I watched the first 2 episodes of the Jeopary! challenge between former champions and an IBM super-computer. Humanity isn't fairing well.
We may live long enough to watch the debate in Congress over whether computers should get the vote (once they become indistinguishable from humans). Kurzweil points out that when we build a machine as intelligent as we are, it'll be the last machine we have to build, since the machine itself can create all future machines. This means that if we allow robots to vote, they'll simply overwhelm us by replicating, and then exploiting the power of "one 'man' one vote." Wouldn't this make universal suffrage for all beings (whether bio or techno) impossible in practice, even if philosophically or morally imperative?
(We could e.g. legislate that all beings that are exactly the same get just one vote collectively... but that'd piss off a whole bunch of identical twins!)
Even now, human groups with high birth-rates eventually gain more power at the ballot box. This doesn't create immediate crisis, since humans are so slow and inaccurate in our efforts to reproduce ourselves. When computers can do so without friction -- making their replicas quickly and flawlessly -- it'll be a different matter.
