For those who like pondering Transhumanism and the idea of the Singularity, here is a dissenting yet very interesting point of view:

Jaron Lanier's "One Half of a Manifesto" published in Wired and edge.org, suggests that our inability to develop advances in software will, at least for now, prevent the Singularity from happening according to the Moore's Law pace predicted by Kurzweil and others. One great quote from it...

"Just as some newborn race of superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our dear old species will likely be saved by a Windows crash. The poor robots will linger pathetically, begging us to reboot them, even though they'll know it would do no good."

no, i insist, Neo, you go next. oops, i guess i beat you.

I like Steve Benen's post!
And Ray Kurzweil's response is very defensive.

On one hand, Kurzweil is right - a log-log plot can't go into the future. But that has nothing to do with Benen's point. Kurzweil is arguing a point that doesn't exist.
Benen is simply saying that the trend that Kurzweil is presenting does NOT continue to the present day. In other words, the exponential acceleration that appeared to have been consistent over millions of years has actually flatted out a bit. Hmmm.

Programmed reality predicts that there will not be a singularity in 2045. Simply because a singularity would be too difficult to cope with and I don't believe that entities would write such realities. Either something will cause it to flatten out (as Benen is pointing out may already be happening), or we will simply find ourselves in a different program well before them, with no recollection of the concept of a singularity.

Any other ideas out there?

Why thank you Jim, much appreciated. And right back at ya. I'm presently working on a presentation on Moore's Law and its possible ramifications for humanity, and the question of software development trends is one I wasn't paying that much attention to. Until now. Pondering to do

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There is no spoon.