I used ‘The Singularity is Near: when humans transcend biology‘, by Ray Kurzweil to support a Spring 2006 Bioinformatics Journal Club talk about the coming convergence of technologies in Life Sciences research. Specifically semantic web services.

In the book he states that humankind is at the threshold of an epoch and the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially. ‘Singularity’ is described as the point at which a function takes an infinite value. In space-time, this is when matter becomes infinitely dense, as in a black hole and the normal Laws of Physics no-longer apply.

His point is two-fold:

• There are no constraints on human capacity, especially as we begin to build machines that learn from each other.
• This is a good thing.

How does this apply to Bioinformatics?

• Web interfaces, currently human-friendly, will become machine-friendly.
• Data formats and interfaces will begin to standardize.
• Heterogeneous platforms, applications, and systems will begin to interoperate.
• Machines will begin to communicate with each other in profound and powerful ways.

Why you should care.

• Distribution: data will continue to be created and controlled by autonomous groups all over the world.
• Biology is hard and messy: distributed resources and carefully negotiated ontologies will help.
• The key problems are social:
• We must learn to collaborate with service providers.
• By the way, you are a service provider.
• Technology is easy by comparison.

The current state of the art was punctuated with references to the Tower of Babel, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.