He began by saying that the perceived problems of the future, global warming, overpopulation, resource scarcity, etc. would be solved by various technological fixes and inventions. Amongst these would be the technologies leading to the singularity, which, he said, would be sooner than people think. He described a system of what he called a "gel" computer, a group of small modules networked together in a transparent gel using small lasers. This is technology available now, or soon-ish within the next few years. He also detailed smart organic cells ("smart yogurt"; I kid you not) which would also be enabled to network and evolve themselves (Greg Bear detailed something similar in the novel Blood Music).
All this is very positive, but there are downsides and he highlighted these in the second half of the presentation. He noted that it's possible that what he called a "Stepford Society" would evolve. This is one where criminals cannot be punished because they cannot be identified, having learnt to remove themselves from the systems which track everyone, while honest citizens are increasingly punished for petty misdemeanours as they can be caught. He then went on to describe what he called a "Dark Age of Anti-knowledge", where rumours and half-truths get promulgated by social networking and knowledge bases without being rigorously tested.
All-in-all, it was a good presentation, but a lot of the ideas were not really related to the singularity as such.
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