Intellectual Abundance

[baumer]

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In "The Age of Spritual Machines:, Kurzweil suggests that by the middle of this century we will have attained the ability to control the direction of our own evolution.

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By "our own evolution", do you mean humanity's cumulative evolution? Or evolution on an individual basis?

The telescoping nature of technological development is squeezing more and more advancement into smaller and smaller periods of time.
Soon we will be able to pick and choose these advancements to meet certain goals, much like a tech-tree for Real-Time strategy games, or even like researching things in X-COM.

Hell, we're already doing that, but our vision into the future is not all that clear.