This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
It's not an accredited university, and it doesn't actually teach the singuarity, the supposed superintelligence that will result when man merges with machine, due (according to prolific inventor and author Ray Kurzweil) sometime around 2045. Still, the official welcome at Singularity University's (SU) opening executive-programme class this fresh December afternoon in Nasa's Ames research campus, at Moffett Federal Airfield, California, is delivered -- appropriately -- by a 60cm-tall NAO humanoid robot. "I am so excited to see you all here," the robot beams to about 80 investors, inventors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and otherwise future-curious students who have committed up to $12,000 (£7,650) each to spend seven days here exploring advances in biotech, nanotech, AI, robotics, neuroscience, energy systems and other accelerating technologies.
The week's takeaways, declares SU's CEO Rob Nail, will be the opportunities offered by abundance, disruptive convergence, "10<sup>9</sup> thinking", problem-solving and "exponential technological challenges". "It gets really interesting," Nail says, "at the borders of, say, robotics and medicine, or nanotech and neuroscience." Even the course Wi-Fi password is "12481632" -- chosen because "it's exponential".
Nasa astronaut Yvonne Cagle talks about the classroom's nearby attractions (Nasa's hyperwall-2 visualisation system; its wind tunnels and space-biology lab; the world's third-largest supercomputer), and then SU's director of research, Kathryn Myronuk, sets out a few data points to prime the delegates. "Each of your smartphones is more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in the world of 20 years ago," she explains. "The cost of getting the genome sequenced used to be the equivalent of buying a football team, but now it's a good seat at the World Cup. The Square Kilometre Array being built will measure one exabyte of data a day..." It's only when Salim Ismail, SU's "global ambassador" and the week's moderator, fails to project his slides that we are reminded that the technological singularity may not be quite as near as predicted. "AI is really easy," Ismail sighs as he fiddles with the projector connection. "AV is really hard."
His key slide, when it does work, explains that whereas 30 linear steps would take you from one to two to three and finally to 30, in 30 exponential steps the repeated doubling would get you from one to 1,073,741,824 (i.e. 2 to the power of 30). And that same growth curve has moved from the Moore's-law impact on computer processing to gene-sequencing capability, solar-panel costs, even UAV performance. "It's the law of accelerating returns," explains Ray Kurzweil, with Peter Diamandis the cofounder of Singularity University, in a conversation a week after the course. "The measures of information technology -- price performance, bandwidth capacity -- are growing exponentially. Yet hardwired in our neocortex is this linear expectation. My critics will look at the current situation, and say, 'Well, I don't see the harbingers of what Mr Kurzweil is talking about.' "I predicted the divergence of the internet in the early 80s, as I saw the Arpanet doubling every year," Kurzweil continues. "People declared the Human Genome Project a failure halfway through, when one percent had been decoded -- they said it'd take 700 years. My reaction was, no, we're almost done. It was finished seven years later."
[Quote##"The longevity revolution changes everything. Two-thirds of all people who have ever lived past 65 are alive today. There is no trend more predictable today than the rise in older people.
Think of the new economic opportunities -- self-driving cars, smart windscreens, robots, health, vision, travel and leisure, education..." ##Ken Dychtwald##FullWidth##Company¬President, Age Wave]
Through booms and recessions, wars and peace, from Morse code to 4G, the trend curve, Kurzweil says, has continued uninterrupted. "If you understand the potential of these exponential technologies to transform everything from energy to education, you have a different perspective on how we can solve the grand challenges of humanity."
At 2pm the next afternoon -- a study day that begins with a 7.15am physical training session and ends at 10pm with a team competition to build the tallest dry-spaghetti structure to support a marshmallow -- Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, cofounder of asteroid-mining company Planetary Resources, and the founding spirit behind SU, gives a presentation titled "Goodbye linear thinking, hello abundance". "We're living in a world where a couple of guys or gals in a garage can touch a billion people -- and it's never been like that before," he says. His audience sits in personal Steelcase workstation pods while typing on iPad Minis or writing in longhand (longhand!) in Moleskines.
One introduced himself the previous evening as just having spent six months meditating on a mountain. Another explained he was a genomics entrepreneur who now owns a rock-climbing gym. Others still were mutual-fund managers; a property developer; a lucid dreamer; members of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's family; and an inventor of Intel's Pentium chip. "Human development over 150,000 years has been local and linear," Diamandis continues. "Your brain is programmed to be linear. But in these next few decades the rate of change is growing so fast that almost everything we can conceive can happen. Every industry is potentially disruptible in the near future. And if you're not excited or scared, you're asleep at the wheel."
Three billion new people will be plugged in to the global economy by 2020, he explains. Linear 20th-century corporations will be supplanted by small, nimble teams that can impact a billion people in a dematerialised, demonetised, information-driven world. "Bigger is no longer better," he says, blaming Kodak's bankruptcy on its "failure to understand exponential growth". "In 1996, Kodak had a $28 billion (£17.8 billion) market cap, $16 billion (£10.3 billion) in revenue, and 140,000 employees. It invented the digital camera.
Yet in 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram, an exponential company, for $1 billion (£640 million). And it had 13 employees." In an abundant world where the very idea of "work" may become optional, in which technology can meet our basic needs and robots can care for us, SU's role, Diamandis says, is to be "a front end" to all such emerging innovations.
After his lecture -- one of around 40 over the week --
Diamandis, 51, tells Wired that his ultimate goal for SU is the same as that of his X Prize Foundation: "To empower people who are thinking in a bold fashion to solve the world's grand challenges. I want to build a mindset, a community, where problems are just opportunities. I'm revitalised every time I come back."
Diamandis's passion to open up space exploration had led him to launch the International Space University (ISU) while a graduate student at MIT in 1987. So when he went trekking in Chile six years ago, with Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near in his backpack, it was no great leap to begin imagining a university as the natural outgrowth of Kurzweil's radical ideas. "I was making notes in the margins, and realised there was no place I could go and learn this stuff without getting a PhD in multiple fields. I said to myself, I bet there's a great market for an international interdisciplinary university teaching all the exponential technologies. I wrote in the margins,
'ISU 2'." He invited Kurzweil, who had recently joined the X Prize board, to dinner. Barry Ptolemy, who was trailing Kurzweil for his documentary Transcendent Man, happened to be filming the dinner when the university was born. "I said, 'Yeah, sounds like a great idea,'" Kurzweil recalls. "I might struggle with what I'm going to order for dinner, but I may then very casually make a decision that becomes a ten-, 20-, 50-year commitment." He was, after all, on a mission to popularise the bold ideas in <em style="font-size: 10px;">The Singularity is Near[/i] -- as well as to disarm his intellectual and scientific critics. "It's important to communicate these ideas to the world. Books and lectures are two methods I've used; I've also done it in movies. I was the subject of Transcendent Man, which has been seen by five million people; I've made a documentary based on The Singularity is Near; and I'm working with Roland Emmerich on a $200m (£129m) movie on the singularity. But SU represents a whole other approach to communicating and developing these ideas, and building a worldwide community who can help to disseminate them."
Kurzweil sees SU as a means of building "an in-depth, thoughtful community of people united only in their appreciation of the exponential growth of information technology" -- not just to solve age-old problems such as hunger and poverty, but to confront progress's downside too. "The same technology that will enable us to reprogram biology away from disease -- biotechnology -- could also be used by a bioterrorist to create a superweapon. I've actually worked on that problem extensively with the US Army. I advised them on putting together a rapid-response system for that problem. There is actually a rapid-response system in place now."
Diamandis knew Pete Worden, the base commander at Nasa Ames, and said he wanted to base SU at Moffett Field. Worden said yes. An initial brainstorming conference was arranged for September 20, 2008 to explore what such a university might do, to which around 100 Silicon Valley influencers were invited. "I'd never heard of Ray, Peter or the singularity, and walked in totally blind," recalls Salim Ismail, then running Yahoo!'s incubator. "But the top of my head lifted off during the presentations.
[Google cofounder] Larry Page got up and said, 'If you're bringing leading thinkers from across all these technologies, then focus on the biggest problems. We don't have smart, thoughtful people addressing the biggest problems.' A couple of years later when Page came to speak, he took me aside and said, 'I have to say, I didn't think it would work.' Ha! The power of an idea." Ismail came on board as founding CEO; Diamandis announced SU at TED in February 2009 and the first programme launched four months later, with Google, Nasa, Cisco and Autodesk among its backers.
The four- and seven-day executive programmes -- six this year -- help to fund the ten-week graduate-studies programme, in which 80 carefully chosen international students split their time between lessons and "creating projects that will impact humanity". After about 160 lectures and several days of intensive workshops, they work on business ideas that could potentially affect a billion people. Last year there were 4,000 applicants from 120 countries for the 80 slots; Diamandis created a mini-X Prize with Brazilian universities to offer a place to someone who can "come up with an idea to impact a million people in São Paolo". In two months, this global-impact competition generated 230 projects; the winner, Fabio Teixeira, set out to solve traffic problems in real time. This year there will be 15 such global-impact competitions, including in Indonesia and India.
The project is also scaling up. The university recently acquired the Singularity Summit conferences and the Singularity Hub web portal; and it will launch two-day Singularity Summits in various cities. Online education will be "a huge initiative for 2013", according to Gabriel Baldinucci, in charge of development and strategy. "It will be a paid course. We see ourselves as very complementary to graduate schools." Kurzweil is ambitious about online education. "I see a major revolution coming," he says. "Online education is where we were in ebooks four years ago -- people saying they still want printed books, that the ebook reading experience isn't very good... Well, today most books are ebooks. You see the same complaints about online education.
Well, just wait. Four years from now, you'll have everything online."
The university has moved from non-profit to a for-profit benefit corporation, and intends to create business incubators in which it takes stakes in spun-out companies. "For me, the incubators are the most fun," Diamandis says. "We have a synthetic bio lab, we're excited about creating a robotics lab, and an AI lab, where the best grad students and the best executives can come and incubate a company. We can build an economic engine where the faculty have ownership in helping the best ideas move forward." Early success stories, he says, include peer-to-peer car-sharing platform Getaround ("They've had a valuation near $50 million (£32 million)").
Kurzweil, 65, meanwhile has a new day job: last December, Larry Page appointed him Google's chief engineer, based in Mountain View. "I met Larry a few months ago to talk about my new book, How to Create a Mind," Kurzweil says. "He was very excited about that. We talked about artificial intelligence, and reached agreement that he would provide all the resources I could ever want." He'll be leading a team seeking to use AI to understand natural language. "At the moment, software treats web pages as bags of words. They're not able to really understand the meaning of the language. When you create any natural-language document, you're creating meaning. Natural-language understanding is feasible. I have many ideas about that. The future of search engines and a system like Google Now will really understand human language, will be able to read the whole web, every book, for meaning. And also get to know you, by paying attention to you -- so it could pop up and say, 'I noticed that two weeks ago you expressed concern about vitamin B12 getting into [your] cells. There's research that came out 13 seconds ago that has a whole new approach to that, here it is... That's where we're headed."
Diamandis, too, is stretched, splitting his time between SU, the X Prize and Planetary Resources. "I work a 100-hour week. I'll put in my 40 or 50 hours at the X Prize, but they're all one and the same. When I'm talking to philanthropists or corporations, I'm out promoting this universe of abundance, of how do you get there. Is it an X Prize, or an SU project? I'm an action junkie. I love making stuff happen." When pressed, he explains why he suspects he is so driven. "I had experiences that shaped me," he says. "I discovered these in a course called Landmark Education. When I was a child, my mum was a troop leader of a Cub Scout programme. She put on a play, and to be politically correct she assigned the lead part to someone else, not me. I made that mean that my mum didn't love me. So when it came down to picking my part, I demanded that I have three parts. Not one. So I made doing more mean that was better. "You want the source code to my brain? It's over there." He points to a poster listing "Peter's Laws", "the creed of the persistent and passionate mind" in 28 rules (no 2: "When given a choice -- take both!!"). "I have a memory of when the first X Prize was won," he says. "I imagined I had just climbed a mountain, and I looked around, and all I saw were more mountain peaks. I hope I will never rest."
It's Wednesday afternoon, and in the lunch break Dan Barry, a three-times Space Shuttle astronaut and SU's head of faculty, leads a walk across from the classroom towards a decommissioned cruise missile and Moffett Field's iconic Hangar One. "We should go to Mars, so that we can be a species with an indefinite lifespan," he says as he walks. "Once we have an independent colony on Mars, no single event can kill everybody in the species, which means we're immortal." He grins. "And Star Trek can happen." He points to a parked supersonic trainer jet. "I used to fly here in those T38s," he says. "You could see this hangar from 50 miles away."
Back in the classroom, Barry shows a video he took during one of his Space Shuttle launches. "That's the view out of my window. It takes eight minutes to get to orbit -- New York to LA in ten minutes. It's parallel parking at 7.5km a second. The ride up is called shake-n-bake." He shows a slide from one of his space walks. "They normally take six hours. That one went on for eight hours, as a bolt wouldn't come up. I saw the power light blinking zero. Which raises your attention."
This is not your typical university. An "innovation lab" adjoining the classroom is packed with 3D printers, LEGO Mindstorms kits, UAVs, Leonar3Do user interfaces, digital medical devices and Arduino kits. Course delegates are 3D-printing individual buildings that they have designed to create "Singularity Village". Friends of SU who drop by include Jack Andraka, who at 15 developed a test for pancreatic cancer, and Bob Richard, whose company Moon Express intends to be "a FedEx to the Moon". On the Sunday evening, a Google self-driving car arrives outside the classroom (accompanied by a human); on Wednesday afternoon, delegates learn how to extract their DNA and turn it into jewellery. Non-core lectures include a demonstration by Robert Strong, a magician who declares himself a "mind reader", and a meditation class by Mandar Apte. Brad Templeton, networks and computing faculty chair, declares one afternoon in passing: "I'm trying to make a projector that can go into a contact lens." Daniel Kraft, who runs the medical strand, explains that his startup intends to 3D-print personalised medicines for patients in their homes.
It is an intense, stimulating, eclectic experience that bridges the purely theoretical and the real-world business opportunity.
SU's pull allows it to attract world-class lecturers and authorities in their field, as well as practitioners from innovative businesses such as Ekso Bionics and TechShop. And the Nasa location adds a usefully future-facing context. For most delegates (predominantly male: Wired counted eight women and 46 men at an ethics discussion), there were clear business reasons to be in the classroom -- but there was also a widespread curiosity about technology's impact and related ethical issues. Among the questions asked by delegates on the second day: what are the security risks when we have IT everywhere in our bodies? Where does education go in ten years' time? Where are the financial opportunities? How will technology enhance the capabilities of the human body? How do you launch a disruptive startup? How can you nurture breakthrough thinking?
What of SU's own future? It certainly does not plan to become an accredited university. "You need to fix your curriculum for that," says Salim Ismail. "We change ours five times a year! One of the deans at Stanford proudly told me they update theirs every six years. But if you're doing a master's degree today in neuroscience or advanced robotics or biotech, by the time you finish you're out of date. And we've never seen that before in the history of the world."
Its teachings are unusually cross-disciplinary. "This is the only place in Silicon Valley where we talk about the future, the grand challenges," says Vivek Wadhwa, vice president of innovation and research. "We're thinking forward. Cross the street and the debate is all about social media or big data. Here, computing is a small part of our curriculum. The next decade will be the most innovative decade in human history: technologies are advancing so rapidly, entire industries will be wiped out and new ones created out of nowhere. So there has to be a think tank. That's what SU is.
It's not a university. We don't even teach the singularity, other than when Ray talks about it. We don't think about man-machine convergence or all this sci-fi stuff. We talk about practical implementation of today's technologies -- harnessing advancing technologies to do good for mankind."
The project is also commercialising fast, to protect its financial future -- with plans for new income-generating streams such as a speaker bureau and sponsor-driven events as well as its equity investments in spin-out companies. Some alumni, however, have expressed concerns that this approach may conflict with SU's educational remit.
How, then, will Kurzweil know when he has succeeded? "It's a good question," he says. "We've talked about how we measure success. If one of the companies that we spawn becomes the next Google, it would be hard to argue with that; or if one of these projects becomes a new approach to clean water or food production.
I'm an inventor. What excites me are real solutions that people get benefit from."
Diamandis gestures around him. "We're building a university here, a community, a family of people who are thinking about the future. And we're iterating. This is just the beginning. In a world where the biggest problems on the planet are the biggest market opportunities, why wouldn't you be focusing on them?"
David Rowan is the editor of Wired. He wrote about Joi Ito and the MIT Media Lab in 11.12
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
