The 2030's sound nice, why don't we just pause there and proceed no further. In the realm of science fiction the singularity is almost always when the humans become slaves to their AI masters, does Kurzweil have any predictions to this effect or is it impossible to predict because we are dealing with a new intelligence whose motivations are beyond our comprehension?
The definition of the singularity is that we don't know what how our world and civilization (both technologically and socially) will be affected by higher than human intelligence AI. Of course we don't know for sure anything about the future, but I suppose we are reasonably good at having some kind of an idea, as Kurzweil's track record shows. The one thing that we can reasonably predict is the impact will be pretty massive. The invention of agriculture type massive. Anything from Terminator-esque genocide to essentially heaven on earth is conceivable. Guiding this toward a beneficial outcome for the human race this is exactly the the point of The Singularity Institute Kurzweil's books "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and "The Singularity is Near" take the basic format of spending half the book explaining the singularity theory and making a case for it's validity, and the second half talking about how crazy awesome the outcome could potentially be. He's pretty optimistic about it and makes good arguments for his optimism. They are great reads.
I couldn't agree more. The benefit of having an institute like The Singularity Institute will become more and more evident as the pace of change increases in the 2010s, 2020s, and beyond. The think the singularity will be just as massive and transformative as agriculture... or even the World Wide Web. I just went to see Kurweil speak in Toronto and this was one of my favourite quotes from him: "Its amazing how quickly people adapt to things that they had thought were impossible when they were first told about it. Then they continue to act as if nothing has changed.” I think that rings true for humanity's response to the internet at the moment. We've lived through an "agriculture types massive" change with the development of the internet. Its mind boggling... and Kurzweil predicted everything about it to pretty much the exact year. In retrospect that is truly amazing.
He has hypothesized that there will be humans that refuse to integrate with new technologies. There have always been luddites throughout history that do not integrate with the rest of society. I would guess that whatever future intelligence existed they would preserve areas where biological humans could exist, in the same way we are trying to preserve areas where non-humans can live without fear of extinction. However, they could just as easily wipe out biological humans, in the same way we could choose to wipe out all megafauna.