I too have my doubts about reverse engineering the brain. As I see it regardless of whether the Singularity arises or not this century will achieve a rate of progress which is incomparable to anything we have ever seen before. To get this in perspective just consider that in the nineteenth century more technological breakthroughs were made than in all of the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century combined. In this century we will achieve 1000 times more than we achieved in the whole 20th century which was itself a period of progress never before seen. Whether we reverse engineer the brain or not the merging of human and machine intelligence is an inevitability because you only need to look at how attached we are to our iPhones and Blackberry’s to realise that we will ultimately be unable to resist moving increased processing capability directly inside the body. The consequence of that is massively increased capability whatever way you look at it.
