npr.org: "December 23, 2005 · Will new technologies fundamentally change what it means to be human? Inventor and author Ray Kurweil talks about technological change and its effects on everything from health to artificial intelligence." Listen here

wikipedia.org: "In his 2001 essay, The Law of Accelerating Returns, Ray Kurzweil proposed a generalization of Moore's law that forms the basis of many people's beliefs regarding a "Technological Singularity". Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Kurzweil extended this to include technologies from far before the integrated circuit to future forms of computation. He declared that, whenever a technology approaches some kind of a barrier, a new technology will be invented to allow us to cross that barrier. He predicts that such paradigm shifts will become more and more common as we approach the singularity. He believes that the exponential growth of Moore's law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the "Singularity", which he defines as a technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history." More