Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Distributed Energy.
In energy, we need to move away from the extremely concentrated and centralized installations 
on which we now depend. For example, one company is pioneering fuel cells that are microscopic, using MEMS 
technology.
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They are manufactured like electronic chips but are actually energy-storage devices with an energy-to-
size ratio significantly exceeding that of conventional technology. As I discussed earlier, nanoengineered solar panels 
will be able to meet our energy needs in a distributed, renewable, and clean fashion. Ultimately technology along these 
lines could power everything from our cell phones to our cars and homes. These types of decentralized energy 
technologies would not be subject to disaster or disruption. 
As these technologies develop, our need for aggregating people in large buildings and cities will diminish, and 
people will spread out, living where they want and gathering together in virtual reality. 
Civil Liberties in an Age of Asymmetric Warfare.
The nature of terrorist attacks and the philosophies of the 
organizations behind them highlight how civil liberties can be at odds with legitimate state interests in surveillance and 
control. Our law-enforcement system—and indeed, much of our thinking about security—is based on the assumption 
that people are motivated to preserve their own lives and well-being. That logic underlies all our strategies, from 
protection at the local level to mutual assured destruction on the world stage. But a foe that values the destruction of 
both its enemy and itself is not amenable to this line of reasoning. 
The implications of dealing with an enemy that does not value its own survival are deeply troublesome and have 
led to controversy that will only intensify as the stakes continue to escalate. For example, when the FBI identifies a 
likely terrorist cell, it will arrest the participants, even though there may be insufficient evidence to convict them of a 
crime and they may not yet even have committed a crime. Under the rules of engagement in our war on terrorism, the 
government continues to hold these individuals. 
In a lead editorial, the 
New York Times
objected to this policy, which it described as a "troubling provision."
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The 
paper argued that the government should release these detainees because they have not yet committed a crime and 
should rearrest them only after they have done so. Of course by that time suspected terrorists might well be dead along 
with a large number of their victims. How can the authorities possibly break up a vast network of decentralized cells of 
suicide terrorists if they have to wait for each one to commit a crime? 

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On the other hand this very logic has been routinely used by tyrannical regimes to justify the waiving of the 
judicial protections we have come to cherish. It is likewise fair to argue that curtailing civil liberties in this way is 
exactly the aim of the terrorists, who despise our notions of freedoms and pluralism. However, I do not see the 
prospect of any technology "magic bullet" that would essentially change this dilemma. 
The encryption trapdoor may be considered a technical innovation that the government has been proposing in an 
attempt to balance legitimate individual needs for privacy with the government's need for surveillance. Along with this 
type of technology we also need the requisite political innovation to provide for effective oversight, by both the 
judicial and legislative branches, of the executive branch's use of these trapdoors, to avoid the potential for abuse of 
power. The secretive nature of our opponents and their lack of respect for human life including their own will deeply 
test the foundations of our democratic traditions.