What is Technological singularity?

The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two.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 unseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. Vernor Vinge later called this event "the Singularity" as an analogy between the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity and the drastic change in society he argues would occur following an intelligence explosion. In the 1980s, Vinge popularized the Singularity in lectures, essays, and science fiction. More recently, some AI researchers have voiced concern over the potential dangers of Vinge's Singularity.
Others, most prominently Ray Kurzweil, define the Singularity as a period of extremely rapid technological progress. Kurzweil argues such an event is implied by a long-term pattern of accelerating change that generalizes Moore's Law to technologies predating the integrated circuit and which he argues will continue to other technologies not yet invented.
Critics of Kurzweil's interpretation consider it an example of static analysis, citing particular failures of the predictions of Moore's Law. The Singularity also draws criticism from anarcho-primitivism and environmentalism advocates

What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism (sometimes symbolized by >H or H+),a term often used as a synonym for "human enhancement", is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death. Transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Possible dangers, as well as benefits, of powerful new technologies that might radically change the conditions of human life are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.Although the first known use of the term "transhumanism" dates from 1957, the contemporary meaning is a product of the 1980s, when a group of scientists, artists, and futurists based in the United States began to organize what has since grown into the transhumanist movement. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings will eventually be transformed into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman, Transhumanism is therefore sometimes referred to as "posthumanism" or a form of transformational activism influenced by posthumanist ideals..Transhumanist foresight of a profoundly transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives. Transhumanism has been described by one outspoken opponent as the world's most dangerous idea,while a proponent counters that it is the "movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity

Mind uploading

Mind uploading is the transfer of the human mind/consciousness to a more durable material vessel (stereotypically but not necessarily a silicon computer). The concept is based on materialism, the philosophy of mind that argues that the human spirit is entirely composed of a very complex system of physical and chemical interactions. However, it is not understood how consciousness exists, and thus no existing scientific understanding for "reading" the "contents" of a human mind. With computer power increasing exponentially, and technology in the pipeline to keep up the trend, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that computer hardware will be powerful enough to run a functional model of the human mind by the 2020s. Several developing technologies hypothetically allow the complete mapping of human brains on a similar timescale. Uploading the human mind to a computer, if possible, would potentially greatly extend human lifespan due to the ability to construct highly durable computer hardware and the potential to copy or transfer the mind to multiple computers

Suspended animation

Suspended animation is the slowing of life processes by external means without termination. Breathing, heartbeat, and other involuntary functions may still occur, but they can only be detected by artificial means. Extreme cold is used to precipitate the slowing of an individual's functions. Although the technique has not been applied to human, experiments are successful in dogs, pigs and mice. Scientists drain the blood from animals' bodies and put an ice-cold solution into their circulatory systems. After being clinically dead for three hours, their blood is put back into their circulatory systems, and the dogs are revived by delivering an electric shock to their hearts. Scientists also have done similar experiments on pigs and tested 200 times with a 90 percent success rate. There are also experiments reports success towards inducing suspended animation in mice by using chemical method, according to an article published in the scientific journal Science on April 22, 2005

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence)

Cell loss can be repaired (reversed) just by suitable exercise, in the case of muscle. For other tissues, it needs various growth factors to stimulate cell division; in some cases it needs stem cells.
Senescent cells can be removed by activating the immune system against them. Or they can be destroyed by gene therapy to introduce "suicide genes" that only kill senescent cells.
Protein cross-linking can largely be reversed by drugs that break the links. But to break some of the cross-links we may need to develop enzymatic methods.
Extracellular garbage (like amyloid) can be eliminated by vaccination that gets immune cells to "eat" the garbage.
For intracellular junk we need to introduce new enzymes, possibly enzymes from soil bacteria, that can degrade the junk (lipofuscin) that our own natural enzymes cannot degrade.
For mitochondrial mutations the plan is not to repair them but to prevent harm from the mutations by putting suitably modified copies of the mitochondrial genes into the cell nucleus by gene therapy. The mitochondrial DNA experiences a high degree of mutagenic damage because most free radicals are generated in the mitochondria and because the DNA repair mechanisms of mitochondrial DNA are significantly inferior to those of nuclear DNA. A copy of the mitochondrial DNA located in the nucleus will be better protected from free radicals, and there will be better DNA repair when damage occurs. All mitochondrial proteins would then be imported into the mitochondria.
For cancer (the most lethal consequence of mutations) the strategy is to use gene therapy to delete the genes for telomerase and to eliminate telomerase-independent mechanisms of turning normal cells into "immortal" cancer cells. To compensate for the loss of telomerase in stem cells we would introduce new stem cells every decade or so.