Pretty good tldr summary of the singularity theory. For my part I was first exposed to it through "The Age of Spiritual Machines" which I stumbled into after listening to Our Lady Peace's concept album of the same name. The band even recruited Kurzweil to voice several excerpts. The interesting thing to me is that album has a fairly dark tone to it. This is in stark contrast to the very optimistic outlook Kurzweil argues for in his books.

I would consider myself a 'believer' in the concept of the singularity, although as more time goes on I become more skeptical of Kurzweil's timeline. His predictions continue to be quite spot on, so maybe it's just the inevitable conservatism that comes with age or the difficulty of understanding/accepting exponential trends that humans seem to have, but as neuroscience advances we seem to keep finding more complexity to the human brain rather than less. The rate at which we find new questions outpaces the rate at which we find answers. Such is science.

At the same time we seem to be hitting some limitations in our advancement of microprocessor technology. Laws of physics type limitations. We can't keep scaling processing potential vertically so now we are going horizontally. Given the difficulty of massively parallel programming and the lack of benefits it poses to the vast majority of consumer applications the rate of advancement seems to have slowed down to me. But again, maybe I'm just getting older and more jaded? :)

I do think I will live to see the singularity though, even if it misses it's 2040's deadline. Kurzweil's book "Live Long Enough to Live Forever" makes a pretty compelling argument as such.

There are a massive shitload of interesting moral questions that will arise from all of this. AI civil rights. When you copy your complete consciousness into a machine which 'you' is you? Is deleting copies of a transcended consciousness murder? In a world with no resource scarcity how will we occupy our time? Etc etc etc...

It's an exciting topic.