Did you grow up on Twilight Zone, the Jetsons, and Star Trek? Then you were fed a daily dose of either machines that were slaves to humans needs, or monsters that enslaved us like perhaps in The Mztrix.

Well these possibilities are being applauded or feared by many in the science community. Because it turns out that a new University has popped up right down the street from the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. The school called Singularity University will offer courses on biotechnology, nano-technology and artificial intelligence.

This is a joint collaberation between NASA (yah the Space agency) and Google.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorized period of rapid technological progress in the near future. Mr Kurzweil, an American inventor, popularized the term in his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

From Wikipedia:
The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.[1]

Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an “intelligence explosion”, suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.