Anyone here enjoy reading Ray Kurzweil's work? He's a pretty brilliant guy: inventor, entrepreneur and futurist. His latest book is called "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology." It's fascinating, a fun read, and effectively makes science fiction obsolete. Because his (and others like him) vision of the future is jaw-dropping.
The Singularity is generally taken to mean "a future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity."
Kurzweil essentially extrapolates increases in computing power, development of genetic engineering, artifical intelligence, nanotechnology and then shows how all these disciplines will eventually converge, leading to a moment of nearly instantaneous progress.
The book talks about some of these technological and biological domains, and shows what's ahead over the next 20, 30, 40 years. And it's pretty incredible stuff. But nothing like what he envisions once superintelligent machines will eventually do ost-singularity (in a 50 years? A hundred years? When is a big question). He and others have postulated that the progeny of human beings (whatever that may be) could alter the universe itself, or create new universes in which to live.
I'm not really doing this stuff justice. It's a fascinating topic worth some web browsing over. Reading it also has a therapeutic effect. While the next few decades will indeed be perilous ones, there may also be incredible days ahead as well. And to read about the world of fifty or one hundred or a billion years from now certainly puts everything into perspective - even the Bush years, even the rapid destruction. I wouldn't suggest falling into techno utopianism, but for pessimists like me, it is soothing to think that progress may yet be possible, that there may indeed be some destiny for mankind beyond destruction or nihilistic meaninglessness.
Worth a look.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/... with some good links to sites) http://en.wikipedia.org/...