Its worth pointing out that this is a commentary on Kurzweil's particular view of technological singularity and how it might happen. Picking holes in his propos

Its worth pointing out that this is a commentary on Kurzweil's particular view of technological singularity and how it might happen. Picking holes in his proposed theory of mind for AIs, or his relating biological evolution with technological "progress", doesn't necessarily invalidate the general idea of exponentially accelerating technology. Kurzweil is just one advocate. In fact, the idea [1] originated with Von Neumann in the 50s and was popularised by Vernor Vinge in the 90s, and its worth reading Vinge's paper "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" [2]. Bruce Sterling gave a interesting (and sceptical) talk [3] on the subject a while back. For what its worth, I'm personally not convinced that we'll ever see a technological singularity because I don't think our culture generates technology that has the required attributes. Siri or Google Now don't need to be self-aware in order to do what they do, and there is no apparent commercial pressure to make them so. And since people build technology for human purposes, the presence of people who sleep, get bored, etc. will act as a drag on any tendency for runaway acceleration. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#History_of_the_idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Histo... [2] http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.htm... [3] http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-as-a-black-hole/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-you...