As usual I'm tempted to come down the middle of the argument...Will there be a rapid increase in development of new technology - probably yes for a while...but the thing to be considered is...technology is not made for its own sake...it is an economic activity, and so the way it happens often surprises tech geeks..for eg, everyone in 1940 predicted flying cars by 2010...and here's the thing, we can quite easily have flying personal vehicles today...so why don't we see them? cos its cheaper to use a combination of good urban planning, public transport, and normal cars, when these 3 already exist. It's a chicken and egg problem.

Similarly, AI will get better definitely. Will we make 'conscious' AI? I think that's very possible. BUt please keep in mind that the majority of humans can't even see that most higher animals are conscious, have emotions etc...so will the world be interacting with these 'conscious' AI as sentient beings? probably not...in fact making an absolutely conscious AI serves very few economic purposes, so my bet is barely conscious AI...what do i mean by that?

As long as an AI has 2-3 layers of cognitive processes, one for getting inputs from environment, doing primal pre-processing, sending signals (emotions) to higher layers that then do conceptual data structure formation by inductive reasoning, then in my view the AI is technically conscious...it's not human, but neither are dogs, whereas dogs seem pretty conscious too...

So if you're asking can we predict the state of technology after the singularity...no we can't...but we can't predict the state of technology more than 50 years in the future anyway...we couldn't do that 50 years back...

apparently mobile phones use quantum mechanic theory...do people who use it know that? do they marvel at the scientific 'singularity' that happened 50 years back?

as for bio-medical advances, again..yes...lots of advances..but will humans allow their basic instincts to be changed? probably not...and yes humans have basic instincts, thats why all of humanity shows easily identifiable patterns of behavior...

Lastly - virtual reality...this was something i had a lot of hope for..i could see it happening, brains transferred to VR, people living forever...but it struck me recently that this might be an impossibility, like artificial gravity on a macro scale might be an impossibility...because the brain's memory storage mechanism might not be in a form that's readable...we make computer hard-drives so that they can be easily read from begg to end..the brain stores data differently, it's spread out, overlapping...it's like how neural networks store it...now for the brain to get transferred to VR we essentially need to ghost it, like ghosting a hard drive...but ghosting a multi million connection neural network that has had 20+ years of training may be impossible to simplify...it will be an NP complete problem with a time period of a million factorial or something...that will take the life span of a sun dying to be processed...

Technology may advance all it wants to, but gravity remains gravity and NP complete remains NP complete...

I find it quite incredible that mass genocide was mentioned (at least in denial) while it wasn't mentioned that rich countries could start consuming less per capita. The current level of consumption in the US per capita, is not at an inevitable level given the amount of technology they have...it is the maximum possible at that level...isn't it possible for this consumption level to be below the maximum possible? If people in the US were on avg to consume say merely 7 times as much gas as the avg chinese, then couldn't the chinese as a whole consume double the gas without any increase in over-all depletion? In fact since a lot of gas is consumed by industry, and one of the things happening is industries shifting from the west to china etc, won't this happen to an extent neway as long as the west can moderate their personal consumption?

Also the power of technology must not be forgotten...the native americans had technology to support only 1 person per 100 acres or so, while now in India, 16% of the world's population are fed on 2.2% of the world's land and 1-2% of the world's water...

The worl'd population is expected to level off by 2060...most of the world is at the fertility level of near replacement anyway....china's population will start declining by the end of the decade, and India (where I come from), the biggest population crisis, will start declining by 2050...

I think a lot of people misuderstand the resource crisis...a lot of it are technological problems rather than the world running out...consider this...6 billion people...multiplied by 4 sq metre, that is one decent sized room, that would be 1/10th the size of france...