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: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.

[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.