Wired UK’s April issue is out now. Readers can download the April edition at the Wired UK website, featuring the cover story “Live forever and save the world: Ray Kurzweil’s new Singularity University will change how you think.”

“It’s not an accredited university, and it doesn’t actually teach the singularity, the supposed superintelligence that will result when man merges with machine, due (according to prolific inventor Ray Kurzweil) sometime around 2045…

“It’s the law of accelerating returns,” explains Kurzweil, with Peter Diamandis the cofounder of Singularity University, in a conversation a week after the course. “The measures of information technology — price performance, bandwidth capacity — are growing expnentially. Yet hardwired in our linear cortex is this linear expectation.

My critics will look at the current situation, and say, ‘Well, I don’t see th eharbingers of what Mr. Kurzweil is talking about it.'”I predicted the divergence of the internet in the early ’80s, as I saw the Arpanet doubling every year,” Kurzweil continues.

“People declared the Human Genome Project a failure halfway through, when one per cent had been decoded — they said it’d take 700 years. My reaction was, no, we’re almost done. It was finished seven years later.” […]