Stephen Wolfram on the Singularity Xconomy

Last month, I posted a story about which Boston-area innovators subscribe to the belief that there will be a technological "singularity," as popularized by Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge. The idea is that a superhuman artificial intelligence will emerge in a few decades, thereby creating an event horizon beyond which humans cannot fathom--and leading to all sorts of possibilities, such as the explicit merging of humans and computers. One local I ended up reaching out to is Stephen Wolfram, the computational guru, CEO of Wolfram Research, and creator of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science, and Wolfram Alpha. I predicted that his answer would be, shall we say, complicated. Here's what Wolfram wrote back (I would say he's a non-believer, but you be the judge; as usual he brings up a different way of looking at things): There will be more automation, and the rate of new automation will increase.