If we can create machines that are deeply creative and aware and imaginative, then they can apply those powers of creativity and imagination to their own technology. So they would understand those principles and discover new ones, and then reinvent themselves. Once you have that happening, you have much harder mutability in computing media, than you do in this delicate, fragile brain of ours. You would have, basically, some recursive, accelerating self-improvement in the machines. It would result in a cascade of improvement in the performance of machines that would add up towards an intelligence-explosion, as I.J. Good said.
The key to this, what is called the technological singularity, where technology approaches this sort of unimaginable point of transcendence, the key is not technology. It is creativity. Because every iteration has to involve something new, some new state of awareness. If this happens, and we survive through it, if it doesn't destabilize and result in technologies of annihilation, and get deployed, if we live through this experience, it is going to change what life means on the planet. What we are and our context in the universe. It is unimaginable and very profound.