Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Crashing the Party.
Another oft-cited concern is that of a large-scale asteroid or comet collision, which has occurred 
repeatedly in the Earth's history, and did represent existential outcomes for species at these times. This is not a peril of 
technology, of course. Rather, technology will protect us from this risk (certainly within one to a couple of decades). 
Although small impacts are a regular occurrence, large and destructive visitors from space are rare. We don't see one 
on the horizon, and it is virtually certain that by the time such a danger occurs, our civilization will readily destroy the 
intruder before it destroys us. 
Another item on the existential danger list is destruction by an alien intelligence (not one that we've created). I 
discussed this possibility in chapter 6 and I don't see this as likely, either. 
GNR: The Proper Focus of Promise Versus Peril.
This leaves the GNR technologies as the primary concerns. 
However, I do think we also need to take seriously the misguided and increasingly strident Luddite voices that 
advocate reliance on broad relinquishment of technological progress to avoid the genuine dangers of GNR. For reasons 
I discuss below (see p. 410), relinquishment is not the answer, but rational fear could lead to irrational solutions. 
Delays in overcoming human suffering are still of great consequence—for example, the worsening of famine in Africa 
due to opposition to aid from food using GMOs (genetically modified organisms). 
Broad relinquishment would require a totalitarian system to implement, and a totalitarian brave new world is 
unlikely because of the democratizing impact of increasingly powerful decentralized electronic and photonic 
communication. The advent of worldwide, decentralized communication epitomized by the Internet and cell phones 
has been a pervasive democratizing force. It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup 
against Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders, and 
personal computers that broke decades of totalitarian control of information.
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The movement toward democracy and 
capitalism and the attendant economic growth that characterized the 1990s were all fueled by the accelerating force of 
these person-to-person communication technologies. 
There are other questions that are nonexistential but nonetheless serious. They include "Who is controlling the 
nanobots?" and "Whom are the nanobots talking to?" Future organizations (whether governments or extremist groups) 
or just a clever individual could put trillions of undetectable nanobots in the water or food supply of an individual or of 
an entire population. These spybots could then monitor, influence, and even control thoughts and actions. In addition 
existing nanobots could be influenced through software viruses and hacking techniques. When there is software 
running in our bodies and brains (as we discussed, a threshold we have already passed for some people), issues of 

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privacy and security will take on a new urgency, and countersurveillance methods of combating such intrusions will be 
devised.