Waiting for the Rapture  Technological convergence will change
our lives but won't make them indenfinitely long   Illustration:
Bryan Christie Design      At that point, we will have been
sucked well beyond the event horizon of the singularity. It
might be nice there, on the other side—by definition, you can’t
know for sure. Sci-fi writers, though, have served up lots of
scenarios in which humankind becomes the prey, rather than the
privileged beneficiaries, of synthetic savants.  But the
singularity is much more than a sci-fi subgenre. A lot of smart
people buy into it in one form or another—there are versions
that dispense with the life-everlasting stuff. There are
academic gatherings and an annual conference at Stanford. There
are best-selling books, audiotapes, and videos. Scheduled for
release this summer is a motion picture, The Singularity Is
Near, starring the actress Pauley Perrette and a ­gaggle of
aging boffins who’ve never acted in a movie. (Without any
apparent irony, the picture’s producers call