[extropy-chat] converging history

[Spike]

Please look at this figure for a minute:

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/spike/Local%20Settings/Temporary%2
0Internet%20Files/OLKA6/Intel_Roadmap_2003.gif

then explain to me how humanity could be doing anything
other than converging towards an inevitable singularity.
Clearly ours is a species in open-loop, with no apparent
equilibrium point that can possibly be re-established.

We think of time travellers going back and doing something
that causes histories to diverge with ever expanding
consequences, like spreading ripples on a pond when a
pebble is cast therein.  But after a while, you again
have a calm surface, do you not?  At the risk of straining
the analogy, could it be that history of life inevitably
converges?  Consider:

Any large star inevitably goes supernova, spewing metals
into the cosmos, which eventually form planets elsewhere,
which will form life, given the right mix of elements and 
conditions.  Life may have long periods of equilibrium,
such as our own 3 billion years of blue-green algal mats,
but something like multicellular life must eventually
happen, or so it would seem.  If there is multicellular
life, there is interspecies competition, and every available
ecological niche is eventually filled.  One obvious ecological
niche is the one humans inhabit: scentient intelligence
sufficient to modify the environment to its own needs.
In that niche exists competition for resources and
competition for mates, which leads to ever more creativeness
and ever greater intelligence.  Societal equilibria may be
reached in many or perhaps most of those cases, but
it only takes one society somewhere to precipitate something 
analogous to the industrial revolution, which makes it
inevitable as all hell, and when that happens, automated 
control of machines is clearly desired, leading
eventually to mechanical computers, then improvements
leading to electronics, then artificial intelligence appears
to me to be absolutely unavoidable in the long run, which
leads to AI and eventually to uploading and the construction 
of MBrains, to use all the available metals in the star system.

So the history of life apparently eventually converges on 
this solution, utterly regardless of the path it takes to 
get there.  

Please, what am I doing wrong in this line of reasoning?  
Where is the stepping off point?

spike