It seems reasonable to say that “intelligent tool using civilization is entering a transitional period of objectively great importance”, but that’s already happened at least 3 times in the last 10 or 12,000 years. I’d certainly argue that the invention of agriculture was a great transition; it made possible permanent groups of more than 30 or so humans, eventually permitting cities. Then the development of writing allowed knowledge to be transmitted across space and time with much higher accuracy and in much larger amounts than oral tradition, which had the effect of making culture more robust and giving it the same exponential growth curve as the population and later the growth of science, engineering, and even semiconductor device density. And finally the scientific method, coupled with the development of mathematics as a model of physical and other systems, resulted in a growth of knowledge of the world which could be applied to increasing life span, communication speed, and the power to modify the world, making the human experience again very different.

Singularities aren’t new to humans (and there have been a total of at least 6 in the evolution of life as well, I’ll give you a cite for that if you want), but we tend to think of the previous ones as blending into the overall trend of history that resulted in us. But I think the difference between the lives of hunter-gatherers and those of the city dwellers of Assyria or Babylon was as great as the difference between us and whatever humans may become in the next century or so is going to be. Doesn’t mean I have any way of predicting what that difference will be.

We currently make excellent use of gravity and theories about gravity, without understanding it. The suggestions Ray puts forth – that intelligent tool using civilization is entering a transitional period of objectively great importance – a change that hasn’t happened in probably a billion years in this region of the galaxy – is an observation of a trend with a significant implications.

The problem is, you cannot anticipate on it, worse than you can anticipate on an earthquake. No response has any meaning. Plus it wouldnt be a single singularity – it can be any of a thousand different singularity type transitions, ranging from a skynet extinction to a accelerando type funhouse ride.

Like bfwebster, I’ve studied AI, as well as neural nets and their relationship to real neurons, theories of brain function, and the philosophy of consciousness. I simply don’t believe that his predictions take into account many factors that will affect how much and how quickly we can learn about how the human mind functions. I don’t think Kurzweil’s a charlatan, but I do think he’s fooling himself, in part because he wants to believe that these technologies will be available to him before he dies.

This kind of exponential growth of technological capability and knowledge (not to mention financial wealth) has been going on for > 200 years now.

As to his specific predictions well, @bfwebster above mentioned that at least they’re testable and specific.

But I’ve always been struck by the spiritual and philisophical component of his writings (particularly in TSiN): where he talks of “physicalism” (as opposed to materialism, which has some negative connotations) and “patternism” (referring to the pattern of information that makes up a human mind).

Kurzweil is a technological spiritualist. There’s nothing wrong with that, an it’s interesting to watch new religion being born.