Well, I finished Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near." Very interesting book, though I'm still digesting the contents. I'm not going to attempt to summarize it, but I will say that I would recommend it as reading for anyone who thinks they will be alive more than 10 years from now, since even if he's wrong about 90% of what he predicts, he discusses the issues- and he's probably closer to right on 90% of what he says.

I was thinking as I read the book about one thing I disagree with his analysis about - he points out that as technology advances and gets cheaper, it spreads out, and quickly reaches the point where most of the globe has the new technology. Additionally, since the time between first adopters and laggards is speeding up, (for example, it took decades longer for telephones to spread to 50% of the population than it took cell phones,) the wealth disparity among people will disappear.

I'm going to have to disagree with the analysis, which I hope I presented fairly, if quickly. As technology accelerates, the growth accelerates as well - the difference one hundred years ago between the haves and have nots was smaller than it is now because the "haves" had less. A particular distance on the x-axis has a much larger difference the farther along an exponential curve the further along we go. I fear that even if the distance in terms of availability of technology in time between the haves and have-nots is decreasing exponentially, the technology curve is further along, and the gap will continue to grow. To illustrate this mathematically, we can see that two exponential growth curves offset by any finite amount grows arbitrarily far apart at some point. I'm not sure that this is surmountable.

To illustrate this point more anecdotally, let's assume that in the year 2030, Bill Gates gets his brain upgraded to integrate a nonbiological computer-based component, as one of the second generation of implants, enhancing his intelligence. He can now model understand computer user's preferences many times better then he previously could, and even manages to produce a version of Windows that doesn't suck. He can also understand market forces and pick a near-perfectly differentiated pricing model for Windows XY, and makes several billion more dollars over the next couple of months. Noticing his newfound brilliance, he realizes that the best way to spend his newfound money is to buy more computing capacity for himself, and does so, further widening the gap between him and us non-enhanced people. In fact, excepting the tendency he has recently displayed to give money to charity, I see no hope for anyone else in the world - he will continue to improve his personal computational ability, and grow his wealth to an unprecedented extent, (as if this has not already happened,) continually improve himself, and not share any of his newfound, proprietary technology since he understands that it will allow others to catch up with his lead, which given his 1 week, 10 billion dollar lead in computational ability, can now never happen - this is what those time-offset exponential curves meant earlier.

I was unimpressed by Kurzweil's discussion of the topic, but given how long the book was, it is entirely possible that this topic, being one of the least important things he discussed, was simply shortchanged in the book due to space considerations.