Curation
Singularity Hub curates the latest news in exponential technologies. Curation is where you’ll find awesome stories from around the web.
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 13)
ROBOTICS
Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Shows Off Parkour Skills
Erico Guizzo | IEEE Spectrum
"The remarkable evolution of Atlas, Boston Dynamics’ most agile robot, continues. In a video posted today, Atlas is seen jumping over a log and...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 6)
ROBOTICS
The Demise of Rethink Robotics Shows How Hard It Is to Make Machines Truly Smart
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
"There’s growing interest in using recent advances in AI to make industrial robots a lot smarter and more useful....
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through September 29)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How Google's DeepMind Will Train Its AI Inside Unity's Video Game Worlds
Sean Captain | Fast Company
"DeepMind, part of Google parent company Alphabet, is going big on virtual world AI training through a deal...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through September 22)
ROBOTICS
Meet the Winner of Robotics' World Cup
Editorial Staff | MIT Technology Review
"If you are under the impression that the recent soccer World Cup was won by a fine French team that triumphed over Croatia...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through September 15)
GENETICS
Plan to Build a Genetic Noah's Ark Includes a Staggering 66,000 Species
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
"As its name implies, this group had initially planned to sequence the genomes of at least 10,000 vertebrate species,...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through September 8)
TECHNOLOGY
Google Turns 20: How an Internet Search Engine Reshaped the World
Editorial Staff | The Verge
"No technology company is arguably more responsible for shaping the modern internet, and modern life, than Google. The company that...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through September 1)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Pentagon Priority. Will Silicon Valley Help?
Cade Metz | The New York Times
"The consultants and planners who try to forecast threats think AI could be the next technological game...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 25)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
God Is in the Machine
Carl Miller | The Times Literary Supplement
"Algorithms have changed, from Really Simple to Ridiculously Complicated. They are capable of accomplishing tasks and tackling problems that they’ve never been able...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 18)
FUTURE
What the Year 2050 Has in Store for Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari | Wired
"Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling and no new story has so far emerged to replace them....
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 11)
MIXED REALITY
I Tried Magic Leap and Saw a Flawed Glimpse of Mixed Reality's Amazing Potential
Adi Robertson | The Verge
"Whether or not it’s cooler than most people think, the Magic Leap One is cooler than...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through August 4)
TECHNOLOGY
Apple Is Worth One Trillion Dollars
Ian Bogost | The Atlantic
"Tech magnates crow too often about 'changing the world,' but this is what it really looks like, for good and for ill. It’s what railroads...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 28)
ROBOTICS
Can a Robot Be a Very Good Doggo? Boston Dynamics Hopes So
Nick Lucchesi | Inverse
"Boston Dynamics has plans to take its robotic helpers mainstream next year: By July 2019, it will be on pace...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 21)
FUTURE OF WORK
This Is What Work Will Look Like in 2100
Jared Lindzon | Fast Company
"Some futurists believe that automation will push future workers to tasks that are quintessentially human, and that things like standardized...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through July 14)
COMPUTING
The US May Have Just Pulled Even With China in the Race to Build Supercomputing's Next Big Thing
Martin Giles | MIT Technology Review
"While there’s plenty of national pride wrapped up in the race to...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 23)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
What It's Like to Watch an IBM AI Successfully Debate Humans
Dieter Bohn | The Verge
"It looks like a huge leap beyond that other splashy demonstration we all remember from IBM when Watson mopped the...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 16)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This Wild, AI-Generated Film Is the Next Step in 'Whole-Movie Puppetry'
Sam Machkovech | Ars Technica
"Their plan required Benjamin to do the following: cobble together footage from public domain films, face-swap the duo's database...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 9)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The World's Most Powerful Supercomputer Is Tailor Made for the AI Era
Martin Giles | MIT Technology Review
"The team at Oak Ridge says Summit is the first supercomputer designed from the ground up to...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through June 2)
BIOTECH
Gene Therapy Is Saving Children’s Lives—but Screening to Discover Who Needs It Is Lagging Behind
Emily Mullin | MIT Technology Review
“The company behind the drug, AveXis, is seeing the most dramatic results in children who...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 26)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How the Enlightenment Ends
Henry A. Kissinger | The Atlantic
“Paradoxically, as the world becomes more transparent, it will also become increasingly mysterious. What will distinguish that new world from the one we have known?...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 19)
TRANSPORTATION
Elon Musk Presents His Tunnel Vision to the People of LA
Jack Stewart and Aarian Marshall | Wired
“Now, Musk wants to build this new, 2.1-mile tunnel, near LA’s Sepulveda pass. It’s all part of his...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 12)
ROBOTICS
Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini Robot Dog Goes on Sale in 2019
Stephen Shankland | CNET
“The company has 10 SpotMini prototypes now and will work with manufacturing partners to build 100 this year, said company co-founder and...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through May 5)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How Can We Be Sure AI Will Behave? Perhaps by Watching It Argue with Itself.
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“Having AI programs argue with one another requires more sophisticated technology than exists currently....
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 28)
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Let's Destroy Bitcoin
Morgan Peck | MIT Technology Review
"No one can copy an individual bitcoin, but anyone can copy the idea of Bitcoin. So how might a government, or a corporation, or even ordinary people,...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 21)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Pedro Domingos on the Arms Race in Artificial Intelligence
Christoph Scheuermann and Bernhard Zand | Spiegel Online
“AI lowers the cost of knowledge by orders of magnitude. One good, effective machine learning system can do...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 14)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Learns a New Trick: Measuring Brain Cells
Robbie Gonzalez | Wired
“For three months, I spent three or four hours a day, five or six days a week, in a small room, peering through...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through April 7)
CYBERNETICS
A Brain-Boosting Prosthesis Moves From Rats to Humans
Robbie Gonzalez | WIRED
“Today, their proof-of-concept prosthetic lives outside a patient's head and connects to the brain via wires. But in the future, Hampson hopes, surgeons could...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 31)
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
The Next Best Version of Me: How to Live Forever
David Ewing Duncan | Wired
“Church is one of the leaders of an initiative called the Genome Project-Write, or GP-Write, which is organizing the efforts...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 24)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How the AI Cloud Could Produce the Richest Companies Ever
Peter Burrows | MIT Technology Review
“Amazon, Google, and Microsoft—and to a lesser extent companies like Apple, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP—have the massive computing...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 17)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
China Wants to Shape the Global Future of Artificial Intelligence
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“China’s booming AI industry and massive government investment in the technology have raised fears in the US and elsewhere...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 10)
COMPUTING
Google Thinks It's Close to 'Quantum Supremacy.' Here's What That Really Means.
Martin Giles and Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“Seventy-two may not be a large number, but in quantum computing terms, it’s massive. This...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through March 3)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Inside the Alexa Prize
James Vlahos | Wired
“The fevered quest for conversational AI has pitted Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft in a battle for two vital resources. The first is finite: top-shelf PhDs...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 24)
COMPUTING
Serious Quantum Computers Are Finally Here. What Are We Going to Do With Them?
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
"'The thing driving the hype is the realization that quantum computing is actually real,' says Isaac...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 17)
BIOTECH
In the Future We Won’t Edit Genomes—We’ll Just Print Out New Ones
Bryan Walsh | MIT Technology Review
“'Over the next 10 years synthetic biology is going to be producing all kinds of compounds and materials...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 10)
SPACE
Falcon Heavy Rocket Makes History With Successful First Launch
Michael Greshko | National Geographic
“'I'm still trying to absorb everything that happened. It seemed surreal to me,' SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a post-launch press...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through February 3)
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico
Nellie Bowles | The New York Times
“Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter…And these men—because they are almost...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 27)
COMPUTING
China Wants to Make the Chips That Will Add AI to Any Gadget
Yiting Sun | MIT Technology Review
“The chip is just one example of an important trend sweeping China’s tech sector. The country’s semiconductor...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 20)
AUGMENTED REALITY
AR Has Inherited All the Promise and Hype of VR
Nick Statt | The Verge
“The full spectrum of AR was present on the floor of the show’s many gadget expos and booth halls, making...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 13)
TRANSPORTATION
CES 2018: Phantom Auto Demonstrates First Remote-Controlled Car on Public Roads
Mark Harris | IEEE Spectrum
“But Shukman is not sitting next to me in the driver’s seat of Phantom’s Lincoln MKZ, and he hasn’t felt...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through January 6)
ROBOTS
The Year Robots Backflipped Their Way Into Our Hearts
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“Legged robots remain very expensive and difficult to commercialize. So it came as little surprise when Google sold Boston Dynamics to...
The 7 Hub Stories That Got the Most Social Media Love This Year
I bet you think 2017 was a hot mess, a relentless series of tragedies and catastrophes that exposed humanity for what little it's worth. Let us re-instill in you a sense of optimism with...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 16)
BITCOIN
Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the World
Derek Thompson | The Atlantic
“What seems most certain is that the future of money will test our conventional definitions—of currencies, of bubbles, and of initial offerings....
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 9)
ROBOTICS
New Robots Can See Into Their Future
Brett Israel | Berkeley News
“Using this technology, called visual foresight, the robots can predict what their cameras will see if they perform a particular sequence of movements. These robotic...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through December 2)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself?
Cliff Kuang | New York Times
“Kosinski’s results suggested something stranger: that artificial intelligences often excel by developing whole new ways of seeing, or even thinking, that...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through November 18)
ROBOTS
Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Does Backflips Now and It's Full-Tilt Insane
Matt Simon | Wired
“To be clear: Humanoids aren’t supposed to be able to do this. It's extremely difficult to make a bipedal robot that can move...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through November 11)
QUANTUM COMPUTING
IBM Raises the Bar With a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer
Will Knight | MIT Technology Review
“50 qubits is a significant landmark in progress toward practical quantum computers. Other systems built so far have...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through November 4)
TRANSPORTATION
Who's Ready to Put Their Kid on a Self-Driving School Bus?
Aarian Marshall | Wired
“The designers know the concept is provocative, but they think it points to a bigger truth: You’ll know autonomous vehicles are...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 28)
INTERNET OF THINGS
Amazon Key Is a New Service That Lets Couriers Unlock Your Front Door
Ben Popper | The Verge
“When a courier arrives with a package for in-home delivery, they scan the barcode, sending a...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 21)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Stunning AI Breakthrough Takes Us One Step Closer to the Singularity
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
“A new paper published in Nature today describes how the artificially intelligent system that defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016 got its digital...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around the Web (Through October 14)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Google's Learning Software Learns to Write Learning Software
Tom Simonite | Wired
“In a project called AutoML, Google’s researchers have taught machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. In some instances, what it comes up...
This Week’s Awesome Stories From Around The Web (Through October 7)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Google Has Built Earbuds That Translate 40 Languages in Real Time
Dave Gershgorn | Quartz
“The last part of that process is traditionally done by putting together pre-recorded words or word fragments. However, DeepMind, Alphabet’s AI...
