I read “Fire Upon the Deep” when it first came out, and was not particularly impressed with it. Of Verner Vinges stuff, I liked his “Across Realtime” novels better. He wrote these novels, “The Peace War” and “Marooned in Realtime”, in the mid 80′s.

Too much conjecture to see clear and easy pathways to that future.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/05/13/dna-sequencing-beating-moores-law-since-january-2008/

you don’t characterize “their” views correctly. that’s usually the first problem, and so why i discuss it rarely.

Hardly, we don’t even have a physical definition of intelligence (versus an operational one) at this point. Until we have that, ‘superhuman’ and other relative terms are meaningless and we have no way of knowing if human cognitive function can be replicated in any way other than the existing one.

A major problem I have with the singularity concept is that it assumes there is no physical limit to how fast society or technology can change (the basic concept; I have a lot of problems with specific ideas of how it can be achieved). At some point the rate at which you can physically implement innovation is going to the limit the speed of further innovation.

Regardless, compare it to something like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, which despite being written entirely in the 1990s, has zero references to the internet until the last book (by 1996 he couldn’t totally avoid it anymore). I recall rereading the series recently and finding it amazing how many times they reference people “watching television.”