The "End of Tech" and Artificial Super-Intelligence

In a recent blogpost, VC Tony Tjan, CEO of Cue Ball,  heralded a paradigm shift in technology, and accurately so. In explaining why the current crop of tech companies is a boom and not a bubble, he wrote "perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is that in 2000 companies were attempting to change what people did with novel but poorly executed alternatives, whereas today, the tech industry is changing how people do things due to technological developments. Today technology is no longer a separate industry but rather an underlying utility: tech is changing both consumer behavior and enterprise workflow".  He's right, at a minimum, that tech is becoming a utility, much revolution (and humanistic handwringing) having already been endured. So, should I stop writing here? Are the human/tech issues done, regardless of outcome? I thought I might, until I began to read "Our Last Invention" by James Barrat, a highly cautionary antidote to Kurzweil's  optimism regarding the alleged "Singularity". His point, stated in a variety of different ways - once we get to true AI, it is only a brief step to ASI, artificial superintellegence, having machines that can replicate thinking machines. Why should they care about humans instead of seeing us as we see lesser intelligent creatures? We will have a bear of a time architecting into code common sense, human kindness or even basic respect for human beings (tell an ASI machine to cure cancer, so it wipes out human beings - we're the disease vectors, right?). Barrat is not at all sanguine about our survival as a species since he thinks (as do the others he interviews and quotes) that there is no way for us to be able to fathom the thinking of creatures thousands of times smarter than we are, and that we tend to anthropomorphize far too much when it comes to machines generally. Smart they may be but humans they aren't. So, while issues related to  ASI are certainly a few years away (likely, whatever that means, 15 to 20 years on), it appears the human/tech interface/tension may be generating more heat soon rather than less. Tech may be a utility while we are still smarter than the machines. But when we aren't anymore,.....