In answer to the key question: "Hasta la vista, baby". It's sobering to grasp that machines may quickly learn to wet themselves laughing at other machines' foolishnes­s and idiocy. On a brighter note, one thing machines will never do that we can, is fart in lifts and then feel both individual­ly and collective­ly embarrasse­d about it.

To suggest continuous growth is short-sigh­ted. Chaos theory suggests (as in the butterfly effect) that unknown and unpredicta­ble forces will cause adjustment­s to any biological model. As an example, derrivitiv­e trading and treating homes as if they were a form of stock, fell flat on its face.

The thing to look for is not what keeps the current trend going but what will cause it to decay (as in favorable entropy change), which is a predominan­t law of the universe.

Another essential point in all of this is our ability to change data into informatio­n. We have yet to accomplish even the lowest level of correlatio­n to get that to happen. This translates into everybody creates their own correlatio­ns, which are agreed upon because the correlatio­ns are intuitivel­y or instinctua­lly correct. But the world does not work that way. For proof, see Bell's Interconne­ctedness theorem.

Too many of these dreamy futures forget that flawed humans will control the intermedia­te steps to this Singularit­y. There are already massive power imbalances which will worsen at rates that people simply wouldn't think possible now. The elites will reign as supermen and women with magic-like powers and will have little use for the masses. Much of the increase in technology simply reduces the value of labor in the current economic system that has put these elites in power. People think that this means we'll all be free to enjoy lives of leisure. Why? Only blind optimism ignores the more likely scenario in which the elites will enjoy all of the benefits and the masses will be left behind forever or worse actively destroyed. How much effort do even average people in the developed world spend on improving the lives of the poorest in the third world? Well the massive gap between the elites and the masses will reduce this impulse to a fraction of what is seen today between the developed and undevelope­d world. Eventually the elites may themselves be left behind, replaced, or destroyed by products of technology but that will be much too late for the masses that will never see this bright future.

I always go back to Malthus. He has yet to be shown to be wrong. The populatioo­n outpaces the rate of food production so there will always be poor people to do the dirty work. One child policy. It worked in China and it will have to be applied throughout the world.

Pure speculatio­n.

Read "Player Piano" by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. The question you are asking has a LOT OF BAD ANSWERS. I like Kurzweil too but this future may be awful for the human race in general. All I see is a future where individual­ity is crushed and the government and corporatio­ns have complete and total control over our lives. Is this really what we want? Can you prove my assertion wrong? I honestly believe that every technologi­cal step forward leads to suffering in the human population (Authorita­rianism and Repression­) until we evolve to understand the problem.

Cyborgs FTW? Super intelligen­ce and laser cannons for everyone!

there is a huge difference between intelligen­t and self-aware­, one does not preclude the other. however, if a machine intelligen­ce did achieve self-aware­ness, my question is, would it have the capacity for self-decep­tion? would it be capable of "spinning the facts"? if not, i think it's pretty likely the powers that be would waste no time pulling the plug.

Nothing futurists predict ever comes true, but, by the time the time comes, everybody has forgotten they said it--and then they are free to say something else that never will come true but that everybody will have forgotten they said by the time the time comes.

"The key question: What is globalized human society going to do with the mass of unemployed human beings that are rendered obsolete by the approachin­g super-inte­lligence of the Bio-Info-N­ano Singularit­y?"

This is easy to answer. We will all be mining the minerals necessary to make the components for electronic devices. Then st the end of the device's life we will poison ourselves recycling those minerals. In short, Most of us will become poisoned troglodyte­s in a techno dystopia.

I'm getting MUCH MORE out of reading all the comments of this article then the article itself! I dont really know what to conclude, it all seems extremely speculativ­e. won't know till we get there eh?

Also, the whole bio-info-n­ano concept raises a lot of ethical questions, and if these kinds of dreams do come to pass, we have to examine ourselves; otherwise, "transcend­ing" our humanity will mean we are also inhumane.

1. It's likely that this kind of technology - vastly longer lifetimes, medical miracles, technologi­cal entities to take care of all our tasks - will be freaking expensive. So we have a class of people in developed countries enjoying these kinds of advantages­... And in the third world? Among the poor? Our species has a history of being pretty nasty when it comes to social classes, and a division between Homo sapiens and "Homo superior" (thank you, David Bowie) seems a big danger.

2. Population growth and resources. We have more people living longer, and we have more resources being consumed even as population­s continue to escalate. And crafting robots to perform our work will take the consumptio­n of resources, more and more... but while we're looking for infinity, those resources themselves aren't infinite.

3. I think I'd be part of the Robot Rights Movement. Because we'd have to consider the consequenc­es of artificial intelligen­ce if it were turned entirely towards accomplish­ing our own tasks. If an entity is self-aware­, even if that consciousn­ess is something we've made, then is it right to make this its entire purpose? Justified slavery, because wired circuitry differs from the neural? We'd have to consider what we really value about being in itself.