The Singularity Institute is a fabulous site with many high-quality articles about an event known as the singularity. I could tell you about this event right here, but I could never do it better than the Singularity Institute. So let's hear what they have got to say! Here is part of their introduction:

The human brain has existed in its present form for between fifty and a hundred thousand years. The underlying hardware that powers our civilization is so constant and unchanging that we pay it absolutely no attention. If change proceeds faster in our time than in the Bronze Age, or faster in the Bronze Age than in hunter-gatherer civilizations, we explain it by references to the variances between humans and the differences between human cultures. These variances are relatively small, but they form the whole of our experienced reality.

We explain the faster pace of modern culture by referring to better communication methods, like the printing press and the telephone; or to better knowledge-gathering procedures, such as the scientific method. We explain the variance between humans by looking at characteristics such as education, experience, and the unknown quirks that make the occasional Einstein or Newton. But no amount of education will make a chimpanzee a scientific researcher. The existence of chimpanzee "geniuses" has been documented, but no chimpanzee genius is a match for a human moron. All the variance that measures the gap between human village idiot and human Einstein is trivial in a cosmic sense; it is a different kind of difference than that which separates humans from chimpanzees, and much smaller. The underlying hardware remains constant.

Humans are smarter than chimpanzees, presently the smartest creatures on Earth. Does humanity represent the theoretical limit? Certainly, the human brain's hardware is far slower than the theoretical limit. Human neurons fire approximately 200 times per second, using signals that travel at a maximum of 100 meters per second. By comparison, my computer's CPU operates at 667 million clock cycles per second, and the speed of light is 300 million meters per second; the reason a human brain has around a hundred million times as much raw computing power as my computer is that a human brain has 40 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. If your neurons could be upgraded to fire 200 million times per second and send signals at 100 million meters per second, the result would be a millionfold "subjective speedup"; you could think a million times faster. In the time it now takes for your watch to count off 31 seconds, you could do a year's worth of thinking; more than a millennium of subjective time would pass between sunrise and sunset.

You might not be any "smarter" - you would simply think much, much faster - but the effect, to an external observer, would be beyond description. A community of ultraspeed humans could - mentally, at least - recreate the entire path from Socrates to World Wide Web in less than a day. A day after that, if the ultraspeed humans have physical technology that runs at the same speed as their minds, the ultraspeed community would have the same technology and culture we would reach in 4700 AD... and just 1900 AD to 2000 AD was enough to take us from steam engines to the Internet.

It is a great idea to pay them a visit and read their material. You can view their site on:

http://singinst.org