"The Singularity will be a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed," said Ray Kurzweil, keynote speaker and author of the best-selling The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005).
I'm reading the book. About 1/2 way through. You knock the ideas that these people have but they are well thought through and documented in spades. Have a look at the book the next time you are in Borders. You may be surprised. In particular, Kurzweil isn't predicting that any of this is going to happen over night. The big changes are 30 to 40 years away. Look back 40 years and think about about the state of automatic voice recognition, pattern recognition, database indexing of billions of documents, instant and essentially free worldwide communication in any household that wants it and computers for $800 that are as good as anything that IBM had in 1966.
Things are changing. And fast.
"You knock the ideas that these people have but they are well thought through and documented in spades. Have a look at the book the next time you are in Borders. You may be surprised."
I read the book a couple of months ago and was equally impressed with the documentation. I came away with one overriding impression. What Kurzweil predicts will happen, in general terms and plus or minus a few years, is inevitable.
Even if a group of countries or even a majority of the world's countries concluded that nanotechnology or AI was too dangerous and had to be banned, it would merely go underground and would emerge anyway, probably in the hands of someone immensely dangerous. Better to have everyone working on ways to insure it's safe, than have it in the hands of a few crazies.
" Things are changing. And fast."
I agree. before the end of this century, technology will completely transform life as we know it---unless we fall into another Dork Ages. Perhaps that's not such a bad alternative?