Singularitarians want to take human civilization to the next step, by creating a superintelligence - an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. Such an event has been called a "Singularity" by futurists and technologists who work in related areas.

The human brain is a piece of hardware that runs software to interpret, predict, and manipulate its environment. Like all forms of software and hardware, the human brain has inherent flaws and limitations that prevent us from reaching our full potential. We were crafted by an imperfect process, biological evolution, that had no idea what it was doing.

To circumvent these limitations, Singularitarians propose the creation of a benevolent superintelligence - a mind both kinder and smarter than humans. Once superintelligence is created, it could apply itself to solving humanitarian problems, like cancer, aging, poverty, war, and the improvement of its own design.

Because the path involving the direct enhancement of human brains is too expensive and risky, Singularitarians plan to build a mind from scratch. We will study the phenomenon of intelligence from the viewpoints of information theory, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, learning, memory, and many other areas of cognitive science - until we have the knowledge to build a mind that works. It will be a long and hard road, but worth it.

Eventually the mind we create mind will become smart enough to improve upon its own design, rather than depending on humans to do it. That's where the real power of superintelligence will come from - a mind engaging in recursive self-improvement. Since a superintelligence would gain the ability to improve the performance of the hardware it runs on, it could become vastly smarter and more capable on shorter timescales than many of us would expect.

Not all Singularitarians are computer programmers or scientists. As long as you have a mind with ideas and a voice to commmunicate them, you too can participate meaningfully in the creation of superintelligence. Consider joining us in our quest to build a smarter-, kinder-than-human mind - a uniquely important pursuit in the world today.

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