Humanity may undergo an evolutionary phase transition within this century at the very moment our computational creations develop a level of intelligence that surpasses that of the typical human being. This predicted development is referred to as The Singularity. This transitional event might be considered a true evolutionary development for our species because our primary evolutionary advantage over the rest of the natural kingdom--high-level tool-making--is driving our engineering of ever-more powerful robots and computing machines.

However, we do often forge ahead in our technological developments with pure brute force in an attempt to make as much progress as possible in as short a time as possible. Notably, the classic Moore's Law, an idea suggested by the co-founder of Intel, has accurately predicted the advancement of computing power over many decades. This exponential "law" is still expected to continue, and is a key predictive element for the coming Singularity Event.

However, bottlenecks for technical advancements in silicon-chip development that conforms with Moore's Law have been foreseen in the past--and have been overcome. Making transistors ever smaller has been the primary brute-force method of increasing computational power, but there must be an ultimate limit: the scale of a single atom.

So, if silicon chips with transistors still larger than a single atom do not provide enough computing power to bring about The Singularity, what fork in the road of this bottleneck might we diverge onto? The human brain clearly does not have a circuitry that mimics the traditional structure of the computer chip. Even massively parallel computing systems do not come close to replicating the network structure of our brain. And it is the morphological structure of our networked neurons that ultimately gives rise to the emergent computational power of the mind... it's just that we don't yet understand this complex network structure.

A brief commentary on this potential bottleneck in reaching The Singularity with a call to consider alternate approaches was presented recently in a New York Times guest column. How will we finally reach The Singularity? A new technological approach may be necessary; a new philosophical approach may be necessary; a new, more complete understanding of the structure of our own brains will certainly be necessary.