Ray Kurzweil looks at the future in his new book " The Singularity is Near" as a culmination of three related fields of innovation. Genetics, nano-technology, and robotics. (Kurzweil, 205) The human genome is only about 800 million uncompressed bytes which really isn't all that much compared to the amount of data that a large mainframe program may run. To put it in perspective, the genetic information about the brain is 12 million bytes of compressed data, "smaller than …showed first 75 words of 1517 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1517 total…between the population and the machines that maintain them will become total. And when those machines fail, for one reason or another, that lack of awareness will probably be fatal. Science fiction has written extensively on this subject, actually, and in historical terms it probably isn't all that far off. On the other hand, unless some dramatic discoveries are made in the next few decades, none of us may make it to the Year 2525 anyway.