"The slide showed computing power, starting with the first punch card machine designed for the 1890 US Census, and ending with today’s most powerful chip. Since 1890, computing power has become a trillion times more powerful, and a billion times more powerful in the last 25 years. The computer I used at the beginning of college had 10 times less power and half the storage space of the one I used as a senior. With the human brain able to hold only about 2 petabytes of information,a single computer will equal the storage capacity and speed of the human brain by around 2029.

And once a computer can map out every single neuron, connection, and firing of a brain, someone will make a digital version. Looking at Kurzweil’s graph, all the data lined up so elegantly, I became convinced that a computer will simulate a human brain in my lifetime."   - Stuart Fox  reports on the closing presentation by Ray Kurzweill  at the Singularity Summit 2009. 

The Summits,  first held in 2006 at Stanford University, seek to explore concept of Singularity and the future of human technological progress.  What is Singularity, you may ask?  It is what happens when machines start to think for themselves,and can think better than humans. It is that moment when the past can no longer become a basis for predicting future trends.  It is, in Kurzweill’s terms, the ultimate "event horizon".  He has been an enthusiastic proponent of the notion; but others are less enthusiastic.  The concept was solidified by mathematician and computer scientist Vernor Vinge, who coined the term "technological singularity" in an article for Omni magazine in 1983.  In 2000, the Singularity Institute was founded by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and entrepreneur Brian Atkins  to work toward smarter-than-human intelligence

The Singularity is beyond huge, but it can begin with something small. If one smarter-than-human intelligence exists, that mind will find it easier to create still smarter minds. In this respect the dynamic of the Singularity resembles other cases where small causes can have large effects; toppling the first domino in a chain, starting an avalanche with a pebble, perturbing an upright object balanced on its tip. All it takes is one technology – Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or perhaps something unforeseen – that advances to the point of creating smarter-than-human minds. That one technological advance is the equivalent of the first self-replicating chemical that gave rise to life on Earth. (Taken from "What is Singularity")