Singularity University CEO believes blockchain is developing rapidly

Rage Review : Singularity University is located in NASA Ames Research Center, a Silicon Valley think tank. It was founded by Google's chief engineer 8 years ago and has extremely high accuracy and authority in technology prediction. Singularity University believes that blockchain is an exponential technology and puts it in the same category as artificial intelligence, network sensors, and robots. Blockchain has changed the form of technological growth, and the timing of its emergence is inevitable. Although Singularity has not officially explored blockchain, it has begun to pay close attention. It can be seen that blockchain technology has become increasingly mature.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Singularity University is located in the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) R&D Park. It was founded by Google's chief engineer 8 years ago. Its current learning courses provide new concepts for technological development.

Singularity University is known as a Silicon Valley think tank and is extremely well-known. It has a famous growth rate tracking technology, and its new technology analysis is highly valued by market observers and companies. The predictions it makes are also extremely accurate, although some of the predictions may seem strange at first glance.

Ray Kurzweil of Google used the method of Singularity University to successfully predict that computers would defeat the world chess champion before 1998, which happened as expected in 1997; real-time translation would appear before 2010, which is exactly what Google and Skype’s translation applications are now.

Singularity University has also adopted technologies that expand the scope of its value and potential impact. It is worth mentioning that Singularity now considers blockchain to be an exponential technology, classifying it with artificial intelligence, network sensors, and robots.

Rob Nail, CEO of Singularity University, said that blockchain is not a bubble and will continue to maintain its current development speed.

Rob Nail

He believes that the basic concept of double-entry bookkeeping, which has been around for more than a thousand years, has evolved into a completely new way of tracking value.

"The reason things grow exponentially is that more and more people are involved in technology development and application, increasing the likelihood of future technological breakthroughs."

To sum up, what he meant was that after analog technology is upgraded to digital technology, it can independently improve its own growth rate.

While the rate of growth in capacity, size, and performance of traditional technologies is referred to as linear growth; new technologies can lead to exponential growth.

Blockchain Technology Application

Nail believes that the reason why blockchain is an exponential technology is that after the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the seventh century, innovation in the accounting field has been limited by the cumbersome procedures of bookkeeping audits.

But blockchain’s distributed ledger technology makes ledger audits and other post-transaction processes redundant.

Nail believes that the explosion of innovation in the blockchain industry has replaced the growth of “hundreds of companies” with the growth of “tens of thousands of applications,” adding “every possible type of transaction” that “we haven’t even thought of yet.”

"It's the technology that drives the exponential growth curve."

Predicting future trends

Currently, the faculty of Singularity University includes Ralph Merkle, the creator of the Merkle Tree algorithm. Vitalk Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, calls this algorithm “the fundamental component that makes blockchain usable.”

One such project is Network Society Research, a non-profit organization founded in 2014 that is dedicated to identifying bottlenecks in the development of exponential technologies and ensuring that the transition to an increasingly decentralized society has positive side effects.

David Orban

David Orban, founder of Network Society Research, said in an interview:

“The mathematical invention of blockchain could have come sooner or later, but the implementation of Bitcoin, Ethereum or other blockchains can only be achieved in a special social context: our generation.”

In February, Blockchain Capital founder Brock Pierce and Electronic Frontier Foundation board member Brad Templeton spoke about exponential finance at Singularity University’s India Summit, but Singularity University has not formally explored blockchain concepts.

Nail concluded:

"We don't have any courses or anything, but there has been discussion about doing something."