I don't see the point in saying the number of new articles has decreased in that last 2 years. It's like saying I'm not satisfied of my 34.347.293 volumes enciclopedia because it grows only 2 volumes per months and not 4. Wikipedia is already the biggest enciclopedia on earth, nothing compare to it, there are articles about things traditional enciclopedias would never dream to cover such as consumer products, software programms, videogames characters, movies, etc..etc.. I think the number of articles has decreased simply because there aren't so many new topics to talk about and general knowledge has already been completely covered. Wikipedia keeps being one of the most valuable assets of the whole Internet.

Another dark age again? You mean the strong live and the "weak" dies? I don't feel any nostalgia for "state of nature". Screw it. Look at how animals live, it doesn't worth living that way.

Yeah, quantum computing is NOT a necessary requisite for strong A.I. . We will get to it nevertheless. That's what IBM engineers are saying.

You're talking about very distant eras. The technology that used to be known then has nothing to do with what we know today, just as those eras don't resemble ours in any way. Since it was the beginning of civilization it's normal technological advancemenent were erratic and causal, you're talking about people who didn't even know the concept of "progress"! But now we're progressing at gradually increasing rhythm. Moore's law has always been proved true, according to IBM it will be so at least until 2020. By then we'll have moved to new technologies such as quantum computing, so Moore's law will be still valid. I don't know what do you mean as for progress being a "law of nature". But if humans are a law of nature, then technological progress is. Besides, this is a non-issue: technology is rapidly advancing for sure (just take a look at regular advancements in nanotechnology, genetics and information technology...) the problem is if we are going autodestroy ourself before getting mature enough to exclude this possibility, in the next few centuries.

500.000 years to go? Come on... As a race our fate is going to be sorted in the next 500 years, and I'm giving us a long time... In the next few centuries we will have found a way to make the Alcubierre's Warp Drive theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_Warp_Drive) feasible otherwise it will simply means that we are extinct.

Wait before saying Kurzweil is a delusional fanatic. Have you actually read his books? They make sense, it's not just a bunch of futuristic blabbing. I'm critic and quite picky about futuristic visions, I always ask "why", and Kurzweil books aren't the place where these questions end up unanswered. You can say he's too optimistic, or that's he's right, but I will never say he's a charlatan. Otherwise every other expert trying to make a guess on the future using statistical tools should be labeled the same. Sure, some claims seem unrealistic now, but how much of the technology you're using now would have considered unrealistic, for example in the eighties? So think twice, wait and live to see, it's a possible outcome, not ridiculous science-fiction.