I read Kurzweil's book, but it has been several years.  Personally, I don't see the technological singularity taking place in the next eleven years.  Even at the pace that technology is moving, that just seems to be a bit too optimistic as well as psychologically flavored by Kurzweil's hope that he himself will be able to use the technological singularity to escape death and bring his father back to life in some form.  I've heard this called "The Rapture for nerds," and I tend to agree with that assessment.  We also have to keep in mind that there is still a lot we don't understand about the mind and human consciousness.  Is consciousness a result of the structure of the brain, or is consciousness a pre-existing fundamental aspect of reality that the brain somehow channels?  My honest answer is I have no idea, but it seems to me that in order to create consciousness, we would first need to understand what it is, and how it operates within the biological human mind.