The Technological Singularity Goes Mainstream (Again)

The technological singularity goes mainstream again (and again).

The last 12 months or so we have witnessed an unparalleled growth of mainstream coverage of transhumanism, the singularity, artificial intelligence and Ray Kurzweil.

Some of the more notable mentions include: PBS on Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity; the NY Times’ Humans are so Yesterday; Ray Kurzweil on the Daily Show with John Stewart and New Zeland TV features Singularity University. (Yeah, it does seem that Michael Anissimov is right to say that Transhumanism Has Already Won.)

Yesterday, Time Magazine’s cover story was about Ray Kurzweil and Barry Ptolemy‘s long anticipated feature documentary Transcendent Man. It is hard to get any more mainstream than that. I hope that people will go to watch the film en masse, listen to what Ray has to say and start thinking about the vital issues stemming from the exponential growth of technology.

In addition to the article, science comedian Brian Malow made a cool video titled When Robots Attack: Should We Fear the Singularity? where he analyzes our fears of a day when machines are smarter than we are.

So, the singularity is starting to go mainstream indeed. The question is what would be the result?

Are we going to embrace the future and try to direct and shape it?

Or are we going to fear and fight it?

I choose the former. That is why for the last 18 months or more I have been working full time on SingularityWeblog.com and SingularitySymposium.com

What about you?

Related articles

• Kevin Kelly On Singularity 1 on 1: Technology Doesn’t Want A Singularity
• Andrew Hessel on Singularity 1 on 1: Don’t Fear Synthetic Biology

Tagged as: Ray Kurzweil, singularity, Technological Singularity, transcendent man, transhumanism