I thought this article, entitled "Future Watch: A.I. comes of age" from ComputerWorld might be worth posting that i found on Slashdot.

Reading how the robot would understand a natural language query, move about in the real-world to look for an object, pick it up, bring it back to the person who had requested it in the first place with the words ""Here is your stapler," says Stair, handing it to the man. "Have a nice day." might not sound like such a big deal at first glance as this would be something that any human (from the age of 4+ :) ) would consider to be a mundane task. However the fact that this robot can understand, learn and adapt to his environment have been formidable challenges that have gone unsolved for a very long time and it is encouraging to see strong progress being made.

What really reminded me of the book "The Singularity Is Near" from Ray Kurzweil was a quote from one of the researchers Tom Mitchell from Carnegie Mellon saying: "Suddenly, we have ways of observing what the brain is really doing, via brain imaging methods like functional MRI. It's a way to look into the brain while you are thinking and see, once a second, a movie of your brain's activity with a resolution of 1mm."

It's been exactly those sort of trends that Ray says have exponential qualities to them as in the discoveries and advancements we make in important fields such as genetic or robotic research and this will ultimately lead to an ever increasing speed of evolution. There might be hope that he could be right and we could end up getting the 'benefit' of for example drastically increased lifespans.