don't put us all in the same package. I still think that technology can advance much further, but in this century we must focus on stoping the pillage of natural resources first, growth of economies, resource uses and the total number of users need to go down. Once this is done, with reduced human numbers (by as of yet undefined means), we can keep advancing our technology.

People who criticize the claims of futurists aren’t neo-luddites.

Much of The Singularity rests on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life. In reality futurists are just generalizing Moore’s law to technological advancement as a whole.

There hasn’t been any major break through in the AI field of commonsense reasoning. Moore’s law will end in 2021 with the current silicate based processors. We still have long ways to go with quantum computing. That’s not even taking into account how to make them into scalable and commercial devices.

This is not to say we aren’t going to build smaller and faster computers. The reality is we aren’t going to see it at such a fast rate.

It's always interesting to look at what happened to technology during WWII. On both the German and Allied sides, the development of high technology was utterly amazing. But WWII was a significant social disruption and unifying mobilization of peoples. We haven't even begun to see anything nearly equivalent as the result of recent energy price moves. The MSM isn't even talking about it all that much.

Still, if you look for it, you can find plenty of buzz over sustainability and alternative energies already. People are already innovating and making plans for an energy-reduced future. I wouldn't write-off entirely new energy sources like fusion until such efforts have proved fruitless even when the pressure for results is intense.

Still, it seems hard to argue about the full range of resources that are rapidly being depleted because of human overpopulation and hyper-consumption. I was listening to Nate Hagens from The Oil Drum talk about this briefly here today ( I know, it's a year old). So this is why I think that there could be both a population reduction as well as dramatic advancement in high technologies. The trend of rapidly advancing tech is just too profound to ignore.

I even think that somewhere a deliberate population reduction plan must be contemplated as a contingency - much like there must be a contingency plan for the invasion of Canada somewhere in the Pentagon. somewhere, somebody is asking the question: is it possible? How quickly could it be accomplished? Could the societal disruption of population reduction be minimized? How would it be explained to the survivors, etc.

Maybe afterwards, the future will be a mix: Low-tech, energy-efficient, self-sustaining communities in which it is possible to live in a more relaxed communal way, alongside extreme high-tech campuses of one sort or another. Who says ultra high technology is necessarily dependent upon industrial civilization and overshooting population?

Personally, I think it is indelibly human to advance through the application of the scientific method. It's a trick we've learned that we could never now unlearn.

I actually think that some form of technocracy, where those that know how to design and engineer technology are basically magicians for the rest... this can even happen in some for of ecocity... but all this "magic solutions" are thin air now; just a possibility.

Schadenfreude, maybe some of us have some sane level of skepticism towards technology-only "solutions" that doesn't advance our harmony with nature and our spiritual development... technology by itself is cold and gray...

I'll plead guilty to some pretty strong luddite tendencies (as I type this on my laptop)

But I think people are soon going to have their cell phones (or blue teeth...) implanted into their sculls. Communications technologies are always highly prized by humans. Human language itself is essentially a communication technology hard wired into our brains and our physiology (much to the detriment of our ability to do the most basic functions of living things--drink and breath--simultaneously).

I don't like the idea, but I think it is possible, especially for the elites, who will continue to have considerable power post peak.