Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. In the summer of 1984, when I was at my last year of

graduate school at Princeton, I had something very exciting happen. I got my first personal desktop

computer. It was the first one to come out and I was very excited. And at that time, the only thing you could really do was write papers with these personal computers.

But outside of writing papers, there wasn't much you could do with these personal computers.

Times have changed.

Really change.

Over the years, Hollywood has taken some pretty good cracks at

what's going to happen in the future with computers.

The two biggest ones are the Matrix and Terminator.

Well, Hollywood's done it again, and they've come out with the movie Transcendants.

In this new Hollywood futuristic movie, the story is about a scientist, played by Johnny

Depth, who gets downloaded into a computer, and he ends up trying to take

over the world.

Now, this is a movie.

Of course, but it's based upon a whole field of study that explores what's going to happen in the future,

and this field of study is called singularity. That's Singularity.

Though the concept goes back to over a hundred years,

the mathematician John von Neumann

was really the first person in 1958 to really develop the concept of a

singularity. And I want to read the definition from Wikipedia of what a singularity is,

because I think it's a good definition.

The singularity is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence

...