Max More and Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity:

"Epochal events such as two world wars, the Cold War, and numerous economic, cultural, and social upheavals have failed to provide the slightest dent in the pace of the fundamental trends. As I discuss below, recessions, including the Great Depression, register as only slight deviations from the far more profound effect of the underlying exponential growth of the economy, fueled by the exponential growth of information-based technologies... Occasional ethical and legal impediments to fairly narrow developments are rather like stones in the river of advancement; progress just flows around them... Already, at least two dozen of the several hundred regions in the brain have been satisfactorily reverse-engineered and implemented in synthetic substrates. I believe that it is a conservative scenario to expect that the human brain will be fully reverse-engineered in a sufficiently detailed way to recreate its mental powers by 2029."

Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities