I have yet to hear a cogent argument disputing any of the claims made by Ray Kurzweil. Even top computer scientists in the academic literature acknowledge the validity of Kurweil's basic arguments and commend him for articulately exploring the possibilities of a "Kurzweilian Singularity". Here is an example of a good article to check out:

Goertzel, B. 2007. Human-level artificial general intelligence and the possibility of a technological singularity: A reaction to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, and McDermott’s critique of Kurzweil. Artificial Intelligence, 171: 1161-1173.

I am currently doing extensive research on the technological singularity for a book. According to most computer scientists in the field there is as much consensus over it occurring as climate scientists have regarding the anthropogenic effects of global warming. Vernor Vinge, one of the most prominent futurists in computer science first coined the phrase "technological singularity" back in 1993 in his now-famous paper:

Vinge, V. 1993. The Coming Technological Singularity: How To Survive In The Post-Human Era. Vision-21 Symposium, NASA Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 30 to 31 March 1993.

Although other scientists had been aware that something "singularity-like" was on the horizon well before 1993:

Ulam, S. (1958): "One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."

Good, I.J. (1965): "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need very make."

Vernor Vinge has discussed one of the reasons why a singularity-like event would NOT happen, with the main cause of that scenario being that we simply don't "find the soul in the hardware". I wrote about my thoughts on this here:

http://www.theadvancedapes.com/theratchet/2012/12/13/singula...

And here is the citation for the Vernor Vinge article:

Vinge, V. 2007. What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen. Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, the Long Now Foundation.

His talk was at a recent Long Now Foundation conference. An organization I have discussed before if you are interested in learning more about them:

http://www.theadvancedapes.com/theratchet/2012/12/10/thinkin...

Overall, people who hear about the singularity for the first time are just scared of it because the idea is so massive and so overwhelming and it changes our entire species. Actually, it more than changes our entire species, it makes our species irrelevant, and ushers us into a post-human era. I recently told my mom and her husband about the book I am writing and I experienced the common shock response that most people have when they hear about the singularity for the first time. My mom's husband actually got mad and irrational. He later calmed down, but his reaction is typical of most people (even academics) who are exposed to this type of thinking for the first time.

Here are some other interesting articles about the singularity if anyone wants to do further research on the issue as it is being discussed today:

Heylighen, F. 2008. Chapter 13 Accelerating socio-technological evolution: From ephemeralization and stigmergy to the Global Brain. In Modelski, G., Devezas, T. & Thompson, W.R. Globalization As Evolutionary Process. New York: Routledge.

Vinge, V. 2008. Signs of the Singularity. IEEE Spectrum. Special Report: The Singularity. 1-6.

Sandberg, A. & Bostrom, N. 2008. Whole brain emulation: A roadmap. Technical Report. Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reports/2008-3.pdf.

Sandberg, A. (2010, March). An overview of models of technological singularity. The Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-10). URL http://agi-conf. org/2010/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/agi10singmodels2. pdf. 2010.

I also summarized Kurzweil's main ideas in an article earlier this year (for anyone that hasn't read The Singularity Is Near):

http://www.theadvancedapes.com/theratchet/2012/10/19/an-idea...