[B iii]  Increasing computer power and advances in neuroscience will lead to rapid uploading of human minds.

On the other hand, if [B ii] turns out to be easier than [B i], we would open the door to rapid uploading technologies. Once the brain/mind can be put into a parallel circuit with a machine as complex as a human cortex (available, as we've seen, somewhere 2020 and 2040), we might expect a complete, real-time emulation of the scanned brain to be run inside the machine that's copied it. Again, unless the `soul' fails to port over along with the information and topological structure, you'd then find your perfect twin (although grievously short on, ahem, a body) dwelling inside the device.
        Your uploaded double would need to be provided with adequate sensors (possibly enhanced, compared with our limited eyes and ears and tastebuds), plus means of acting with ordinary intuitive grace on the world (via physical effectors of some kind--robotic limbs, say, or a robotic telepresence). Or perhaps your upload twin would inhabit a cyberspace reality, less detailed than ours but more conducive to being rewritten closer to heart's desire. Such VR protocols should lend themselves readily to life as an uploaded personality.
        Once personality uploading is shown to be possible and tolerable or, better still, enjoyable, we can expect at least some people to copy themselves into cyberspace. How rapidly this new world is colonised will depend on how expensive it is to port somebody there, and to sustain them. Computer storage and run-time should be far cheaper by then, of course, but still not entirely free. As economist Robin Hanson has argued, the problem is amenable to traditional economic analysis. `I see very little chance that cheap fast upload copying technology would not be used to cheaply create so many copies that the typical copy would have an income near `subsistence' level.'[13] On the other hand, `If you so choose to limit your copying, you might turn an initial nest egg into fabulous wealth, making your few descendants very rich and able to afford lots of memory.' 
        If an explosion of uploads is due to occur quite quickly after the technology emerges, early adopters would gobble up most of the available computing resources. But this assumes that uploaded personalities would retain the same apparent continuity we fleshly humans prize. Being binary code, after all (however complicated), such people might find it easier to alter themselves--to rewrite their source code, so to speak, and to link themselves directly to other uploaded people, and AIs if there are any around. This looks like a recipe for a Spike to me. How soon? It depends. If true AI-level machines are needed, and perhaps medical nanotechnology to perform neuron-by-neuron, synapse-by synapse brain scanning, we'll wait until both technologies are out of beta-testing and fairly stable. That would be 2040 or 2050, I'd guesstimate.

[B iv]   Increasing connectivity of the Internet will allow individuals or small groups to amplify the effectiveness of their conjoined intelligence.

Routine disseminated software advances will create (or evolve) ever smarter and more useful support systems for thinking, gathering data, writing new programs--and the outcome will be a `in-one-bound-Jack-was-free' surge into AI. That is the garage band model of a singularity, and while it has a certain cheesy appeal, I very much doubt that's how it will happen.
        But the Internet is growing and complexifying at a tremendous rate. It is barely possible that one day, as Arthur C. Clarke suggested decades ago of the telephone system, it will just... wake up. After all, that's what happened to a smart African ape, and unlike computers it and its close genetic cousins weren't already designed to handle language and mathematics.

[B v]  Research and development of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and fullerene-based devices will lead to industrial nanoassembly, and thence to `anything boxes'.

Here we have the `classic' molecular nanotechnology pathway, as predicted by Drexler's Foresight Institute and NASA,[14] but also by the mainstream of conservative chemists and adjacent scientists working in MEMS, and funded nanotechnology labs around the world. In a 1995 Wired article, Eric Drexler predicted nanotechnology within 20 years. Is 2015 too soon? Not, surely, for the early stage devices under development by Zyvex Corporation in Texas, who hope to have at least preliminary results by 2010, if not sooner.[15] For many years AI was granted huge amounts of research funding, without much result (until recently, with a shift in direction and the wind of Moore's Law at its back). Nano is now starting to catch the research dollars, with substantial investment from governments (half a billion promised by Clinton; and in Japan, even Australia) and mega-companies such as IBM. The prospect of successful nanotech is exciting, but should also make you afraid, very afraid. If nano remains (or rather, becomes) a closely guarded national secret, contained by munitions laws, a new balance of terror might take us back to something like the Cold War in international relations--but this would be a polyvalent, fragmented, perhaps tribalised balance.
        Or building and using nanotech might be like the manufacture of dangerous drugs or nuclear materials: centrally produced by big corporations' mints, under stringent protocols (you hope, fearful visions of Homer Simpson's nuclear plant dancing in the back of your brain), except for those in Colombia and the local bikers' fortress...
        Or it might be a Ma & Pa business: a local plant equal, perhaps, to a used car yard, with a fair-sized raw materials pool, mass transport to shift raw or partly processed feed stocks in, and finished product out. This level of implementation might resemble a small internet server, with some hundreds or thousands of customers. One might expect the technology to grow more sophisticated quite quickly, as minting allows the emergence of cheap and amazingly powerful computers. Ultimately, we might find ourselves with the fabled anything box in every household, protected against malign uses by an internal AI system as smart as a human, but without human consciousness and distractibility. We should be so lucky. But it could happen that way.
        A quite different outcome is foreshadowed in a prescient 1959 novel by Damon Knight, A for Anything, in which a `matter duplicator' leads not to utopian prosperity for all but to cruel feudalism, a regression to brutal personal power held by those clever thugs who manage to monopolise the device. A slightly less dystopian future is portrayed in Neal Stephenson's satirical but seriously intended The Diamond Age, where tribes and nations and new optional tetherings of people under flags of affinity or convenience tussle for advantage in a world where the basic needs of the many poor are provided free, but with galling drab uniformity, at street corner matter compilers owned by authorities. That is one way to prevent global ruination at the hands of crackers, lunatics and criminals, but it's not one that especially appeals--if an alternative can be found.
        Meanwhile, will nanoassembly allow the rich to get richer--to hug this magic cornucopia to their selfish breasts--while the poor get poorer? Why should it be so? In a world of 10 billion flesh-and-blood humans (ignoring the uploads for now), there is plenty of space for everyone to own decent housing, transport, clothing, arts, music, sporting opportunities... once we grant the ready availability of nano mints. Why would the rich permit the poor to own the machineries of freedom from want? Some optimists adduce benevolence, others prudence. Above all, perhaps, is the basic law of an information/knowledge economy: the more people you have thinking and solving and inventing and finding the bugs and figuring out the patches, the better a nano minting world is for everyone (just as it is for an open source computing world). Besides, how could they stop us?[16] (Well, by brute force, or in the name of all that's decent, or for our own moral good. None of these methods will long prevail in a world of free-flowing information and cheap material assembly. Even China has trouble keeping dissidents and mystics silenced.)
        The big necessary step is the prior development of early nano assemblers, and this will be funded by university and corporate (and military) money for researchers, as well as by increasing numbers of private investors who see the marginal pay-offs in owning a piece of each consecutive improvement in micro- and nano-scale devices. So yes, the rich will get richer--but the poor will get richer too, as by and large they do now, in the developed world at least. Not as rich, of course, nor as fast. By the time the nano and AI revolutions have attained maturity, these classifications will have shifted ground. Economists insist that rich and poor will still be with us, but the metric will have changed so drastically, so strangely, that we here-and-now can make little sense of it.

[B vi]   Research and development in genomics (the Human Genome Project, etc) will lead to new `wet' biotechnology, lifespan extension, and ultimately to transhuman enhancements.

This is a rather different approach, and increasingly I see experts arguing that it is the short-cut to mastery of the worlds of the very small and the very complex. Biology, not computing! is the slogan. After all, bacteria, ribosomes, viruses, cells for that matter, already operate beautifully at the micro- and even the nano-scales.
        Still, even if technology takes a major turn away from mechanosynthesis and `hard' minting, this approach will require a vast armory of traditional and innovative computers and appropriately ingenious software. The IBM petaflop project Blue Gene (doing a quadrillion operations a second) will be a huge system of parallel processors designed to explore protein folding, crucial once the genome projects have compiled their immense catalogue of genes. Knowing a gene's recipe is little value unless you know, as well, how the protein it encodes twists and curls in three-dimensional space. That is the promise of the first couple of decades of the 21^st century, and it will surely unlock many secrets and open new pathways.
        Exploring those paths will require all the help molecular biologists can get from advanced computers, virtual reality displays, and AI adjuncts. Once again, we can reasonably expect those paths to track right into the foothills of the Spike. Put a date on it? Nobody knows--but recall that DNA was first decoded in 1953, and by around half a century later the whole genome will be in the bag. How long until the next transcendent step--complete understanding of all our genes, how they express themselves in tissues and organs and abilities and behavioural bents, how they can be tweaked to improve them dramatically? Cautiously, the same interval: around 2050. More likely (if Moore's law keeps chugging along), half that time: 2025 or 2030.
        The usual timetable for the Spike, in other words.

[C]   The Singularity happens when we go out and make it happen.

That's Eliezer Yudkowsky's sprightly, in-your-face declaration of intent, which dismisses as uncomprehending all the querulous cautions about the transition to superintelligence and the Singularity on its far side.[17]  
        Just getting to human-level AI, this analysis claims, is enough for the final push to a Spike. How so? Don't we need unique competencies to do that' Isn't the emergence of ultra-intelligence, either augmented-human or artificial, the very definition of a Vingean singularity?
        Yes, but this is most likely to happen when a system with the innate ability to view and reorganise its own cognitive structure gains the conscious power of a human brain. A machine might have that facility, since its programming is listable, you could literally print it out--in many, many volumes--and check each line. Not so an equivalent human, with our protein spaghetti brains, compiled by gene recipes and chemical gradients rather than exact algorithms; we clearly just can't do that.
        So intelligent design turned back upon itself, a cascading multiplier that has no obvious bounds. The primary challenge becomes software, not hardware. The raw petaflop end of the project is chugging along nicely now, mapped by Moore's Law, but even if it tops out, it doesn't matter. A self-improving seed AI could run glacially slowly on a limited machine substrate. The point is, so long as it has the capacity to improve itself, at some point it will do so convulsively, bursting through any architectural bottlenecks to design its own improved hardware, maybe even build it (if it's allowed control of tools in a fabrication plant). So what determines the arrival of the Singularity is just the amount of effort invested in getting the original seed software written and debugged.
        This particular argument is detailed in Yudkowsky's ambitious web documents `Coding a Transhuman AI', `Singularity Analysis' and `The Plan to Singularity'. It doesn't matter much, though, whether these specific plans hold up under detailed expert scrutiny; they serve as a accessible model for the process we're discussing.
        Here we see conventional open-source machine intelligence, starting with industrial AI, leading to a self-rewriting seed AI which runs right into takeoff to a singularity. You'd have a machine that combines the brains of a human (maybe literally, in coded format, although that is not part of Yudkowsky's scheme) with the speed and memory of a shockingly fast computer. It won't be like anything we've ever seen on earth. It should be able to optimise its abilities, compress its source code, turn its architecture from a swamp of mud huts into a gleaming, compact, ergonomic office (with a spa and a bar in the penthouse, lest we think this is all grim earnest).[18] Here is quite a compelling portrait of what it might be like, `human high‑level consciousness and AI rapid algorithmic performance combined synergetically,' to be such a machine:

                Combining Deep Blue with Kasparov... yields a Kasparov who can wonder `How can I put a queen here?' and blink out for a fraction of a second while a million moves are automatically examined. At a higher level of integration, Kasparov's conscious perceptions of each consciously examined chess position may incorporate data culled from a million possibilities, and Kasparov's dozen examined positions may not be consciously simulated moves, but `skips' to the dozen most plausible futures five moves ahead.[19] 

Such a machine, we see, is not really human-equivalent after all. If it isn't already transhuman or superhuman, it will be as soon as it has hacked through its own code and revised it (bit by bit, module by module, making mistakes and rebooting and trying again until the whole package comes out right). If that account has any validity, we also see why the decades-long pauses in the time-tables cited earlier are dubious, if not preposterous. Given a human-level AI by 2039, it is not going to wait around biding its time until 2099 before creating a discontinuity in cognitive and technological history. That will happen quite fast, since a self-optimising machine (or upload, perhaps) will start to function so much faster than its human colleagues that it will simply leave them behind, along with Moore's plodding Law. A key distinguishing feature, if Yudkowsky's analysis is sound, is that we never will see HAL, the autonomous AI in the movie 2001. All we will see is AI specialised to develop software.
        Since I don't know the true shape of the future any more than you do, I certainly don't know whether an AI or nano-minted Singularity will be brought about (assuming it does actually occur) by careful, effortful design in an Institute with a Spike engraved on its door, by a congeries of industrial and scientific research vectors, or by military ambitions pouring zillions of dollars into a new arena that promises endless power through mayhem, or mayhem threatened.
        It does strike me as excessively unlikely that we will skid to a stop anytime soon, or even that a conventional utopia minus any runaway singularity sequel (Star Trek's complacent future, say) will roll off the mechanosynthesising assembly line. [20]
        Are there boringly obvious technical obstacles to a Spike? Granted, particular techniques will surely saturate and pass through inflexions points, tapering off their headlong thrust. If the past is any guide, new improved techniques will arrive (or be forced into reality by the lure of profit and sheer curiosity) in time to carry the curves upward at the same acceleration. If not? Well, then, it will take longer to reach the Spike, but it is hard to see why progress in the necessary technologies would simply stop.
        Well, perhaps some of these options will become technically feasible but remain simply unattractive, and hence bypassed. Dr Russell Blackford, a lawyer, former industrial advocate and literary theorist who has written interestingly about social resistance to major innovation, notes that manned exploration of Mars has been a technical possibility for the past three decades, yet that challenge has not been taken up. Video-conferencing is available but few use it (unlike the instant adoption of mobile phones). While a concerted program involving enough money and with widespread public support could bring us conscious AI by 2050, he argues, it won't happen. Conflicting social priorities will emerge, the task will be difficult and horrendously expensive. Are these objections valid? AI and nano need not be impossibly hard and costly, since they will flow from current work powered by Moore's Law improvements. Missions to Mars, by contrast, have no obvious social or consumer or even scientific benefits beyond their simple feel-good achievement. Profound science can be done by remote vehicles. By contrast, minting and AI or IA will bring immediate and copious benefits to those developing them--and will become less and less expensive, just as desktop computers have.
        What of social forces taking up arms against this future? We've seen the start of a new round of protests and civil disruptions aimed at genetically engineered foods and work in cloning and genomics, but not yet targeted at longevity or computing research. It will come, inevitably. We shall see strange bedfellows arrayed against the machineries of major change. The only question is how effective its impact will be.
        In 1999, for example, emeritus professor Alan Kerr, winner of the lucrative inaugural Australia Prize for his work in plant pathology, radio-broadcast a heartfelt denunciation of the Green's adamant opposition to new genetically engineered crops that allow use of insecticide to be cut by half. Some aspects of science, though, did concern Dr Kerr. He admitted that he'd been `scared witless' by the `thesis is that within a generation or two, science will have conquered death and that humans will become immortal. Have you ever thought of the consequences to society and the environment of such an achievement? If you're anything like me, there might be a few sleepless nights ahead of you. Why don't the greenies get stuck into this potentially horrifying area of science, instead of attacking genetic engineering with all its promise for agriculture and the environment?'[21] This, I suspect, is a short-sighted and ineffective diversionary tactic. It will arouse confused opposition to life extension and other beneficial on-going research programs, but will lash back as well against any ill-understood technology.
        Cultural objections to AI might emerge, as venomous as yesterday's and today's attacks on contraception and abortion rights, or anti-racist struggles. If opposition to the Spike, or any of its contributing factors, gets attached to one or more influential religions, that might set back or divert the current. Alternatively, careful study of the risks of general assemblers and autonomous artificial intelligence might lead to just the kinds of moratoriums that Greens now urge upon genetically engineered crops and herds. Given the time lag we can expect before a singularity occurs--at least a decade, and far more probably two or three--there's room for plenty of informed specialist and public debate. Just as the basic technologies of the Spike will depend on design-ahead projects, so too we'll need a kind of think-ahead program to prepare us for changes that might, indeed, scare us witless. And of course, the practical impact of new technologies condition the sorts of social values that emerge; recall the subtle interplay between the oral contraceptive pill and sexual mores, and the swift, easy acceptance of in vitro conception.
        Despite these possible impediments to the arrival of the Spike, I suggest that while it might be delayed, almost certainly it's not going to be halted. If anything, the surging advances I see every day coming from labs around the world convince me that we already are racing up the lower slopes of its curve into the incomprehensible.
        In short, it makes little sense to try to pin down the future. Too many strange changes are occurring already, with more lurking just out of sight, ready to leap from the equations and surprise us. True AI, when it occurs, might rush within days or months to SI (superintelligence), and from there into a realm of Powers whose motives and plans we can't even start to second-guess. Nano minting could go feral or worse, used by crackpots or statesmen to squelch their foes and rapidly smear us all into paste. Or sublime AI Powers might use it to the same end, recycling our atoms into better living through femtotechnology.
        The single thing I feel confident of is that one of these trajectories will start its visible run up the right-hand side of the graph within 10 or 20 years, and by 2030 (or 2050 at latest) will have put everything we hold self-evident into question. We will live forever; or we will all perish most horribly; our minds will emigrate to cyberspace, and start the most ferocious overpopulation race ever seen on the planet; or our machines will Transcend and take us with them, or leave us in some peaceful backwater where the meek shall inherit the Earth. Or something else, something far weirder and... unimaginable. Don't blame me. That's what I promised you.