Exponential progress is barely noticeable when it first gets started, but are we headed for an arc to the sky in human development that might make the “human” part optional?

Futurist/inventor Ray Kurzweil comes to the Woodstock Film Festival this year with his film The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, based on his bestselling book of the same title.

“You can have an AI (artificial intelligence robot) that learns the same way a human does. The whole paradigm of the human brain is that it gains a lot of its ability through its interaction with the environment,” Kurzweil said. […]