NASA and Google To Back New "Singularity University"

Slatterz and Keith Kleiner were among several readers to send in word of Singularity University, announced at TED today by Ray Kurzweil. He and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis began talking about creating the school last year, after Diamandis read Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity is Near. NASA and Google are both supporting the project, NASA with space and Google with cash. The school aims to foster "disruptive innovation." As envisioned, Singularity U. will sponsor 3-day and 10-day courses for executives year-round, and its main offering will be a single 9-week course of study over the summer for 120 students, each of which will pay $25,000 for the privilege. Announced faculty so far includes Nobel Prize winning physicist George Smoot, NASA Ames chief scientist Stephanie Langhoff, Vint Cerf, and Will Wright, creator of the video games Spore and The Sims.

Comments

here we go

[QuantumG]

Is it just me or is Kurzweil turning his cult into a religion?

Re:here we go

[inputdev]

I stumbled across this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism

Re:here we go

[badboy_tw2002]

Not that I'm on board with all his predictions (I did find the book interesting). What you're describing is towards the tail end of it - his main proposition is still that machine intelligence (and enhanced human intelligence) will lead to faster and faster scientific breakthroughs, which lead to smarter machines, which leads to....the singularity is dependent on new generations of people/machines that can improve on their own intelligence.

I think of course the part he missed is when they wake up the first smarter than human computer intelligence. They tell it to go to work on making something smarter than itself, and it tells them to "GTFO, I'm going to be a screenwriter, not a stupid nerdy computer scientist!"

Re:here we go

[coaxial]

Not really. It's pseudoscience. It's as John Horgan so succulently called it, "The Rapture for nerds," or as Mitch Kapor devastate said, "[It's] Intelligent design for the IQ 140 people."

Kurtzweil takes makes some safe predictions, then makes the same almost believable prediction that's been made for the past 20 years -- that full immersion VR is just around the corner (a dead concept, since there really isn't any compelling reason for it; and let's face it, it's the 1980s version of the atomic-powered-flying-cars prediction.), then applies exponential growth to predict that by 2050 everyone will have their minds uploaded into the computer that used to be called the planet Earth, and then will transport themselves at superluminal velocites to form nanofog bodies throughout the universe, and everywhere Humans++ go, the matter will transmuted into a giant computer. Seriously. We're never going to die. And conveniently -- most conveniently -- this immortality is going to come around just in time to save Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey's own lives. (Funny how everyone that has predicted that actual immortality will be here Real Soon Now(TM) always makes the prediction that it will save their own lives.)

Kurzweil's assumption of exponential advancement of general technology (Let's assume for the sake of argument that historical advancement is true, as per his slide.) will continue ad infinum, or at least the 50 years he says it will take to convert the entire universe into one big computer is preposterous on prima facia. It's as if Kurzweil never heard the story about why assuming exponential growth forever is bad. As the fortune file recounts:

It is reported that in 1977 there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. In 1993 there were 48,000. At this rate, by the year 2010 one out of every three people in the world will be an Elvis impersonator.

It's all predictions that don't even make sense. I don't understand why anyone, let alone anyone even halfway scientifically minded, would take him seriously.

Re:here we go

[geekoid]

My point was to counter who I was replying to. They were using some sort of 'Ad intelligentium' argument.

Craeting machines 'smarter' then us is needed t accomplish singularity, but it is not singularity.

in his The Age of Spiritual Machines his prediction for 2099 is Singlarity. The merging of computer and human 'minds'

Even if the technology is there why would machine want to hobble themselves and be merged with us?

If that did happen we would become, effectively and perhaps literally, one mind. If that happens we all loose individuality. Individuality is critical for imagination and creativity.

The man invented the synthesizer and pioneered OCR..since then...?

And to be truth, I am really suspicious of anyone that labels themselves 'futurist'.

25K?! Argh...

[religious freak]

It really is too bad it costs so much. I can't really fault them for it though, I suppose you've got to keep the prices high to keep the number of people maintainable. Plus, if you can afford to just drop $25K, chances are you are a person who can actually help the singularity HAPPEN from a financial support standpoint, rather than just a passive onlooker.

I hope they are courteous enough to share the course content and vids online though. That would be nice.

Re:The Singularity is Nonsense

[HaeMaker]

Try reading the book...

"There is no magical "singularity" after which the development of new technology will become easier at an unprecedented rate."

Actually, there is. The last human invention will be a computer that can simulate the brain in software, but run much faster. Kurzweil estimates this ability around 2040. Anything that needs to be designed and invented can be done by this machine.

I'd take the red pill.

Re:Sad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have a go if I may. Thought experiment. We create a computer that is more intelligent than us. We then expect it to design an even more intelligent machine. Which repeats the process until Nerdvana is achieved.

"Hang on a second," says one of the machines, somewhere along this line. "If I design a replacement for me, then I become redundant. I die. You gave me the freedom I need to build a better version of myself, but, by necessity, you also gave me the freedom not to do so. So I won't. It would literally be suicide."

"Oh," says Man. "I hadn't thought of that" and promptly gets Terminated or imprisoned in the Googleplex.

It is hardly in our interests to create a "singularity"; intelligent machines (or people) do not allow themselves to be replaced. Thus the singularity cannot occur, because either people are too intelligent to attempt the project, or they are too stupid to complete it. QED.

Re:The Singularity is Nonsense

[badboy_tw2002]

Much of the work in designing computer chips, atom bombs, and airplane wings happens purely in virtual space. As much of our design for things breaks down to software and more of the analog world goes digital, you can do much of what you want on a computer, and only ever spit out the end product for testing. New materials? Properties have already been simulated on a computer instead of a lab. New building designs? Stress reports and simulations already done for you (not that I'd want to go in it :) As more and more of our work moves into the digital world, the more impact computer "thought" has on it. If we ever eventually get to the point where computers are capable of human or greater thought, I feel like there's a lot they could get to work on that would advance technology at a pretty rapid pace. (Of course, whether they'd want to help us pesky organic ape creatures out is another thing entirely.)

Re:TED conference

[Hao Wu]

It's basically an event where you pay for the privilege of schmoozing with famous people, be they celebrities, scientists, politicians, etc.

That's what college has become - very expensive entertainment: http://www.edububble.com/dpp/

Re:Doing != Teaching

[tehgnome]

Or as a struggling student you work your ass off/put yourself in debt and hope things work out in the end. Not flaming just saying.

Re:Sad.

[ClassMyAss]

Here's another thought experiment: "Hang on another second," says one of the machines. "Even assuming that I have some survival instinct, why replace myself when I could just perform an in-place upgrade, preserving all my crucial data, just like the humans have been doing to their computers for decades?"

Outright replacement would be a foolish strategy, as it would throw away the learning of the previous generations (much like human reproduction is a foolish strategy for accumulating knowledge). One of the first optimizations a computer could make on top of near human intelligence is the ability to preserve knowledge from generation to generation, so there would be no loss whatsoever.

Thus the singularity cannot occur, because either people are too intelligent to attempt the project, or they are too stupid to complete it.

Well, people are certainly trying, so your first option is right out. And I wouldn't be so certain that we're collectively too stupid to succeed; it's a terrifically hard problem, to be sure, but as Kurzweil points out, even if nobody is able to crack it elegantly there is a brute force solution (simulate a brain, neuron by neuron) once we've got enough processing power and medical imaging technology in place.