The machines have learned to dream. They can paint in Monet’s hues before breakfast, sing like Kishore Kumar, and draft legal briefs by nightfall. Artificial Intelligence dazzles with feats that would have been science fiction a decade ago. Yet the brighter their intelligence burns, the dimmer the human flame of meaning seems to grow. This is the paradox of our era: technological power accelerating at unprecedented speed, while our sense of purpose falters.

Ray Kurzweil, herald of the Singularity, charts humanity’s arc from stone tools to a future where, by 2045, non-biological intelligence eclipses all human minds. His timeline predicts artificial general intelligence by 2029, brain-cloud fusion in the 2030s, and lifespans approaching a millennium. Kurzweil speaks in quasi — spiritual tones of the Universe “waking up,” yet his path is entirely material: faster chips, denser data, sharper scans, until mind and machine converge. In his vision, transcendence is engineered, immortality uploaded, creativity distilled into code — a dream intoxicating for engineers, because here, existence itself can be debugged. A century before Kurzweil, Sri Aurobindo drew a different map. A revolutionary turned yogi with a Cambridge mind and poet’s voice, he recognised the mind’s vast potential but did not equate intelligence with evolution’s end. For him, the next leap was the supramental........

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