Technological singularity

[NobleSavage]

Pseudoscience or not? I think some of the cheerleaders are nunts like Ray Kurzweil. However, according to Wikipedia:

The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann. In 1958, regarding a summary of a conversation with von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam described "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

I place von Neuman in the rational category.

This Singularity stuff got popular around the the heady days before the dot com crash when it was mixed with Moore's Law, strong AI, and a lot of gibberish. Now that those times are over, can we measure knowledge, technology, and progress in such a way to claim that it's growth is exponential? What unit of measure would you use?

I have never looked into Transhumanism can anyone give me a summary? I like the word and think it's more accurate than Singularity for what will happen in the future. I expect more exciting stuff to come from biology than computer science.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If we don't do ourselves in somehow it's basically certain to happen.

Kurzweil's problem is that his using very optimistic estimates of when it will come about.