Human Animals;

Naturally,those of us who inhabit the planet today like to imagine that we must be something special,what with our large and intricate brains,our flat screen televisions and laser surgeries,our capacities for abstract art and space travel and self-awareness and so forth.We like to believe that were are here and shall remain as the last king  of the planet ,to be assured that we are the victorious culmination of evolution or the perfect triumph of a divine plan.To imagine that we are the best and final model of life on earth.In February,a group of  future-seekers came together in Birmingham, Alabama, to debate a curious idea: that perhaps we are not the final model.They gathered,more specifically,for the fourth annual Singularity Summit,a two-day conference about a concept that has been gathering momentum for the past few decades.The Singularity,in its simplest terms,is the moment when we  make a machine{or become a machine}that is smarter than we are.But it's  also everything that follows that moment :a chain of creation as that smart machine itself begins innovating,designing its own children,its own 2.0's and 3.0's and 4.0's,faster and faster ,imagining new versions of themselves  far batter than we ever could ,creating machines of a fantastic superintelligence,leading to an explosion of discovery and advancement unlike anything human history has ever seen. A kind of progress that will come so fast,and change the world dramatically,that we can't even begin to imagine it.