This encounter is like the meeting between two artists, the elder celebrity and the rambunctious youngster. The finishing touch would be if Myhrvold were to ask Goertzel what he was working on, as Goethe once asked Heinrich Heine, and Goertzel were to reply: "a version of Faust."

According to Myrvhold, genetic engineering and the development of artificial intelligence are the two main obsessions of America's scientific elite. In a text available on the Internet, he illustrates the limits to this project. One example he gives is the number of permutations possible with 59 objects — only slightly more than a deck of cards. Calculating the complete set of permutations for 59 objects would require 10 to the power of 20 permutations, roughly equivalent to the entire number of protons and neutrons in the universe.

"Europe has stopped thinking," says Lanier without a trace of malice. Later he adds: "Maybe we'll all go mad over here."

These are young men reciting the development of artificial intelligence to young billionaires like a poem. Scientists such as Daniel Hillis, who first built the world's most powerful computer and now a mechanical watch which might still be ticking away in a world without humans. Hillis, whom Marvin Minsky lists among the most important scientists of our time, built parallel computers which simulate evolution. His machines were so powerful that the U.S. government banned the sale of his company Thinking Machines to a Japanese group in the interests of national security. And where did the theoretician of "artificial life" end up? "Until recently I was at Disney, but I resigned," he says. "It was a great experience. But it was just a transitional phase on the way to creating artificial life."

Ray Kurzweil speaks of an age of "spiritual machines." And indeed, at technology's cutting edge, a movement has grown up that is as spiritual as it is materialistic. Like every movement, it has its profane sides. Asked how this profanity manifests itself, all the representatives of the movement without exception name Bill Gates. As if he was an ideological traitor, the Stalin of the computer age. But these are minor battles. "We are all part of it when Microsoft is broken up," says Lanier: "Broken up into its component parts."