The eponymous io9 poses the question.
I propose, in short, no.
Perhaps our new job is non-stop education, outreach, and distributed peer-to-peer augmented psychotherapies to help other humans adjust and adapt to The Hybrid Century, as well. If the recent townhall tantrum trend is any indication, it will take many generations to even begin to bring humanity up to speed on the obvious and dramatic differences in scale and function between gray goo and swarming microbots.
So wait, let me rephrase that, the answer isn't so much "no" as it is, "not in the sense you once thought." In other words, there's a diminishing return on racking our brains to INVENT communication satellites, Star Trek replicators, and matrixy singularities; especially if all existence as we know it is actually a simulation, right?
The fact of the matter is, none of us truly has a grip on where the hell all of these developments are leading, but we certainly can see that the ever exploding explosions of everyday advances are taking us to wherever the hell "there" is at an accelerating; not flat or decelerating rate. Argue about the shape of the curve, it doesn't matter. What matters is the trajectory and how we bring our allegedly enlightened Human Values to bear upon this journey set so plainly before us.
Bickering over whether or not specific scenario high resolution realization of occurs -- will "THE" singularity happen or not -- also simply does not matter. All such are, and always have been, highly evolved and Focused Instructional and Motivational Tools, boys and girls; so let us rather write science fiction scenarios within the seemingly known universe of unpredictable outcomes of seemingly all-known unknowns; let us rather help one another to get over ourselves, accept ourselves, find ourselves in the Shared Fate of each and every one another, regardless of whether or not Gort, Hal, Neo, or Colossus actually awaits us on the other side.
Isn't that more than Good Enough for a fictional future palette? What more do you want, oh forlorn and self-pitying writer-blocked human? Put your Once and Ever Might Imagination to work envisioning and describing futures wherein every human has More Than Enough, without suppression or oppression of any other. If that doesn't provide our allegedly superior SciFi minds an infinite palette of possibilities, then perhaps we have only our own stunted, un-augmented, un-transhuman imaginations to blame.
After all the dreaming, it's the DOING that matters. And perhaps in between dreaming, only DOING can open us all up to the next imaginable unimaginable final frontier.
"This is the real news of our century. It is highly feasible to take care of all of humanity at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever experienced or dreamt of. To do so without having anybody profit at the expense of another so that everybody can enjoy the whole earth. And it can all be done by 1985." – R. Buckminster Fuller, The World Game, 1971
