probably already here on some levels
Delegating tasks to AI has been happening gradually. In the 60s it was robots painting cars, and in the 90s it took computers to make other computers. Frankly, I don't think computers can keep up with fickle human demands. Just when they think they can take a vacation, we want a better version of the product they just designed for us. It's not the humans who have to be afraid of the AI, it's the AI that should be nervous.
Whatever happened to all that leisure time and wealth and low-cost electricity those Dick and Jane books promised us? My first grade text book predicted we'd be living in space colonies in the 1980s.
A little more about the Singularity
Kurzweil's idea in the book is that AI is about to reach an event horizon in which it not only gains self consciousness, but shall begin replicating itself endlessly and taking over the means of producing more technologies. He thinks that this freedom shall not be a limited event, such as some supercomputer in a localized space controlling things, but sentience will flow through every power source on earth and hence our very enviornment will be suffused by Intelligence. Nanotechnology coupled with a shared 'hivelike' technology may make this possible. He believes that the limits on our own technology have been largely self imposed due to restraints in the market place (Tucker vs. Big Auto). We have not seen many new technologies because of either money or military concerns. For instance, we could be using ethanol or even hydrogen to power our cars right now, but the oil industry is too powerful at the moment to allow it.
