This from Kurzweil's website.

Call it a modern, high-tech version of Teilhard De Chardin's noosphere apotheosis—an approaching time when humanity may move, dramatically and decisively, to a higher state of awareness or being. Only, instead of achieving this transcendence through meditation, good works or nobility of spirit, the idea this time is that we may use an accelerating cycle of education, creativity and computer-mediated knowledge to achieve intelligent mastery over both the environment and our own primitive drives.

In other words, first taking control over Brahma's "wheel of life," then learning to steer it wherever we choose.

What else would you call it…

* When we start using nanotechnology to repair bodies at the cellular level?
* When catching up on the latest research is a mere matter of desiring information, whereupon autonomous software agents deliver it to you, as quickly and easily as your arm now moves wherever you wish it to?
* When on-demand production becomes so trivial that wealth and poverty become almost meaningless terms?
* When the virtual reality experience—say visiting a faraway planet—gets hard to distinguish from the real thing?
* When each of us can have as many "servants"—either robotic or software-based—as we like, as loyal as your own right hand?
* When augmented human intelligence will soar and—trading insights with one another at light speed—helping us attain entirely new levels of thought?

Of course, it is worth pondering how this 'singularity' notion compares to the long tradition of contemplations about human transcendence. Indeed, the idea of rising to another plane of existence is hardly new! It makes up one of the most consistent themes in cultural history, as though arising from our basic natures.

Indeed, many opponents of science and technology clutch their own images of messianic transformation, images that—if truth be told—share many emotional currents with the tech-heavy version, even if they disagree over the means to achieve transformation. Throughout history, most of these musings dwelled upon the spiritual path, that human beings might achieve a higher state through prayer, moral behavior, mental discipline, or by reciting correct incantations. Perhaps because prayer and incantations were the only means available.

And although Kurzweil criticized James Cameron's view of technology as largely oppositional, I believe that -- as I noted before in the other Avatar post -- technology and religion are not enemies; that they will conflate with one another and maybe we won't know the difference (Spiritual Machines).