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What is Singularity Hub? (Short Version)

Singularity Hub is your place to keep informed about the daily advances mankind is making in nanotechnology, genetics, biology, artificial intelligence, aging, robotics, and various other fields as we work our way towards the singularity.  The singularity is the point in mankind’s future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining.

The impossible is becoming possible.  The future that you thought would not come in your lifetime is coming sooner than you thought.  Singularity Hub is here to tell you about it.

What is Singularity Hub? (Long Version)

We live in an era where a number of exponentially advancing technologies are massively increasing human intelligence and capabilities.  A few examples:

  • Computers are likely to increase in computational ability one thousand fold in the next 10 years.  By 2020 a single desktop computer is likely to have the computational ability of the human brain
  • In the next 5 years or less your doctor will be able to take a sample of your blood and sequence your entire genome for $100.  A revolution in our understanding of the human body and our ability to medically treat the human body will subsequently unfold.
  • Researchers are already growing entire human organs in the laboratory!  Soon we will be able to grow a new heart or almost any other organ to replace old organs when they go bad.  This will greatly increase the longevity and health of all humans.

Technologies and capabilities that were once thought to be centuries away or even impossible are actually only years from our grasp.  These advances may ultimately lead us to a technological singularity.

First coined by science fiction author Vernor Vinge in the 1980’s, the singularity is the ultimate outcome of the current era of accelerating technological change.  The singularity would be signified by the creation of an artificial intelligence equal to our own.  Such an intelligence would be unconstrained by the limitations of human biology.  This artificial intelligence would potentially evolve into a super intelligence beyond our comprehension after recursively self modifying itself through millions of generations in just a matter of hours.   Borrowing from physics, this intelligence explosion is called a singularity — a point beyond which all understanding, all rules, and all prediction becomes impossible.

Over the last few decades thousands of scientists and thought leaders, most notably Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Near”, have formalized the idea of accelerating technological change.  According to Kurzweil, several information technologies including genetics, computing, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are advancing at predictable, exponential rates.  Technological advances in these fields are coming faster than most people realize and they will radically transform how we live our lives and what it means to be human.

Many have debated whether or not our technological advances will ultimately lead to a singularity or not.  Kurzweil, for one, strongly believes that a singularity will occur in the next 50 years or less. Others think a singularity is either far off into the future or never to come at all.  Whether a person believes in a near term singularity or not, the indisputable fact is that extraordinary technological advances are coming to our lives faster than almost anyone imagined.  Here at Singularity Hub it is our goal everyday to bring you the most comprehensive coverage of these amazing advances as they happen.

About Keith Kleiner

I am the founder and author of Singularity Hub. Formerly I was an early employee at Google, responsible for managing the deployment and configuration of all of Google’s thousands of servers worldwide as the Manager of Hardware Operations. I am currently the founder and investment manager for the Haymar Fund, a hedge fund that seeks out excellent stocks and invests with a buy and hold strategy. I am also a high school physics teacher at Aragon High School in San Mateo, CA. I attended the University of Missouri - Columbia, where I was the founder of the Mizzou Linux Users Group and graduated with a BS in Chemistry and a BS in computer science. [more]