Which way will technology take us?

Is this utopia? A new science fiction movie? An optimistic scenario for human life in the year 2500?

Try 2030. It is a prediction evangelized in intense detail by Ray Kurzweil in his staggering new 650-plus-page treatise, ''The Singularity Is Near." Kurzweil, a renowned computer scientist and inventor of, among other things, the flatbed scanner, argues that our society is facing an imminent and overwhelming transformation called the Singularity.

The Singularity is, in Kurzweil's words, ''a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Another way to put it is to say that pretty soon biological evolution will be transcended by technological evolution.

Too wild? Before you dismiss it as techno-zeal, think for a moment about what is going on in 2005; think about the kind of things that are written about on the other pages of this newspaper. Breast exams are performed by robotic hands. Refrigerator magnets (or car keys, or hearing aids) contain chips that match the computing power of PCs we happily spent a couple of thousand dollars on in 1990. Our soldiers have X-ray, night, and telescopic vision. Computers launch, fly, and land supersonic airplanes.

Every day the line between what is human and what is not quite human blurs a bit more. We are, in many ways, already engineering our own evolution. Consider Viagra, steroids, or in vitro fertility treatments. Is it really so improbable that someday soon high schoolers might be able to access the Internet through an implant in their brain? Or that robots the size of red blood cells will be injected into our bloodstream to repair diseased organs?

What Kurzweil assumes is that (1) technology drives history and (2) technology (and therefore order and complexity) will continue to advance at an exponential rate.