Alex Beam in the Boston Globe:
Inventor/entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil has become the high-tech version of the cartoon character carrying the sign: “The End Is Near.” With dogged consistency, the founder of eight different technology companies has been proselytizing an end-of-humantime event called the Singularity, a Buck Rogers vision of the hypothetical Christian Rapture.
Like everything, the term was first coined by mathematician John von Neumann, who spoke a half-century ago of “the ever accelerating progress of technology . . . approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race.” More recently, San Diego State computer scientist Vernor Vinge has predicted that man-made “entities with greater than human intelligence” would dominate the planet.
In his forthcoming book, “The Singularity Is Near,” Kurzweil calls the Singularity “the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process.” Already, human activity is enhanced by technological substitutes, e.g., robotic prostheses, artificial skin, blood plasma, etc. The Singularity, which Kurzweil says will occur at mid-century, is the moment when biological material ceases to exist, and we become products of the revolution in “GNR”: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.
More here.