One of the scenarios in Age of Spiritual Machines has a posthuman, post-singularity being (whose progress we have followed since she was a kid) declare that “life is still hard.” Kurzweil is definitely an optimist, but you are correct to point out that that doesn’t mean he thinks the future will be heaven.

To put it in other terms, I’m coming to think that our future will look more like a sequence of narrowly averted Greek tragedies than it will fairy tale.

Sounds like an interesting book!