Moore’s Law won’t apply to anything–even integrated circuits–forever. And it doesn’t apply to many things at all. Growth has its spurts, but other things get in the way: entropy, priorities, politics, etc. So I think the near-term questions regarding machines aren’t about transhumanism and other such lofty ones but rather more practical considerations. You know, like a highly automated society creating new jobs and 3-D printers making the manufacturing of firearms uncontrollable and undetectable. In a Commentary broadside, David Gelernter, that brilliant and perplexing thinker, takes aim at the approach of today’s technologists and what he sees as their lack of commitment to humanism. An excerpt about Ray Kurzweil:

“The voice most strongly associated with what I’ve termed roboticism is that of Ray Kurzweil, a leading technologist and inventor. The Kurzweil Cult teaches that, given the strong and ever-increasing pace of technological progress and change, a fateful crossover point is approaching. He calls this point the ‘singularity.’ After the year 2045 (mark your calendars!), machine intelligence will dominate human intelligence to the extent that men will no longer understand machines any more than potato chips understand mathematical topology. Men will already have begun an orgy of machinification—implanting chips in their bodies and brains, and fine-tuning their own and their children’s genetic material. Kurzweil believes in ‘transhumanism,’ the merging of men and machines. He believes human immortality is just around the corner. He works for Google.

Whether he knows it or not, Kurzweil believes in and longs for the death of mankind. Because if things work out as he predicts, there will still be life on Earth, but no human life. To predict that a man who lives forever and is built mainly of semiconductors is still a man is like predicting that a man with stainless steel skin, a small nuclear reactor for a stomach, and an IQ of 10,000 would still be a man. In fact we have no idea what he would be.

Each change in him might be defended as an improvement, but man as we know him is the top growth on a tall tree in a large forest: His kinship with his parents and ancestors and mankind at large, the experience of seeing his own reflection in human history and his fellow man—those things are the crucial part of who he is. If you make him grossly different, he is lost, with no reflection anywhere he looks. If you make lots of people grossly different, they are all lost together—cut adrift from their forebears, from human history and human experience. Of course we do know that whatever these creatures are, untransformed men will be unable to keep up with them. Their superhuman intelligence and strength will extinguish mankind as we know it, or reduce men to slaves or dogs. To wish for such a development is to play dice with the universe.” (Thanks Browser.)