A capitalist economy will use up whatever energy is cheaply accessible.
But, the essential point is that energy has become a smaller part of GDP than it was 30 years ago, and that means increased efficiency has indeed occurred.
Increased efficiency doesn't lead to less energy use, it leads to greater wealth for the same energy use. You know the old saying, waste not want not.
The market is not going to reduce energy use until it's forced to by supply and demand imbalances.
If you want efficiency increases to result in actual lower energy use, you'll need government intervention.

Robert,

To be fair, though things are not happening as fast as Kurzweil said and as you pointed out energy is his blind spot, we are now for the first time in history able to build infrastructure that is capable of powering our civilization from renewables.

That we haven't done so (yet) and that since the members of our civilization are not all rowing in the same direction we may not is a different question.

Also: OK so he does look 60 (though I'd have said more like 50) he looks like he's in great shape for his age. Looking at the office where I'm currently working, there are plenty of people in their late 40s in worse shape than Ray.

FWIW, Kurzweil does address the Fermi paradox by saying that "well, since a post-singularity civilisation would be easily visible to our current SETI efforts, there cannot be any civilisations which have reached a singularity at any point where electromagnetic waves from them would have reached us by now". I'm not convinced by this argument but it's not something he hasn't thought about.

if it can happen at all, why wouldn't galactic civilization(s) where it already has be here?

Yet, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

The sentiment of your quote is certainly comforting (to those with a similar view of the Singularity, which I share), but it does not stand well on it's own (despite Fermi's brilliance).

This is a typically Oedipal evaluation of an Interplanetary species' presence. If WE, mighty mighty WE can't "detect" so-called intelligent life in the universe, certainly it must not exist. If NASA and MIT and SETI and the US Gubmint have officially pronounced that ET is not here, has never been here nor has ever been detected, then surely ET remains entirely hypothetical.

An _objective_ evaluation of HARD evidence, e.a., what are dismissively referred to as "UFO sightings", radar returns, photographic evidence, trace evidence, multi-person accounts and thousands of documented military intercepts and interactions with "phenomena" you must come to the conclusion that ET is here, that ET is doing as he pleases without our consultation or consent, and apparently, without our knowledge. All things that I would personally characterize as ample evidence of _advanced_ technological superiority. But that's just me.

I would expect hearty chuckles and snorts and derisive laughter from the hardcore speculator-energy crowd, but it's completely irrelevant.

One of the effects of the Singularity that I use as a personal measure of Change is the rate of disintegration of institutions. Institutions are bureaucratic entities designed to centralize and control the implementation of Process, but when you reach a point when Process itself assumes, let's call it "velocity", Process escapes institutional control and at some point the institutions become irrelevant. Or, more simply put, the institutions fail.

The ET phenomenon is a perfect example of a complete failure of our institutions across the board. Confronted with evidence of a phenomenon that exceeds our technological/creative/institutional limits to understand and/or interpret. e.a., _control_, our reaction is entirely predictable. We simply dismiss it.

So across mainstream, whenever this issue is brought up, it comes down to discussing SETI and the White House Red Carpet reception and the signing of the Intergalactic Trade Agreement with the Zeta Reticulans, and how in the absence thereof, surely this entire realm of interest remains nothing but speculative fiction and whacko fringe babble.

The sad irony of ET in the "official" scientific circles is that ET only becomes real at that point that we have the ability to calculate his existence once and for all. Of course, that moment approaches, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear some "shocking" pronouncement one day soon on the "discovery" or some sort of confirmation of ET life.

Because Fermi's paradox is one of those silly arguments of scale where no one actually knows what numbers to plug in for the probabilities. Sure theres a hundred billion stars in the milky way and a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, but the likelyhood of civilization arising around one of those stars could easily be lower than 1 civilization in the observable universe.

Consider:

1. Rare earth, where water is liquid.
2. Precambrian life existed as simple single celled organisms for billions of years, indicating the multicellular jump may be quite a bit less likely than just forming life.
3. The jump from multicellular life to animal life with nervous systems may be quite a bit less likely still.
4. There are strong environmental factors selecting against intelligence in creatures capable of using tools.

I didn't understand most of that but I am better for having read it. I think your comment about not being able to miniaturise mass and energy is the key to this "Technology will save us" mentiality. Just delivering a hot shower takes a minimum amount of energy. While we may not yet have reached optimal efficiency in hot shower delivery, the law of diminishing returns will act on our efforts to do so at some point. While I can imagine that nano-technology might be able to create new materials that could deliver massive amounts of heat right at the point of delivery (for my shower example), the amount of heat in the water, that hits my back, is not going to change.

Something I read recently was that a group of researchers had succeeded in building a maxwell's demon.

If I remember correctly (I don't - it's vague), a maxwell's demon is ruled out by the laws of thermodynamics.

If this is the case then where does that leave us with miniaturization of energy sources?

Here's more information:
"Maxwell's demon tamed:
A manmade molecular machine that can drive a system away from equilibrium is the first to do so using an "information ratchet", claim researchers in Scotland. The machine, in which a light-powered gate controls the transport of molecules, uses a similar principle to Maxwell's demon, a famous thought experiment devised to challenge the second law of thermodynamics (Nature 445 523).

Nature uses molecular machines to drive chemical systems away from thermodynamic equilibrium in virtually every major biological process. But while scientists have been eager to create similar machines to perform nanoscale tasks, they have so far only had success with simple switches that proceed towards equilibrium.

One way onlyDavid Leigh and fellow researchers at the University of Edinburgh, however, have proved that particles can be driven away from equilibrium using a molecular "information ratchet". To perform the feat, they use "rotaxane", an assembly of molecules comprising a dumbbell-shaped axle on which a ring can slide, hindered only by a gate located part way along. By shining light on rotaxane, the ring absorbs photons and transfers energy to the gate, which then temporarily changes shape to let the ring pass. Once the ring has passed, however, it cannot transmit energy back to the gate, and is therefore stuck – or ratcheted – in place.

A comparable ratcheting process was famously conjured 140 years ago by James Clerk Maxwell in a thought experiment that was later nicknamed "Maxwell's demon". Maxwell supposed that some kind of entity (a "demon") could be invented to act as a gatekeeper between two isolated chambers of gas, letting only fast molecules into one chamber and only slow molecules into the other. In doing so, he proposed, the difference in temperature between the two chambers would progressively increase, thus violating the second law of thermodynamics.
"

Craig Venter, billionaire pioneer in gene sequencing, has used gene synthesis to put together 500,000 genes which will be placed into a cleared cell to create synthetic life.

Other companies are using the new genetic capabilities to create enhanced microbes that make more productive biofuels.

The latest AMD and Nvidia GPGPU processors have 500 cores and 30,000 threads in each chip and the price is as low as $200 per chip which have dual precision teraflop performance. Multiple chips are being placed together in workstations and co-processing boards.

A four GPU system in a 1U-sized rack-mounted device that delivers up to 4 TFlops at 700W. It sells for $7,995.
AMD will be coming out with a 70W system for laptops.

Evolved machines uses the Tesla processors to speed up by 130-fold against simulations with current generation x86 microprocessors. They are now engaged in the design of a rack of GPUs, which will rival the world’s top systems, at 1/100 their cost.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/teraflop-chips-amd-firestream-500-cores...

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researchers are looking at is configurable processor technology developed by Tensilica Inc. The company offers a set of tools that system developers can employ to design both the SoC and the processor cores themselves. A real-world implementation of this technology. LBNL estimate that a 10 petaflop peak system built with Tensilica technology would only draw 3 megawatts and cost just $75 million. It's not a general-purpose system, but neither is it a one-off machine for a single application (like Japan's MD-GRAPE machine, for example). A 10 petaflop Opteron-based system was estimated to cost $1.8 billion and require 179 megawatts to operate; the corresponding Blue Gene/L system would cost $2.6 billion and draw 27 megawatts. Exaflop supercomputers are targeted for 2016-2017.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/02/tensilica-configurable-processors-could...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/05/berkeley-labs-and-tensilica-working-on....

The increased processing power and hardware neuron simulators would be able to scale from current 22 teraflop to get a detailed 10,000 neurons and 30 million synapses up to 10 million neurons and 30 billion synapses for 22 petaflops (even without simulation efficiency improvements) and 500 million neurons and 1.5 trillion synapses. A whole human brain has 100 billion neurons and 1 trillion synapses. the AI researchers believe that they can increase the efficiency of their simulations to achieve whole brain simulations with exaflop computers
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/blue-brain-status-and-future-of-whole.html