Robot
© The Spectator, UK
The latest US census found that 43 per cent of the population in Santa Clara County, California, were members of a religious institution. This is slightly less than the American national average of 50 per cent, but you'd probably expect that because the area includes Silicon Valley, where geeks are busy designing our online, gadget-laden future. You might assume they would be pretty secular types.

You'd be wrong. As a measure of religious observance, that census is useless. Perhaps the geeks don't all belong to churches, but the reality is that the inhabitants of the Valley are in the grip of a religious mania so bizarre, so exotic, that it makes the Prince Philip-worshipping inhabitants of the island of Pacific Tanna look positively mainstream. For the geeks worship a machine that has not yet been built.

This machine will appear in about 2045 at a moment its worshippers call the Singularity. It will be the last machine we will ever build because, being superintelligent and able to redesign itself to be ever more intelligent, it will do everything we need, including make us medically immortal by curing all our ills, or, perhaps, genuinely immortal by uploading us into itself. Or it will kill us. The mood of the machine is as unpredictable as that of Prince Philip; it may be an Old rather than a New Testament god.

Ray Kurzweil
© GettyRay Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and large-vocabulary speech recognition.
The Abraham - or perhaps John the Baptist - of this faith is Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil has long been the hot gospeller of the future. As with all futurologists, his forecasts have proved more often wrong than right. Yet he is a marketing genius and that has led to him being lauded by presidents and employed by Google to work on artificial intelligence (AI).

This genius has also led to the establishment of the Singularity University, the campus of which is inside the mighty Nasa Ames Research Centre in Silicon Valley. It is Kurzweil who chose the date of 2045 for the advent of the Singularity and who has been the final machine's most effective disciple.

Singularity is a term derived from physics, where it means the point at the unknowable centre of a black hole where the laws of physics break down. For Valley believers, the tech version of this is where the rules and conventions that have previously ordered human life come to an end. It is the 'trans-human' moment at which we transcend our biological destiny.