I've liked watching his interviews. In one he's talking about "ideas having sex" and novelties being created more and more. The way I see it, is that science until recently has succeeded in dividing our awareness into a bunch of little, highly focused lenses. Now, it's starting to come back together; biochemistry blurs into micro-biology blurs into nanotechnology blurs into etc, etc.
It is really uplifting to think of, but I think Silva and others on this train of thought (Ray Kurzweil for one) are almost too ambitious. Programming and processing do seem to be getting exponentially more powerful, but there's still so much we don't understand. I think some of the ambitions they present, such as extending human life are still beyond us. We're really an infant species, and most of us can barely navigate our own minds with any real skill. It's going to be scary if they are right, for the majority of people in my opinion. While we are able to make all these cool devices, it takes thousands of humans working in unison to develop the new IPod. And what about all the third-world factory workers caught in the gears of this ever-expanding machine? And the nations who have their resources of gold and silver robbed from them so we can make these machines. Also, the majority of people that use these new technologies barely understand them, making us ever more dependent on the "machine" in general.
He also gets really superlative when he mentions the topography of Manhattan trumping "geology". I think the BP Oil Spill and Fukushima Reactor allude to our overall ingenuity. We haven't learned to build things that can stand amongst chaos, and the universe is far more chaotic than it is ordered. It's structure is ordered, but it's proceedings are chaotic.
The only hell for a warrior is peace.
The warm fuzzy side of the cold hard truth.