It’s a hot and sticky summer afternoon in Silicon Valley, and a group of students are chatting over drinks and food, having just completed the final presentations for their course. On the surface, the scenes of jollity and relief are familiar from institutions around the world. Here, though, things are different. These are no ordinary graduates: They are the first class to pass through Singularity University.
The brainchild of futurist Ray Kurzweil and his friend Peter Diamandis, the pioneer of personal space flight and founder of the X Prize Foundation, Singularity University (SU) is meant to be a summer camp for people to learn about emerging technologies from the experts.
Over the summer, 40 students with diverse backgrounds — among them medicine, physics, computing and law — were brought together and given an intensive training course in the most important futuristic ideas. The ultimate objective? As its slogan says: “Preparing humanity for accelerating technological change.”
It is a lofty and ambitious goal. When it was formally announced at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference this year, the idea raised some eyebrows. Kurzweil, after all, has a reputation as something of a maverick — he believes that computers will become independently intelligent in the near future, for example — and some were concerned that the idea of a crash course in the future was a gimmick. However, the project gained a number of backers and more than US$2 million in funding. It was reality.
Housed on Moffett Federal Airfield, a former naval base south of San Francisco that is now used as a research center by NASA, the Singularity program ran in a building that is used regularly by the agency’s International Space University, which provided the model for SU.
Over the past nine weeks, the students have attended classes from more than 100 faculty advisers and speakers, who have given their time for free as part of the experiment. The subjects included biotechnology, space research, artificial intelligence and nanotech; visitors included luminaries such as Vint Cerf and Bob Metcalfe, often called the “fathers of the Internet,” as well as Nobel laureate and physicist George Smoot and 21st-century success stories such as game design legend Will Wright and billionaire investor Peter Thiel.
The students — or their sponsors — have paid US$25,000 each to attend this high-tech summer camp. The cost was not a deterrent, however: staff had to sift through more than 1,200 applications, said Salim Ismail, executive director of the project.
There is a largely balanced gender ratio, an international tendency and the average age is 31. But most difficult, said Ismail, was picking out a broad mix of skills.
“Clearly, if we had 40 nanotechnologists, it wouldn’t be a good mix. So we thought carefully about how many of each discipline we wanted in that founding class, and I think we’ve succeeded: They’re a frightening bunch,” he said.
The real point, he says, is to arm the students with the tools they need to go out and make a difference in the world, using the smartest and fastest-growing technologies to overcome some of the planet’s major problems.
And it’s not only the students who will benefit from the program. Tara Lemmey of Lens Ventures is an investor, entrepreneur and former head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has been running one of the project’s academic tracks. She believes the experience was almost as illuminating for those who taught classes and gave talks as it was for the students.
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