Title: Senior Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society Harvard Law School
For someone of my generation, who was raised to believe in the power of the combustible engine - the power of carbon-based power systems - as well as the promise of nuclear energy too cheap to monitor, the rapidity and totality of the ecological adverse effects of these technologies on the survival of the planet was not only unexpected, but profoundly altered my belief in humankind's ability to secure its own survival. As a species, we are capable of collectively acting in ways that could very easily lead to our extinction. As the complexity and scope of technologies increase, it seems less and less likely that Homo sapiens (what a misnomer) as we now know it is very likely to survive.
There very likely will be some form of a technology singularity, perhaps not on the scale or time frame predicted by Ray Kurtzweil, but something of sufficient magnitude to aggressively select for a successor species.
