singularity

I saw in the NYT today a thought-provoking article about Verner Vinge (a sci-fi writer) and Ray Kurtzweil. They both write dramatic stories about computers taking over.

I love sci-fi and I'm delighted these guys are writing books that get people thinking about the future. But I totally disagree with their underlying assumptions. Without getting to far into all the details of how and why the specifics of their arguments are far out and unlikely, I'll skip straight to the philosophical reason they're wrong:

Computers are fundamentally different from humans and don't compete with us for resources. They depend on us, not just in the short term to feed them electricity and repair them, but also in the long term to tell them what to do and let them evolve.

A reader of the article summed up the basis of what I have felt a little more poetically than I can, so I'll quote her:

"
The simple reason we don’t have anything to worry about regarding computers out thinking us is that they don’t need to and never will. What I mean by this is that *we* think because we need to to survive. Computers will never think because they don’t need to survive - they cannot ever care if they are switched off. We can ‘lend’ them biological imperatives but we cannot produce life and *that* is the big mystery that trumps consciousness and thought.
— Marie
"

I've got a book on this subject brewing in the back of my head but I don't know whether it will be more profitable to publish a short-ish article about it now or to wait and give a fully-formed thesis on it in about 5 years.