I was supremely confident that Moore's Law and work by AGI researchers would usher in the Singularity well within my lifetime, and that my offspring would either be incorporeal AIs or corporeal AIs in robotic shells. I would be uploaded into a giant virtual connectome powered by a Dyson sphere and live a thousand subjective lifetimes in a real year. My life insurance policy named Alcor as the sole beneficiary and I wore a bracelet with pre-vitrification instructions on it.
Now I have two human biological children, and Moore's Law has given us duckface selfies on Instagram celebrities and consumerist bliss via StitchFix. All the AGI researchers of that time have given up and gone into human bias control and polyamorous relationships in intentional communes with other futurists or disappeared into sketchy Chinese universities. Kurzweil will die ignominiously.
The exaflops of global processing power that the AGI researchers of 2001 wish they had is here, and is being harnessed to the valiant purpose of ensuring you can watch double anal videos in high definition in your Uber ride en route to the gastropub recommended by Yelp.
Mark my words today. Give it a decade or two. Humans don't want to ascend. They want to consume. Every technological advancement we make will go into facilitating this.
And being a parent is actually pretty cool.