Note: I only skimmed over the article. I've also thought about this subject, and about the reasons we haven't solved world hunger, aren't living on the moon, don't have people on Mars, aren't able to live for 200+ years and haven't reached the singularity. The one thing which retards technology, society and humanity as a whole is fear. Out of fear come politics, laws, armies, governments and wars. Fear is the thing that makes us want to solve all of our problems at once with as little thought as possible. It's what makes us "dumb lazy", which I define as short-terms laziness, as opposed to "smart lazy" which is doing a little more now in exchange for much less later. In other words, the bottleneck is the fear in each and every one of us. Once we get past this stage (either through genetic modification, technological augments, drugs, sheer willpower or a combination of the above), we will be living in a post-singularity world.