Why had this group of students, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to late seventies, all come to SU? Few if any of us were planning to start companies that would manufacture nanobots or artificial brains, and not one of us was going to gain enough insight from a couple dozen 90-minute lectures to become anything close to an expert in any of these fields. As the week wore on, I put the simple question "Why are you here?" to more and more of my fellow students. The answers divided the class into two camps. There were the people like Kent — mostly Americans, mostly with some tie to Silicon Valley — who plainly lived and breathed this stuff. And there were the skeptics — mostly foreign, many with some tie to finance — who seemed to be at SU, mostly, as one New Zealander explained to me, to bask in "the pedigree of Silicon Valley." Over lunch one afternoon, I put the question to two women, a Danish venture capitalist and an Indian-born, Germany-based solar executive. Both were fed up with the European welfare state — they couldn't believe how many workers stayed home for sick days and they marveled at the chutzpah of male employees who used paternity leave as an excuse to shirk their responsibilities. Europe was dead. America and Silicon Valley in particular were the models for a more productive capitalism. But what about the Singularity, I asked them? Did they have opinions on our transhuman future? The Indian woman curled her upper lip and let out a short huff. The Dane rolled her eyes. All that sci-fi talk, they made clear, was something to be endured, not enjoyed. (Still it was undeniably part of the attraction. At the end of the week, the Indian woman confessed that she'd liked SU precisely because it wasn't the same as a typical b-school course. It was weirder. Sometimes weird is good.) One night in the middle of the week, I found myself sitting at the dinner table next to Malek, the Jupiter Sunrise frontman. Malek filled me in on his open-sourced, improvisational music project inspired by the films of John Cassavetes, told me about his various residencies — San Francisco, San Diego, a little town near Joshua Tree — and dropped that he was friends with Peter Diamandis. Malek had introduced himself to the group by revealing that after a devastating car accident he had lost hearing in his left ear. Returning to the subject, he called his choice of material "a little Machiavellian." "I very deliberately mentioned that I'd had an accident; it draws people toward me," Malek explained. "Typically people don't think exponentially until they've had something traumatic happen in their lives. This guy next to me," he pointed to Kent, "I knew within two words something traumatic had happened to him." "This," Malek continued, gesturing toward the attendees and faculty seated across the dining room, "is the scientific adjunct of the San Francisco New Age community. Two thousand years ago these people would have been Gnostics. All these people, their underlying motivation is to relieve their own suffering. Ray is a healer. He's like a preacher. If you feel validated the first time, you'll come back next week. If you feel validated again, you'll donate. If you feel validated a third time, then you'll evangelize. The whole system and everything that Ray is doing is operating on that church model with some math to prove it." Malek didn't necessarily mean this as a critique, and the longer the week went on, the more his comments proved prescient. The day after that dinner, a ginger-haired British attendee confessed that he'd spent much of his adult life waging a battle against depression. (He ran a life-coaching business that promised potential clients the power to change their worlds into better places.) Then another man revealed that his wife suffered from multiple sclerosis. Then a former gymnast shared she'd recently had two tumor scares. Malek had been right about Kent too: His father had died of MS two years before. When we divided up into student-led seminars one night, the most popular class was a meditation session taught by a lay Zen Buddhist monk who doubled as a Silicon Valley marketing consultant. It wasn't until the fourth night of the program, though, that the therapeutic, the spiritual, and the technological began to converge. I had been eagerly anticipating the moment when Ray Kurzweil would finally appear before our class, but when his speaking slot arrived, it was David Roberts — the director of SU's graduate studies program, former military special agent, and current Air Force reservist — who took the stage. Roberts began much like the other lecturers, excitedly describing how disruption had made technology cheaper and better and more democratic. "Unfortunately," Roberts sighed, "technology doesn't bring us ethics. And here's the really bad news: As much as the disruptive technology enables us to create extraordinary things from very small numbers of people, it also allows very small numbers of people to do unbelievably dangerous and bad and evil things in a way that was never possible before. Within 20 years, one or two people could probably end up being capable of destroying the Earth." Roberts hit the remote control that controlled the large display monitors scattered throughout the room. The 72-million-viewed YouTube video "Battle at Kruger" came onto the screens. In that safari footage, a young wildebeest is grabbed by a pride of lions and a hungry crocodile before being rescued by its herd. In a calm, preacherly tone, Roberts analyzed the scene. "There's a self-preservation instinct, and there is a herding instinct, and I think that's about the level animals can think at," Roberts said. "But I think human beings are different. C.S. Lewis does an unbelievable job of explaining this: We actually have this third thing. If you hear somebody yell down a dark alley, there is a self-preservation instinct that says,, and there is a herding instinct that says,, and there's a third thing that tells you that theis to go down that alley and see what's going on." "What are we? What are you?" Roberts asked, his face hanging to make clear his extreme seriousness. Flipping to his next slide, a photograph of a large white palm cradling a tiny withered black hand, he continued, "We can become brilliantly smart and live forever, and not become something that we're proud of. And technology doesn't make that change for us, we make that change through a decision that is independent of that line and growth path. And that is my hope for all of us." After the lecture, I found Roberts outside SU's classroom building talking with about a dozen students under a large oak tree. They were discussing C.S. Lewis's "third thing," an explicitly Christian concept, and pondering whether it was possible to be ethical citizens while also embracing runaway technological progress. As I was standing on the outside of the circle listening, a jovial Brazilian telecom executive walked up to us and seized upon a pause in the conversation. "I have just a short question," he asked. "God?" Roberts drew in a breath and leaned back on his heels, gazing upward through the gently swaying branches, a beatific smile spreading across his face. "I used to be a big atheist," he chuckled. "I dressed up as God for Halloween." He turned to the Brazilian. "You know, on the left you have all of these concepts we've been discussing, and on the right, you have God," he said. "There are indicators both ways. I think both of these things are really possible."