The singularity is near summary
What’s in it for me? Discover how technology will change your life beyond your wildest dreams.
The singularity is near summary – Do you remember the scene in The Matrix, in which Neo has a program uploaded to his brain and, in an instant, he “knows” kung fu? What would life be like if you could upload knowledge just like a basic software program?
As these blinks will show, technology is evolving ever faster; in just a few decades, technological advances will enable us to transcend our biological shackles to overcome aging and disease.
In this new world, uploading a program to your brain will seem quaint. Technology will have become so advanced that it will mark a whole new era: a “singularity” in which computers will be billions of times smarter than all of humanity combined, and biology and technology will be one and the same.
This era isn’t hundreds of years away, either. It’s near.
In this article, you’ll learn
• how DNA will be used to build supercomputers;
• why, in the future, you won’t have to worry about sunburns; and
• how a few years from now, anyone can become a Spock
Evolution is picking up speed. Each development builds and moves faster ahead than the last.
Think about how many major technological changes your grandparents may have witnessed during their lifetimes. Now, think about the changes you’ve seen over just the last 15 years.
Stunning how far technology has advanced in such a short period of time, right?
It’s evident that, as time passes, things are changing more rapidly. History tells us that the rate of change has been growing exponentially.
Roughly 3.8 billion years ago, single-celled life on earth evolved slowly. It took some 2 billion years for multicellular organisms to emerge
Yet gradually, the process of evolution gained momentum. For example, there were only 200 million years between the first mammals and the evolution of Homo sapiens.
If you were to draw a graph showing major evolutionary development on earth, you’d see that evolution does indeed move faster with the passing of time. The same can be said for the rate of technological evolution.
Technological development is also accelerating. Some 50,000 years ago, discoveries such as making fire were few and far between, occurring every 1,000 years or so. Compare this rate with today, where it’s a challenge to list the gadgets and revelations of just last year.
Importantly, the returns of this accelerating process of evolution are also accelerating.
For instance, computer speed in cost per unit doubled every three years between 1910 and 1950, then every two years between 1950 and 1966; today, it’s doubling each year.
This exponential development in technology is known as the “Law of Accelerating Returns.”
We know that the greatest triumphs in each stage of development help to form the next. For example, biological evolution resulted in Homo sapiens; humans then invented technology, and the best technologies are used to develop even better technologies.
It follows then that eventually, supersmart computers will be able to design superior technologies themselves and in doing so, further speed up technological evolution
Computers are making leaps and bounds in speed and processing power. DNA computing is near.
Computers are evolving rapidly, especially as ever-shrinking silicon components improve their performance. But even silicon has its limitations.
Very thin silicon components leak electricity, and densely wired chips overheat, which lowers efficiency. To counter these problems, new technologies are already in the pipeline.
One such invention is nanotube technology, an invention that will significantly speed computer calculations.
Nanotubes are tiny cylinders made out of sheets of carbon atoms. They are excellent candidates as…………….
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