Ray Kurzweil: the 'guru' with a quest for immortality

Inventor Ray Kurzweil's suprisingly popular vision of the future is populated by 'superhuman cyborgs' where he lives on forever as a computer named Ramona.

Forbes magazine once described Ray Kurzweil, 60, as "the ultimate thinking machine". He certainly believes in keeping the mechanism well oiled. America's top futurist takes so many vitamin and mineral supplements (up to 210 a day) that he has a dedicated "pill wrangler" to sort them out. He reckons that if he can hang on for 20 years, the technology will be in place to give him a fighting chance of immortality.

It's easy to dismiss Kurzweil as a sci-fi freak, but his ideas are taken seriously by much of the US scientific establishment. He has just become chancellor of a new institute: the Singularity University, based at Nasa's Silicon Valley campus, and backed by such luminaries as Google co-founder Larry Page and Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.

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