TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Singularity: Coming to New York to Blow Your Mind

This year's Singularity Summit, whose vision is to accelerate the future, will be worth the visit.

Having closed out the inaugural semester of Singularity University at NASA Ames Research Facility in Silicon Valley, Ray Kurzweil and partner Peter Thiel are taking their radical vision of the accelerating future on the road to New York City in early fall for a two-day Singularity Summit at the 92nd Street YMCA Oct. 3-4. (See www.singularitysummit.com for information.)

The focus of this year's summit is on artificial general intelligence, with deep dives into quantum computing, economics, bioinformatics and genomics, language, and other topics germane to charting society's course through the very brief period before we either invent a usable star-drive and leave the planet forever or ascend bodiless into our machines and become as to man as man is to the amoeba. Or both, I guess.

Seriously�the whole dialogue around Singularity studies has become a little cloudy and woo-woo of late�but according to our friend David Orban of WideTag, who taught at this summer's Singularity U., the emphasis of Kurzweil's curriculum has become very concrete: involving a lot more coding than hand waving, and a useful focus on interdisciplinary teaming. The people speaking at the summit are scary-smart, including Gary Drescher (huge AI-applications guy and author), author/physicist Greg Benford and EFF chair Brad Templeton (among many others), so it's unlikely the program will focus on body modification art to the exclusion of hard science. I'm going, for sure.