TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Singularity University - Season 1.0: An On-the-Scene Report

John Jainschigg | Date: 07-25-09 | Comments

A Smarter Tech Virtual event gives participants an insider view into Singularity University, whose goal is to educate students on "the development of exponentially advancing technologies" and apply these tools to address "humanity�s grand challenges."

On Sunday, July 26, at 4 p.m. PDT/7 p.m. EDT, Smarter Technology Virtual will play host to scholar/entrepreneur David Orban, co-founder of sensor network application firm WideTag. David is lecturing this week at Singularity University, and promises to give us an insider view on that unique program, now in its inaugural semester at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

The brainchild of image and signal processing and electronic-music pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil, commercial spaceflight innovator and X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and several other partners, and funded by grants from Google and other technology companies and institutions, Singularity University is aimed at supplementing conventional graduate training�offering a unique, nine-week interdisciplinary curriculum taught by world-class scholars, technology creators and entrepreneurs.

The Singularity curriculum focuses on rapid change: specifically, phenomena emerging as the pace of change increases asymptotically, fueled by radical growth in processing power, storage, bandwidth, number of users, number of network endpoints, software and systems complexity and interconnectedness, and many other technological, economic and social dynamics, and bootstrapped by breakneck innovation.

The term "singularity" in this coinage appears first to have been used by author Vernor Vinge and refers to a hypothetical future point�analogous to the point of maximum curvature of space/time at the center of a black hole�beyond which prediction about technology and culture becomes impossible. In Vinge's original application of the term, the singularity is the point at which machines become radically more intelligent than humans�achieving this goal themselves by building systematically at exponential rates on small improvements in capability.

Kurzweil himself has spoken more of singularities (plural) resulting from something he calls "The Law of Accelerating Returns," derived from a historical analysis generalizing Moore's Law to technologies beyond silicon. In his view, technology of all kinds and in all eras has persistently demonstrated the tendency to accelerate progress, including the progress of innovation required to envision, and then reach, new goals. The result, he says, is more and more frequent paradigm shifts�think of them as mini-singularities�representing ruptures in humanity's worldview roughly equivalent to the creation of calculus, the industrial revolution or the emergence of the Internet.

Singularity University's goal is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity�s grand challenges." To do this, its first nine-week summer program, modeled on and sharing infrastructure with NASA's long-esteemed International Space University program, will deliver lectures in 10 subject areas, ranging from Future Studies to Networks to Bioinformatics to Nanotech to Space Science.

Beyond Kurzweil himself, who leads the Future Studies program, faculty and guest lecturers have been drawn from the highest ranks of academia, business and finance, and government. Venerable luminaries like Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, and Vinton Cerf, creator of TCP/IP, will share teaching duties with up-and-coming geniuses like Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, and computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, whose Stanford team won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.

Following this initial summer program, Singularity University plans to settle into a year-round cycle that includes 10-day and three-day executive courses as well as full post-grad semesters. For the moment, the organization is maintaining a veil of privacy around the identity of the first class of students, beyond noting that a proportion of them are attending on full or partial scholarship.