an ultra-rational thinker but rather the computerized version of an eavesdropping neighborhood gossip?

Updated 1/6/2013: In a follow-up conversation with TechCrunch, Kurzweil denied that he would be given "unlimited resources," but said rather that he'd be getting “sufficient resources for a very important project.” We still imagine that's a pretty substantial amount of resources. He did however give a bit more detail about what he'd actually be doing, which is midwifing, ultimately, a future of search that looks a little like this:

This friend of yours, this cybernetic friend, that knows that you that have certain questions about certain health issues or business strategies. And, It can then be canvassing all the new information that comes out in the world every minute and then bring things to your attention without you asking about them.

There was a bit of bad news for the space enthusiasts, though:

Ray Kurzweil thinks that intelligent robots are the ones that are going to colonize space--not humans. Will be extensions of us

— Vivek Wadhwa (@wadhwa) January 3, 2013

Sorry, Elon.

(Wikipedia.)

The National Rifle Association unpublished its Facebook page in the aftermath of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Conn. [TechCrunch]

Did Instragram CEO Kevin Systrom perjure himself when he testified under oath that his company hadn't received any other acquisition offers at the time it sold to Facebook for $1 billion? Had there not been a verbal agreement on a deal with Twitter weeks earlier? [NYT]

Apps like Timehop, Rewind.me, excavate social media history, further diminish the need to remember anything. [NYT]

Or you can just download your old tweets directly from the source. [The Next Web]

Everybody's favorite futurist is going to work on "machine learning and language processing" at Google. [Ray Kurzweil]

With the holidays swiftly approaching, we decided to fashion together a little cheat sheet for anyone stumped as to what to buy their closest friend with cyborg dreams. Behold, the top 10 gifts for the futurists/transhumanists/singulatarians in your life.

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

Mayor Bloomberg and the NYCEDC recently launched a prototyping competition, where six lucky winning teams will get an opportunity to prototype new products while receiving studio space from sponsor NYDesigns and mentorship from industry leaders Shapeways, Adafruit Industries, and Honeybee Robotics. Alison Hodgson and Miquela Craytor from the NYCEDC will be at the Hardware Startup Meetup today to explain the competition and take any questions.

The Worldwide Investor Network (WIN) is organizing a two-day conference this Tuesday (November 13-14), bringing together ten tech startups from around the world intimately engaging and pitching to the New York venture community. Speakers include David Teten (ff Ventures), Habib Kairouz (Rho Capital), Ed Sim (BOLDstart Ventures) and Kirill Sheynkman (RTP Ventures). Students can get 50 percent off using the discount code "innovation." And if you're a CEO/VC interesting in participating and sharing best practices, email my friend Eyal Bino at eyal@worldwidein.com.

The Partnership for New York City Fund and Accenture have announced a search for top fintech innovators who will work with global financial institutions to bring their ideas to market. Winning companies will be part of the FinTech Innovation Lab, a 12-week program that helps early and growth-stage fintech innovators accelerate product development and gain exposure to top-level financial industry executives. Applications are due by December 19.

New York City recently announced the H.E.L.M. (Hire Expand in Lower Manhattan) contest, its latest initiative to bring more startups into Manhattan’s growing tech scene, which promises up to $1.2 million in funds to startups looking to reside in Lower Manhattan. Applications are due by noon on November 30. And there'll be an event this Thursday where you can mingle with the judges including Reddit's Alexis Ohanian, restauranteur Danny Meyer 'n others.

This Saturday is AngelHack (which is putting together one of the biggest hackathons ever) and they will be donating 100 percent of the proceeds from here out to Sandy relief efforts.

Heard of 37 Angels? They're a community of women investors committed to funding early-stage startups. This Thursday they're organizing a pitch event at NYU with five to eight cross-sector pitches.

Next week, Ray Kurzweil, the bold futurist and author of the bestseller The Singularity Is Near, will explore the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain to create more intelligent machines. You can't miss that!

If you're a startup, don't forget to check out the "Who Would You Fund" TechStartup Challenge 2012, which I'll be judging. It's a contest to find the best startup pitch videos out there. Add your startup promotion video and you just might win the opportunity to make a live pitch to the ARC Angel Round Capital Fund! Deadline is today (Monday) 11:59pm.

Going slightly off-topic... growing up I was always a huge fan of the James Bond movies (no wonder I'm always dressed to kill). This year is Bond's fiftieth anniversary and the latest flick, Skyfall, is seriously awesome. Go see it!

And now let's see whats going down in the Alley this week...

Uncubed NYC (Scout and Scale)
NYC's biggest startup hiring event.
Monday (Nov. 12), 12:30 p.m. @ Altman Building, 135 W. 18th Street

NJ Tech Meetup 30
Feature speaker is Brian Cohen (Chairman, NY Angels and first investor in Pinterest)
Monday (Nov. 12), 6:30 p.m. @ Howe Center, Stevens Institute of Technology, 4th Fl., Hoboken

New York City Pinterest Meetup #6
Panelists include Jenny Layne Cardon (Gogobot), Diego Saez-Gil (WeHostels) and Ava Fedorov (Beyond NYC).
Monday (Nov. 12), 7 p.m. @ WeWork Lounge, 154 Grand Street, Ground Floor

Funding The Best In Global Innovation
A two-day event bringing together a global ecosystem, developed to close the gap between U.S. investors and top investment opportunities overseas.
Tuesday (Nov. 13), 8:30 a.m. @ SNR Denton, 1221 6th Avenue

Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) Happy Hour
Meet some ERA1, ERA2 and ERA3 companies, mentors and learn more about ERA's Winter 2013 program.
Tuesday (Nov. 13), 6 p.m. @ WeWork Labs, 175 Varick Street, 4th Fl.

NY Enterprise Technology Meetup & Afterparty
Demos by Badgeville, Namely, Vaultive and eZ Systems.
Tuesday (Nov. 13), 6:30 p.m. @ Cooley, 1114 Avenue of the Americas, 46th Fl.

November 2012 NY Tech Meetup
You know the drill by now. Five-minute, rapid-fire demos. A bunch of amazing new startups. Now hopefully, you've managed to snag one of those elusive tickets.
Tuesday (Nov. 13), 7 p.m. @ NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts, 566 Laguardia Place

Women 2.0 PITCH NYC 2012 Conference & Competition
Learn from successful women entrepreneurs who started Cisco, Match, Meebo, DailyWorth and more with networking + mentoring.
Wednesday (Nov. 14), 8 a.m. @ Manhattan Center, 311 W. 34th Street

The Inside Story of Election 2012: Fast Politics and Faster Media Meet a Rapidly Changing Electorate
With Peter Hamby (CNN), Ben Smith (BuzzFeed), Molly Ball (The Atlantic), Sayu Bhojwani (The New American Leaders Project) and David Catanese (Politico).
Wednesday (Nov. 14), 8:30 a.m. @ The New School, Theresa Lang Community Center, 55 W. 13th Street, 2nd Fl.

NY Business Expo 2012 (in Association with NYEBN)
With Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge Capital), John Frankel (ff Ventures), Peter Shankman (HARO), Dan Porter (OMGPOP/Zynga) and others.
Wednesday (Nov. 14), 12 p.m. @ The 69th Regiment Armory, 68 Lexington Avenue

Investor Feedback Forum - Future Energy
Panelists include Andrew Garman (New Venture Partners), Arrun Kapoor (SJF Ventures), Jim LoGerfo (Earthrise Capital) and Willem Rensink (Shell). Startup pitches by Lucidity Lights, Kohilo Wind, ReNew, ThermoLift, Solstice Power, KiteFarms, Re-Nuble and Algepower.
Wednesday (Nov. 14), 6:30 p.m. @ NYU, W. 4th Street

The Brooklyn Startup Scene: Brooklyn Coworking Spaces & Their Entrepreneurs
Presenting spaces include Bat Haus CoWorking (Bushwick), Dumbo Startup Lab (Dumbo), The Yard (Williamsburg) and The Secret Clubhouse (Williamsburg).
Wednesday (Nov. 14), 6:30 p.m. @ Dumbo Startup Lab, 68 Jay Street, #718, Brooklyn

NY Video Nov 15 2012 Meetup
Demos by CrowdSurf tv, Rawporter, Liveu, Shelby tv and Pond 5.
Thursday (Nov. 15), 6:30 p.m. @ AOL HQ, 770 Broadway, 6th Fl.

Appular Presents A F#@K Sandy Event- Geeks Give Back
Don’t take anymore of Hurricane Sandy’s $h!t, grab some shots instead! Show the world how real New Yorkers face Mother Nature’s wrath by joining us for some downtown cocktails, geeky gossip, and cheeky NYC charity.
Thursday (Nov. 15), 7 p.m. @ White Rabbit, 145 E. Houston Street, New York

7th Annual Ivy Sports Symposium
With Bob Bowman (CEO, MLB Advanced Media), Rick Cordella (NBC Universal), Will Dean (CEO, Tough Mudder), Tracy Dolgin (CEO, YES Network), Billy King (General Manager, Brooklyn Nets) and others.
Friday (Nov. 16), 8 a.m. @ Alfred Lerner Hall, Columbia University, 2920 Broadway

Sustainability Hackathon - hosted by BMW i Born Electric Tour NYC
Help create a more sustainable future.
Friday (Nov. 16), 7 p.m. @ BMW i Born Electric Tour in NYC, 1095 6th Avenue

AngelHack Fall 2012 New York City
Join 2,500 hackers this fall for the HACKathon of hackathons! $500,000 in hosting and over $50,000 in Sponsor Prizes!
Saturday (Nov. 17), 9 a.m. @ The AlleyNYC, 500 7th Avenue

More events on the horizon...
Future of Fashion Startup Series on Nov 19 @ Projective Space - L.E.S.
Ray Kurzweil: Engineering The Brain on Nov 20 @ Kaufmann Concert Hall
Business Insider: Ignition - Future Of Digital on Nov 27 @ Time Warner Center, 10 on the Park
MakeIt NYC: Secrets of Kickstarter Panel on Nov 27 @ University Settlement - Speyer Hall
NYTECH Fall Networking Cocktail Reception on Nov 29 @ National Showroom
tilt@vc: ff Venture Capital on Nov 29 @ ff Venture Capital
Mashable Media Summit 2012 on Nov 30 @ The TimesCenter
Vator Splash NY 2012 on Dec 05 @ Le Poisson Rouge
FashInvest 2012 Capital Conference on Dec 11 @ Fashion Institute of Technology

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! ;)

(Photo: Venturist.info)

A few weeks ago, a 23-year-old girl named Kim Suozzi took to Reddit with a tragic backstory: during her senior year of college, she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of brain cancer that--after many treatment options had been explored--was deemed untreatable. Ms. Suozzi wrote that she has a 6 to 10 month median survival rate. "I have to prepare to die," she wrote painfully matter-of-factly. "In a way, I am fortunate because the lesion is primarily in my brain stem (controls things like breathing), so I will likely die before the tumor spreads to the areas central to who I am."

Ms. Suozzi was writing to Reddit to ask for donations so that she could afford her dying wish. Fund-raisers for cancer patients on the social news site are nothing new, particularly because potent group pathos is a familiar chord plucked in the community, one that has proven to be a compelling driving force. What makes Ms. Suozzi's case especially interesting is what exactly her dying wish is: the 23-year-old St. Louis resident wants to have her body cryogenically frozen:

I'm back on Reddit again, mostly to ask for help because I want to be cryogenically preserved upon my death. I've been interested in cryonics since long before I was even diagnosed, but I never thought that I would have to secure the finances so fast, and without a career or savings to stand on. As weird as it feels to ask for help here, I feel I should just give it a shot and sees what happens ... I know this is a big thing to ask for, and I'm sure many people are doubtful that preservation is plausible with cryonics. I'm far from convinced, but I would rather take the chance with preservation than rot in the ground or get cremated.

Reddit reacted with its typical mix of skepticism and support, but the majority of users argued with Ms. Suozzi's decision, claiming that believing in cryogenics is a blind leap of faith just as ridiculous as believing in religion (it didn't help that Ms. Suozzi posted her request in the Athiesm subreddit).

The top comment, penned by a user who claimed to also have been diagnosed with cancer and grappled with the specter of death, wrote a bleak comment arguing against Ms. Suozzi's wishes to be preserved:

We'll all be forgotten, and even the ground we walk on will one day be gone as well.

In two generations time, no one will know us or our lives. There is no worth in staying longer ... Defy you biological imperatives to desire to survive longer, and instead live and die knowing yourself better that most could ever dream of. Recognize that those biological drives that wish to survive forever have truly already betrayed you, in their own way, through bringing about your end ... Really, cryogenics is just a modern day take on the age old story of religion: "come with me and live forever." Forget that lie, and live for today, more fully than most will live any day their entire lives.

Less Wrong, an online community for futurists, singularitarians and human rationalists, immediately picked up on Ms. Suozzi's Reddit post, and lamented the community's reaction to her desire to be preserved. "Looking at some of the negative comments and worst of all bad arguments people are using as reasons not to donate made me more upset," wrote a user named Konkvistador. "I hope some here might join me in dismantling them."

Perhaps because they are rationalists to their core, or because of Reddit's historical failure to debunk fraudulent fund-raisers--and to ruin the lives of people who aren't faking at all--the Less Wrongers were wary of donating to Ms. Suozzi's case until it was proven true. But a few days ago, the Society for Venturism, a nonprofit located in Arizona, decided to spearhead the fund-raising efforts for Ms. Suozzi. It was a natural partnership, considering the Society's mission: "To advocate and promote the worldwide conquest of death and the continuation and enhancement of life through technological means, including cryonic suspension."

Many of the suspicions about scams were put to rest when the Society for Venturism vouched for Ms. Suozzi's claims, writing that it had investigated her background and medical paperwork before setting up its own charitable arm to help Ms. Suozzi reach her goal. The news was promptly picked up by KurzweilAI and other Singularity blogs. The Society for Venturism has already funded two successful "Cryonics Charity Cases."

Ms. Suozzi's dying wish invokes complex questions surrounding the nature of life, death and the afterlife, and what science can do--and not do--to comfort us in our final days. Many Redditors seemed to think that Ms. Suozzi was grasping at straws, desperately hoping to prolong her short life because she couldn't accept the fact that she was dying after so little time to live.

"Unfortunately the most interesting thing [I've done] is get a terminal disease at a young age," she wrote in her Reddit post.

Now the futurists, who primarily live on the fringes of science, are hoping they can change that.

(Illustration: David Saracino)

The situation on Alyssa Vance’s couch would have been best described as a cuddle puddle—a tangle of hair-petting and belly-stroking and neck-nuzzling, seven people deep. It was Friday night in late June in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment at The Caroline, a “white-glove service” building in Chelsea. Ms. Vance, a transgender former Google intern with the lips of a Renaissance statue, sat somewhere near the middle next to her girlfriend, Alice. Snuggling up on either end were a neuroscience Ph.D. from Columbia, a Yale grad student in applied mathematics, and a redhead in from Berkeley who “sells drugs on the Internet.” Across the room, a row of white chairs laid out expressly for Ms. Vance’s 21st birthday party stood abandoned in favor of the handsy human octopus.

The Observer hovered near the drinks table. Next to us, a ponytailed programmer from Morgan Stanley nibbled on a family-sized Trader Joe’s chocolate bar as we both stole glances at the pile-on.

The partygoers had a more solemn connection than their youthful PDA might suggest. They were all disciples of the blog Less Wrong, so named because “We try to be as least wrong as possible,” as one guest later explained. Despite describing itself as a forum on “the art of human rationality,” the New York Less Wrong group, which holds weekly Tuesday meetups and boasts almost 300 people signed up for its mailing list, is fixated on a branch of futurism that would seem more at home in a 3D multiplex than a graduate seminar: the dire existential threat—or, with any luck, utopian promise—known as the technological Singularity.

The Singularity, a term first coined by mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, refers to the point in time when man will create a machine capable of superhuman intelligence, shortly after which, he told a crowd of NASA scientists in 1993, “the human era will be ended.” The concept was subsequently popularized by best-selling author and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, known for his embrace of cryonics, or freezing one’s body with the hope of thawing it out, no worse for the wear, when conditions seem ripe. Mr. Kurzweil adopted the term to describe his predictions about the exponential growth of computer technology and its eventual merger with mankind. “By the 2040s and the 2030s, we will begin to augment our neocortex directly,” he told The Observer. “You’ll be talking to a hybrid. You won’t easily be able to separate, Oh, that came from my non-biological side.”

As unsettling as that sounds, Mr. Kurzweil sees it as a potential solution to the planet’s woes. “People look around and take a linear perspective and think we’re gonna run out of energy and water,” he said, suggesting that reverse-engineering the human brain could unleash unfathomable powers of intelligence to address what ails us. (He discusses the subject in more depth in his upcoming book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, out in November.) “The reality is that we’re going to become those machines,” he added. “That’s why we create them, to compensate for our own limitations.”

Such pronouncements have made Mr. Kurzweil a lightning rod for AI enthusiasts. In June, the tech blog Gizmodo hosted a party in his honor on the roof of Gawker’s Soho headquarters. It was a swanky affair for such a sweltering night. Rectangles of pizza and cross-sections of pork belly were passed around as Mr. Kurzweil assured the crowd that “optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

No one from the Less Wrong meetup group was invited.

Mr. Yudkowsky, left, and Mr. Thiel

Considerably more radical than Kurzweil, Less Wrong is affiliated with the Singularity Institute in Berkeley. Both were cofounded by 32-year-old Eliezer Yudkowsky, an eighth-grade dropout with an IQ of 143 (though he claims that might be a lowball figure). The messianic Mr. Yudkowsky also helped attract funding from his friend Peter Thiel, an early Facebook investor and noted libertarian billionaire whom Forbes pegs as the 303rd richest person in America. The Thiel Foundation, Mr. Thiel's philanthropic group, has donated at least $1.1 million to SIAI, more than four times its next largest donor. (The nonprofit’s Form 990 from 2010 shows assets of $462,470.)

While Mr. Kurzweil has generally been viewed as the Singularity’s chief standard-bearer, on the geekier fringe, that distinction belongs to Mr. Yudkowsky. “I have been seriously and not in a joking way accused of trying to take over the world,” he humble-brags on his OKCupid profile.

SingInst or SIAI, as the institute is known, was founded in 2000 to further research on “technological forecasting, human rationality, and architecting safe artificial intelligence.” Although the contemporary futurist movement has largely been a Bay Area phenomenon, the New York Less Wrong meetup group—a motley crew of libertine twenty- and thirty-somethings with impressive jobs and developing social skills—represents something of an East Coast bureau, and is the largest and fastest-growing group in the Less Wrong community. The New York group's upcoming plans include a Humanist open mic night on the Lower East Side and a trip to a co-ed Russian sauna in the Financial District.

SIAI is not to be confused with the more commercially-minded Singularity University, which counts Google, Cisco, and Nokia as corporate backers and has spun out dozens of startups. That organization, which has plans to go for-profit this year, is focused on giving a boost to emerging technologies that are market-ready now, and in spurring thinking about how we can harness them for the future, whereas SingInst’s organizing principle has a more apocalyptic cast. Technological advancements in machine learning, it argues, are hurtling towards to the creation of a self-improving artificial intelligence--one that can program itself to be smarter and smarter still. If the world doesn’t work to ensure the emerging AI is “human-friendly” and shares our values, it will destroy us all.

If Singularity University is the Mitt Romney of futurist advocacy groups—sleek and corporate—then the Singularity Institute is Ron Paul, scruffy and unhinged (and, incidentally, another beneficiary of Mr. Thiel’s largess).

“The AI is smarter than we are, so it would kill everyone. Or it wants all our resources, so of course it’s going to kill everyone,” Zvi Mowshowitz explained as the assembled rose from the couch to whoop it up to show tunes and eighties pop hits. Mr. Mowshowitz, who lives a couple floors up at The Caroline with his girlfriend (the neuroscientist), has jet black hair and an easy, childlike grin. He was wearing a electric blue gym shorts and a homemade T-shirt commemorating his reign as a professional champion of the Magic: The Gathering fantasy card game. Mr. Mowshowitz is currently working with Ms. Vance and Jaan Tallinn, the renowned Estonian programmer behind Skype and Kazaa, on a personalized medicine startup. “People come up with really bad arguments for why the AI wouldn’t kill everyone,” he continued. “‘Well, killing everyone—that’s like Terminator, so John Connor will stop it, right?’ The answer is no, John Connor will die! John Connor is dead!”

The Judgment Day narrative makes it easy to see why it's been satirized as “the Rapture for nerds.” Mitch Kapor, cofounder of Lotus Development, also drew a religious parallel, calling it “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people.”

“I’ve made my peace with the fact that, you know, this is not going to last,” Mr. Mowshowitz said, looking out the window at weekend traffic on Sixth Avenue as though it would all disappear. “We have a very dysfunctional civilization right now. There are better things that could be done.” By the drinks table, his girlfriend sang along with The Lion King’s “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.”

The people behind SIAI know that the end of the world as we know it sounds like a downer, so they are actively engaged in reframing Armageddon. On the webpage “Why Work Toward the Singularity,” SingInst offers a gloriously transcendent vision of AI as mankind’s salvation. If we are able to develop a “friendly” superhuman intelligence, then it could do everything from curing cancer to accelerating scientific research to eradicating hunger. Meanwhile, cohorts focused on anti-aging, nanotechnology, longevity and transhumanism are at work on genetic therapies and body-hacks that will extend our lifespans beyond those of the vampire population of True Blood.

Mr. Mowshowitz calls it escape velocity. “That’s where medicine is advancing so fast that I can’t age fast enough to die,” he explained. “I can’t live to 1,000 now, but by the time I’m 150, the technology will be that much better that I’ll live to 300. And by the time I’m 300, I’ll live to 600 and so on,” he said, a bit breathlessly. “So I can just . . . escape, right? And now I can watch the stars burn out in the Milky Way and do whatever I want to do.”

Many members of the Less Wrong meetup group are hopeful enough to have invested in cryonics; some are even cryonics counselors. At the party, Ms. Vance, who glided around the room with the head-bob and muffled laugh of a very polite alien, interrupted Mr. Mowshowitz to share the business card of a “cryo life insurance guy.” Not necessary; he was already covered.

Convincing people that the world is about to be thoroughly upended has never been an easy or rewarding task, and the singularity cadres have adopted some canny marketing techniques to help the medicine go down. Branding themselves as “rationalists,” as the Less Wrong crew has done, makes it a lot harder to dismiss them as a “doomsday cult.” The Singularity Institute itself is making a similar leap, spinning off what it’s calling The Center for Applied Rationality, which hosts summer camps for math olympians and rationality “mini camps” in San Francisco.

Michael Vassar, the former president of Singularity Institute, who stepped down in January to pursue his idea for a personalized medicine startup--later bringing on Mr. Mowshowitz and Ms. Vance--admitted the nonprofit had learned to hide some of its more radical ideas, emphasizing rationality instead.

As Mr. Yudkowsky put it, “There are plenty of people out there who would be interested in cognitive science-based thinking skills who wouldn’t necessarily buy into the whole ‘save humanity’ thing.”

Mr. Yudkowsky’s most successful stab at attracting young cadres to the cause was a 1,000-page fan fiction project called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which substitutes scientific method for magic and has received, at last count, as many as 5 million hits.

So eager are Singularity adherents to keep the discussion upbeat that Mr. Yudkowsky instituted a ban from the Less Wrong forums of a particularly insidious discussion thread, ominously nicknamed “the Basilisk,” after science fiction writer David Langford's notion of images that crash the mind. In the initial post, a prominent Less Wrong contributor mused about whether a friendly AI—one hell-bent on saving the world—would punish even true believers who had failed to do everything they could to bring about its existence, including donating their disposable income to SIAI. It seemed like little more than a harmless thought experiment, but rumor has it that the discussion thread was deemed a danger to susceptible minds and exorcised from the blog after a reader had a nervous breakdown.

The Observer tried to ask the Less Wrong members at Ms. Vance’s party about it, but Mr. Mowshowitz quickly intervened. “You’ve said enough,” he said, squirming. “Stop. Stop.”

Indeed, the last thing Less Wrong wants to do is freak anyone out. On the contrary, one of the group’s missions seems to be to empower its less socially well-adjusted members and teach them to cope with the various challenges presented by the here and now. In this sense, the whole movement owes a little something to its Bay Area forebears, the New Age and self-actualization movements of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

“Our primary source of value is helping young nerds become engaging and extroverted—and occasionally more muscular,” Raymond Arnold, a Less Wrong member and 3D animator with an advertising firm in Manhattan, explained a few weeks after Ms. Vance’s party. The Observer had stopped by Mr. Mowshowitz’s apartment, a few floors up at The Caroline, for the group’s weekly Tuesday session. As we knew from the mailing list—a constant stream of emails extolling the Paleo diet, recounting post-hike “massage puddles” and offering extra tickets to The Dark Knight Rises—this three-hour meeting would be “Rationalist therapy” for one of the members, a chance to get guidance on productivity, dating, and work.

“You’re playing on hard mode,” one of the members assured their fretful subject for the evening, borrowing a video game analogy.

“Really?” he asked.

“Really.”

Ultimately, the group’s most effective recruitment technique has been providing its members a friendly community—sometimes very friendly—complete with those cuddle puddles. Indeed, for a movement focused on transcendence and the eventual shedding of our mortal “meatsacks,” futurists can be a kinky bunch. Particularly out in the Valley, where many futurists “co-house,” a sexualized aura prevails and many members practice polyamory, taking multiple sex partners.

After all, if the world is coming to an end, why not enjoy ourselves while we have the chance?

Indeed, while Mr. Yudkowsky isn’t quite a techno-utopian in the Kurzweilian vein, some of the lengthy discourses on the Less Wrong blog revolve around “fun theory,” or imagining what we would do if we were immortal.

While long-term thinking about the Singularity tends to be “very idealistic and smart and visionary,” according to William Eden, who helped found New York's Less Wrong chapter, in the near-term, devotees are focused on maximizing the moment, “trying to make more money, have more sex, all of the very basic monkey drives.” Mr. Eden has since relocated to Palo Alto to work for Azumio, a developer of biofeedback health apps funded by Founders Fund, a venture capital firm founded by Mr. Thiel.

Like a number of key Singularity theorists, Mr. Eden also moonlights as a personal coach. He and his wife Divia recently released a series of videos and training sessions called Effectiveness for Geeks.

Eden is not his given last name. He and Divia, who was also part of the Less Wrong meetup group, made up a new one at their wedding this year, which was officiated by Mr. Yudkowsky. One source described the couple as the “JFK and Jackie O. of the Singularity,” though the comparison would be more apt if Camelot were a hippe commune on the Pacific Coast.

For a time, the Edens lived with Patri Friedman—the grandson of economist Milton Friedman and a friend of Mr. Thiel—and his wife in a co-housing situation that they dubbed Tortuga. (Mr. Thiel has also invested in the Seasteading Institute, Mr. Friedman’s attempt to erect a new kind of government atop a bunch of oil rigs in international waters.)

The foursome's adventure was well documented on Shannon Friedman’s LiveJournal, although all have since have moved out. After her separation from Mr. Friedman last August, Shannon has been dating Mr. Yudkowsky, though not exclusively. “I am now down to only three boyfriends ;)” she wrote on her blog in March. “They’re all very casual. Adam describes my relationship with Eliezer as two eight-year-olds on a playground. We banter and play and hot tub.”

Incidentally, Ms. Friedman also offers life-coaching services under the same brand as the Edens.

Not surprisingly, many futurists are also partial to mind-expanding substances. “If I cut down to once/week of pot smoking with possibly the occasional hallucinogen if I can get them working, then that’s only 1-2 nights of altered state/week,” Ms. Friedman wrote last year. On Twitter, Mr. Friedman, whose children were part of the Edens’ wedding party, has wondered if he was taking too much ProVigil, the anti-narcolepsy medication often used as an energy enhancement drug.

As Mr. Vassar explained, “They probably don’t have a relatively mainstream life because why would you, out here?”

Asked whether polyamory was part of the New York scene as well, Ms. Vance said it was uncommon. “I’d certainly say that we don’t think ‘poly’ is morally wrong or anything,” she noted, adding that the California contingent had taken the idea quite a bit further. “In one of those [co-]houses, I saw a big white board on the board with a ‘poly-graph,’ a big diagram of who was connected to whom,” she said. “It was a pretty big graph.

“I won’t claim that our exact culture is the best for everyone, because it’s not,” Ms. Vance went on, “but physical contact is something that I think an awful lot of people do need more of.”

That is, until we shed our physical bodies altogether!

“People being happy helps a community grow,” Mr. Yudkowsky said. “I don’t think I ever understood why it was that to save the world you needed people being happy around each other until I visited New York. Nobody wants to hang out with you if you’re not happy.”

-ntiku@observer.com

A version of this story appeared on the cover of  July 25, 2012 issue of The New York Observer.