Against The Singularity: Rejecting Locutus

Kurzweil's Law:

2045: The Singularity

• $1000 buys a computer a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. This means that average and even low-end computers are infinitely smarter than even highly intelligent, unenhanced humans.
• The Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on. The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.
• The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. The extermination of humanity by violent machines is unlikely (though not impossible) because sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

The effects of the increasing technology available to individuals is often said to a force for advance, potentially with the ability to tip balances of power. With all due respect to Kurzweil, I think that the curve is fairly steep at the early end and doesn't rise much from mass adaptation. What I'm essentially saying is that the main habit that is changed by a new technology is not generally refined by the masses, and so that when it is mass produced there are secondary effects and unexpected consequences, but that eventually the technology bends towards a more human-conceit fueling technology. In other words the technology doesn't determine the human vector, humans determine the technology vector, and after necessity it becomes luxury.

Examples

• Cars. You would think that cars get more and more powerful and commute us quicker and quicker. But the perfection of the technology has gone not towards flying cars as originally thought, but towards cup holders, airbags, gps, spinning rims and 11 speaker stereo. Sure there are race cars, but racing for the few does not change how the masses drive.
   
• Computers. We control them. They do not control us. Colossus, the Forbin Project, never happened. With the great advance in computing power we are now empowering ourselves redundantly. The massive compute power individuates and will take copies of what's out there and make it convenient to us.
• Food. Once we get to the surplus we are not rewarded for eating more and more. We turn around to get human centered again. We want to show that we can do without it. Or turn it to a luxury.
  

Technology in the hands of specialists is taken to its limit by the definition of the tech. In the hands of people, however (as if technical specialists are not) it becomes reflective of the person not the tech. We reject Picard when he is not Picard.

I think Iain Banks has covered this well in fiction. He helps to explain that it is the nature of human beings to want to be humans and augmentation to make us try to live like kings is essentially all we want. We will act locally.