What's the Singularity, and why am I watching for it? Long story short: the Singularity will occur when some area of technology sufficiently changes humanity so as to make them a new species, or in the case of AI, changes FROM humanity.
This will be the first in a series of posts where I update you on all the badass advancements people around the world are making in the fields of Nano, Bio, and I/O. These are general categories I lump together mostly because, well, they rhyme. Each attempts to bridge the human with the artificial to some degree.
Nano includes everything from medical, industrial, and military nanotechnology. As our tech gets smaller and smaller, it opens up untold applications to alter our environment, many in ways we don't understand.
Biotechnology promises to drastically change life as a whole, and so dovetails quite a bit with the nanotech revolution. As machines get small enough to enter the human body and perform tasks, our physical and mental limits will be stretched exponentially.
The last of the three, I/O, is the most unpredictable of all. Artificial intelligence is poised to achieve greater levels of consciousness over the next decade, perhaps enough to reach human level. What comes next is anyone's guess. Citizen robots? AI revolution? Cyborg movement?
Who knows?! I sure don't, but I'll keep doing my best to share what I learn with you fellow ecopunks.