Future
Navigating toward the best of all possible futures. Follow along as Singularity Hub discusses the future and latest trends in futurology.
What Happens When Cyborg Tech Goes Beyond Medicine?
The age of the cyborg may be closer than we think. Rapidly improving medical robotics, wearables, and implants means many humans are already part machine, and this trend is only likely to continue.
It is...
Society Is Destroying and Rebuilding Itself for the Networked Age
When the dust settled from last summer’s failed Turkish coup d’etat, where a faction of Turkey’s armed forces attempted an overthrow of the sitting government and President Recap Tayyip Erdogan, a bizarre—yet distinct—signature of...
Watch: Ray Kurzweil Predicts When We’ll Be Able to Program Matter
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, thinker, and futurist famous for forecasting the pace of technology and predicting the world of tomorrow.
In this video, Kurzweil predicts when he thinks we’ll get programmable matter—or the...
The Future of Flying Cars: Science Fact or Science Fiction?
Uber has shaken up the taxi industry and is trying to put driverless cars on our roads. Now the company aims to have flying ride-sharing vehicles in our skies by 2020.
Uber is not alone...
What We’re Learning From a Big Universal Basic Income Experiment
Will artificial intelligence “destroy humanity?” Probably not.
But I am concerned that AI and robotics will massively impact the future of work.
McKinsey & Co. predicts that 45 percent of jobs today will be automated out...
4 New Human Rights for When Our Brains Are Hooked Up to Computers
The human-machine mind meld is just around the corner if you believe the buzz coming out of Silicon Valley these days. But neuroethicists worry the technology poses a threat to the last bastion of...
How Chemistry Is Making Our Food Safer, Better, and More Abundant
Although food scientists often explore new technologies to reduce the percentage of hungry people in the world today, many also have future-oriented mindsets and look at possibilities that could solve food challenges for future...
David Hasselhoff Stars in a New Short Film—and All His Lines Were Written by AI
Last year, an AI named Benjamin wrote a weird and entertaining science fiction short film called Sunspring. Now, Benjamin’s back in a new film titled It’s No Game. Like its predecessor, the short is...
The Future of Food: To GMO or Not To GMO?
An organic diet has never been more in style than it is right now, with millions of consumers willing to shell out extra dollars for organic foods. Most of us have a vague idea...
Is ‘Strange Beasts’ a Preview of the Sad (Augmented) Reality Ahead of Us?
Strange Beasts is a British short film reminiscent of the dystopian Netflix drama Black Mirror—and it packs an equally strong punch in about a fifth of the time.
The film starts out with a game...
Star Trek or Mad Max? Why What Happens in the Future Is Up to Us
Is humanity headed toward a Star Trek-like utopia or a Mad Max-inspired dystopia?
This is one of the big questions Vivek Wadhwa examines in his new book, co-authored with Alex Salkever, The Driver in the...
Ghost in the Shell Thrills, But Ducks the Philosophical Questions Posed by a Cyborg Future
How closely will we live with the technology we use in the future? How will it change us? And how close is “close”? Ghost in the Shell imagines a futuristic, hi-tech but grimy and...
How to Feed 9.7 Billion People? CRISPR Gene Editing For Crops
It’s no secret that we’re going to struggle to feed the rapidly expanding global population. New genome editing technologies could hold the answer, according to scientists.
The number of humans on this planet is expected...
The Rise of a New Species of Human Being
Today, what survives on Earth can be determined entirely by human beings. We can alter the genetics of almost any life form and potentially design entirely new ones. According to renowned physicist Freeman Dyson,...
Automation Could End Meaningless Jobs—And None Too Soon
What makes your work valuable?
Does it fulfill you? Allow you to connect with or help people? Contribute to a greater good?
Or does its value come from your income, which allows you to do other...
Matchmaker, Make Us the Perfect Love Algorithm
We live in a hyper-connected world where communication is almost effortless. And yet, despite abundant connection, we still lack interpersonal fulfillment. The next challenge, then, is not increasing the number of relationships possible, but...
If We Can See the Future We Want, We Can Shape It Too
Alida Draudt and Julia Rose West are not only co-authors, business partners, and best of friends, but most importantly, they have differing points of view—which is ideal for two budding Silicon Valley futurists.
Alida currently...
New Burger Robot Will Take Command of the Grill in 50 Fast Food Restaurants
Would your burger taste as delicious if it was made by a robot?
You’ll soon be able to find out at CaliBurger restaurants in the US and worldwide.
Cali Group partnered with Miso Robotics to develop...
How to Experiment Like the Most Successful, Hyper-Growth Companies Do
Today’s most successful companies, the ones that are “crushing it,” started as a series of crazy ideas, followed by experiments to test just how viable those ideas might be.
Experimentation is a crucial mechanism for...
The Cities of the Future Are Smart, Green, Connected Innovation Hubs
Humanity has come a long way since the very first cities began to emerge about ten thousand years ago. Today, places like New York, Tokyo and Dubai are centers of innovation and human progress....
How the World Has Changed From 1917 to 2017
Over the last 100 years, the world has changed tremendously.
For perspective, this year at Abundance 360, I gave a few fun examples of what the world looked like in 1917.
This blog is a look...
Art in the Age of AI: How Tech Is Redefining Our Creativity
Technology has long been considered a resource-liberating mechanism, granting us better access to resources like information, food and energy. Yet what is often overlooked is the revolutionary impact technology can have on our ability...
Editorial Note From the Singularity Hub Team
The Trump administration’s executive order on immigration has affected many in tech, and our site is no exception. Our team is privileged to work with bright and talented individuals from all over the world,...
Make Sense of the Future With This Winter Reading List
It’s always jarring to society when we move from one way of doing things to another. Today’s rapid changes can leave us feeling like we’re confronting unprecedented madness, but change is one of the...
India Is Building the Infrastructure for a Truly Digital Economy
Silicon Valley fancies itself the global leader in innovation. Its leaders hype technologies such as bitcoin and blockchain, which some claim are the greatest inventions since the Internet. They are so complex that only a few...
Could Having Too Much Become a Bigger Problem Than Having Too Little?
Years ago I traveled to Juarez, Mexico for work, staying across the border in El Paso, Texas and driving back and forth each day. On the Texas side, American life bustled on as usual:...
Robots May Steal Our Jobs, but Not as Quickly as We Thought
Fear of job loss to automation is growing, with each announcement of exciting technological progress generating a backlash from those who could end up unemployed because of it. Amazon Go is eliminating the need...
One Third of Americans Prefer a Software Robot Over a Human Boss
Digitization and automation are ever-growing topics in relation to the workplace.
A famous Oxford study on the future of employment from 2013 estimated that up to 47% of American jobs may be automated by 2035;...
You Can Now Wear a Nanoscale Archive of 1,000 Languages Around Your Neck
The future depends on how well we've preserved the past. Tomorrow’s breakthroughs are built from today’s innovation. To continue the trend, we must keep preserving information properly for future generations. If we leave indecipherable...
‘New York 2140’ Is a Sci-Fi Vision of the World Reshaped by Climate Change
If a trip to Venice is your ideal holiday, then you’re going to love the future.
Most of us, however, will be quite sobered by Kim Stanley Robinson’s upcoming novel, New York 2140, a near-future...
No Job Is Safe, But These Skills Will Always Be Valued in the Workplace
If you’d asked farmers a few hundred years ago what skills their kids would need to thrive, it wouldn’t have taken long to answer. They’d need to know how to milk a cow or plant...
The Ethical Conundrums Technology Confronted Us With This Year
New advances in technology constantly push humanity into uncharted territory.
Sometimes this territory brings us questions we might not have imagined needing answers so soon, like, "Is editing the DNA of human embryos moral?"
Other questions are more familiar, only with...
Post-Truth: Technology Is a Big Part of the Problem, But It’s Also a Solution
"Post-truth" was chosen as the 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, a catch-all term describing a perception of growing distrust of “the facts” and increasing reliance on emotion in public discourse.
It is frequently used...
Exponential Growth Will Transform Humanity in the Next 30 Years
As we close out 2016, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to take a risk and venture into a topic I’m personally compelled to think about… a topic that will seem far out to...
This Bitcoin-Eating Plant Robot Hires Artists to Make Its Babies
This is a thing that exists in the world: a bitcoin-eating plant robot (called a plantoid), made of self-executing computer code which owns itself and hires artists to make its babies. If that sounds...
The Fourth Industrial Revolution Is Here: What Now? [Video]
What if the world we knew was subtly being replaced with a new one? Would we notice immediately, or would it only be evident in hindsight?
According to the World Economic Forum, the “Fourth Industrial...
How Digital Nomads Are Leading the Seismic Shift in Where We Work
Have laptop, will travel.
That’s become the slogan of an increasing number of the global white-collar workforce. People are unleashing themselves from corporations and companies to plug wirelessly into the wider world. The tribe of...
If Robots and AI Steal Our Jobs, a Universal Basic Income Could Help
Some fear that robots and AI will steal our jobs.
They probably will (in the near-term, at least half of them).
If that happens, what will we do for a living? How will we earn money?
In...
Break Out of Your Echo Chamber: Technology Arranges Lunch With Someone New
On average, Americans spend 50 minutes a day on Facebook. That’s a lot of online socializing. It’s also about the same amount of time workers take for their lunch break. Yet there’s not nearly...
What If a Social Score Determined Your Success? China’s About to Find Out
In an episode of the Netflix dystopian drama Black Mirror, characters live in a future where they have a ‘social score’ that dictates the terms of pretty much every aspect of their lives: who...
The Brain Tech to Merge Humans and AI Is Already Being Developed
Are you scared of artificial intelligence (AI)?
Do you believe the warnings from folks like Prof. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others?
Is AI the greatest tool humanity will ever create, or are we “summoning the...
Is Radical Life Extension Good for Society?
It’s no longer a radical question.
The aging literature is replete with treatments that could prolong lifespan by 20-40%, at least in lab animals. Interventions such as caloric restriction, rapamycin and metformin have been studied...
Will VR Disrupt the Airline Industry? Sci-Fi Show Meets Press Virtually Instead of Flying
A proposed benefit of virtual reality is that it could one day eliminate the need to move our fleshy bodies around the world for business meetings and work engagements. Instead, we’ll be meeting up...
Fear of the Dark: Why Netflix’s ‘Black Mirror’ Is Great Science Fiction
Legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov once said, “The core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.”
With its aim to predict and...
Forget Building Walls, Technology Is Tearing Them Down
With all the talk of building walls, it seems to me that technology has actually been rapidly tearing down walls.
Besides your passport, what really defines your nationality these days?
Is it where you were live?...
The 6 Ds of Tech Disruption: A Guide to the Digital Economy
“The Six Ds are a chain reaction of technological progression, a road map of rapid development that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity.”
–Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Bold
We live in incredible times....
How We Can Save Our History One Smartphone at a Time
Our lives today are increasingly digital, so why isn’t our old memorabilia? As we use smartphones and the cloud more often, our pre-digital personal history is falling to pieces, likely unorganized, poorly labeled or...
6 Big Ways Tech Is Rewriting Society’s Rules
Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors,...
This Is How to Invent Radical Solutions to Huge Problems
If you force a grasshopper into a jar and fasten the lid, the grasshopper eventually shortens its jump after hitting the lid enough times.
After a while, even if you take the lid off the...
Overhauling How We Teach Our Kids in a World of Accelerating Change
Here in L.A., it’s kind of insane that a great kindergarten requires a competitive application and tuitions that exceed most colleges.
I started asking myself, given the fact that most elementary schools haven’t changed in...
