Fewer Keggers, More Nanobots At Kurzweil's Singularity University
But it ain't happening fast enough for Ray Kurzweil.
At least that's the sense one gets from the author, inventor, futurist and now chancellor of the new Singularity University in Silicon Valley, reading between the lines of Kurzweil's statement Tuesday outlining the university's raison d'etre:
"We are now in the steep part of the exponential trajectory of information technologies in a broad variety of fields, including health, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. It is only these accelerating technologies that have the scale to address the major challenges of humanity, ranging from energy and the environment to disease and poverty," Kurzweil said.
"With its strong focus on interdisciplinary learning, Singularity University is poised to foster the leaders who will create a uniquely creative and productive future world."
Pretty standard fare until you consider Kurzweil's background as a futurist whose predictions span near-term advances in processing power that have proven mostly accurate to far-reaching guesses at a massively disruptive, exponentially accelerating merger of biological and machine intelligence. The Singularity University is pretty clearly not just meant to be a gathering of smart people hoping to leverage technology for small improvements -- it's an intentional stepping-on-the-gas towards a world where disease, poverty and even death its ownself are eradicated by smart computers, nanobots and the like.
Or at the very least, a world where we finally get those jetpacks we were promised back in the 1950s.
The university borrows its name from Kurzweil's 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near," which predicts a point in the not so far-off future -- 2045 (!) -- when artificial intelligences become smarter than their human creators, beginning a period of extremely rapid, exponentially increasing technological progress as A.I.s are able to generate better, smarter successors faster and faster in "accelerating returns" of self-improvement. By 2099, the earth itself is a giant computer with nothing left to convert to "computational substrate" and A.I./human hybrids have begun the project of turning the entire universe into a supercomputer, which they accomplish by 2199 if they can figure a way around the travel constraints imposed by the speed of light, or somewhat longer if they can't.
So that's the background behind Singularity University, funded by Google and NASA, and kicking off three-day, 10-day and nine-week courses this summer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.
But if Kurzweil's own predictions are nightmarishly exhilarating, the academic track at his university is, alas, much more mundane, at least as advertised. Sadly, there's no "Robot Overlord Wrath Avoidance 101" to be found on the course list. Classes in future studies, nanotechnology and human enhancement are all offered, true, but so are academic tracks focusing on more familiar subjects like finance, law and the physical sciences.
That might be due to the influence of co-founder and Singularity University vice-chancellor Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation. Whereas Kurzweil's greatness lies in his unrelenting focus on the future (which is not to understate his remarkable string of here-and-now accomplishments in business and technology), Diamandis -- who originated the idea for the university -- seems more interested in solving the problems of today than predicting the ones on the horizon.
And yes, making such a simplistic distinction between the two men does disservice to them both. Nevertheless, it's relevant that it is Diamandis who is the more vocal about "arming" people with the tools they need "to wrestle with the grand challenges of our day," namely hunger, poverty, climate change and energy. Whereas those things seem to naturally disappear in Kurzweil's futurescape, if helped along, perhaps, by a nudge in the form of Singularity University, Diamandis put a lot of money on the line to find fixes right now with his X Prizes.
As admired as Kurzweil and Diamandis are, it's no surprise that the faculty they've lined up for SU's first go at things is impressive. From Vint Cerf to Will Wright to Aubrey de Grey, the lineup is a who's who of thought leaders in medicine, technology and business, not to mention a couple of Nobel Prize winners to boot.
What's missing from the faculty list, by our lights anyway, is a skeptical voice to pick nits with this whole singularity hullabaloo. It'd be nice to see a future SU faculty lineup with at least a glimpse of a Menckenesque sneer, or perhaps a conservative William F. Buckley-type standing athwart the singularity, yelling "Stop!"
Or maybe we're just jealous, seeing as how there's no way we can afford the as-yet-unspecified big bucks it's going to cost to attend SU.