David Gelles recently wrote up an article on Singularity University. Let’s skip to the good parts.

Rather, a new, pseudo-academic institution called Singularity ­University is going to solve our grand challenges: poverty, hunger, energy scarcity and climate change. Among others. Through a combination of techno-optimism, wide-eyed idealism and belief in the perfectibility of human beings, these well-connected geeks are creating an institution meant to legitimise their most extreme thinking.

Then, we see an out-of-focus image with Bruce and Susan to the right.

Then, Gelles talks to Diamandis, who dishes out some superlativity:

A few days before visiting Ames, I caught up with Diamandis at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. Diamandis was attending the Cleantech Forum, a gathering of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hoping to cash in on green technology. Diamandis also sees a market here – who doesn’t? – and hopes SU can contribute. Yet he may be a bit more extreme than his fellow forum-goers: technology won’t just solve our energy needs, Diamandis argues, but all the world’s problems. “People think there is always going to be hunger,” he said. “Well, no. That’s not true. There doesn’t always have to be hunger.” Rather, in the near future, nanobots – minuscule robots capable of performing exceptionally complex tasks – will be able quickly and cheaply to produce food from raw materials, say algae or dirt.

There might eventually not be hunger, but we’ll still have some problems. I’ll bet that’s what he meant to say. Maybe.

And not dirt, necessarily. Probably carbon dioxide. The atmospheric kind. We’re probably going to suffer from such a deficit of CO2 that the Sierra Club will start digging up coal and burning it in open fields to replenish it. (Yes, that’s Toth Tihamer-Fejel‘s line.)

Quick summary of the fun stuff we’re into:

Every year, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit organisation, hosts a summit focused on the future. Mainstream academics, professionals, entrepreneurs and pundits attend. More mainstream yet, The Singularity is Near is now being made into a film (directed by Kurzweil – who also stars in it). But many people who preach the Singularity are involved with more controversial movements. Transhumanism, which aims to “extend human capabilities”, takes the Singularity as one of its intellectual pillars. Many “Singularitarians” are also advocates of cryonics, the process of freezing a recently deceased body in the hope that future medical technologies will be able to revive it. Kurzweil is signed up to be frozen at his death.

Remember, everyone, in transhumanist lingo, “death” in that sentence should be replaced with “denimation”. It’s like temporary death, really. Temporary death to be followed by technological revival. As long as all those microfractures can be stitched up, and we don’t blow ourselves up so that there’s no one to put liquid nitrogen in your dewar.

It’s interesting that the Singularity would be considered less controversial than transhumanism, rather than more. Has Kurzweil turned the word “Singularity” into something even less objectionable than “transhumanism”?

An interesting, characteristically sober and not-too-overexcited “rebuttal/questioning” of SU is then brought forth by Bill McKibben, the apparent go-to man for criticism of the “Singularity” (Kurzweil’s generalized transhumanist vision which doesn’t actually have much to do with smarter-than-human intelligence at all). He seems to be half-hearted at the effort… perhaps he should be replaced with someone more bombastic, such as Jaron Lanier, Dale Carrico, or Wesley J. Smith.

Witness the awkwardness and discomfort as David, the harmless journalist, seeks an audience with Google or NASA on the story:

Google, meanwhile, denied repeated requests for an on-the-record interview with a spokesperson. Finally, after encouragement from the SU team, the company offered up Chris DiBona, a specialist in open-source computing and Google’s point person for dealings with the school. DiBona seemed excited about the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary group. He felt like his speciality, network computing, really could help deliver telemedicine in remote parts of the world. But even DiBona was mindful of the university’s strange pedigree. “Some of the stuff feels very science fiction to me,” he said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s an idealism that speaks well of the university. When you try to work on the future, you’re going to be wrong sometimes. A little zaniness goes a long way.”

Instead of “University”, I’d call it, “a place where certain smart people get together to instruct and discuss technology with other smart people who pay $25K for the privilege”. Of course, that’s what I’d prefer to call any university.

Now for the interesting part:

For all the sci-fi overtones, the projects that come out of Singularity University will be well-intentioned, and it seems unlikely that any malicious artificial intelligence will be designed in the halls of Ames Research Center – or at least in SU’s corner. When pressed, Ismail backed away from the assertion that Singularity University would be delivering deployment-ready solutions to problems like hunger and energy scarcity. “If we do nothing else,” he says, “just to bring people up to speed on all these advances is an accomplishment and a full-time job.”

And who would expect anything more? You can’t solve difficult problems with 100% certainty in one nine week get-together, but you can certainly try. (If that is indeed the object, though it seems to be more about putting together a creative and cutting-edge technological curriculum.) I’m never against smart people coming together to talk about technology and the future, even if a lot of money needs to change hands to do it. The students are paying for the privilege of teachers considered high-status in our society, along with some other teachers that I personally think are smart (like Ben Goertzel and Robert Freitas), who probably get insufficient credit from society. Most people could benefit tremendously from having Goertzel and Freitas lecture to them for several hours. Look at their interdisciplinary nature — Goertzel, spiritual yet mathematical; Freitas, profoundly imaginative yet numerically rigorous. I don’t know so much about the other teachers, I’m just telling you about who I know who might teach there.

About universities in general, I think everyone should read the chapter on universities in Paul Fussell’s Class.

Here’s the ending of the article:

What Singularity University can do with certainty, he says, is create an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to dream. “You can’t pre-script innovation,” he said. “You can create an environment where you bring together the best and brightest from disparate fields and very often interesting things will happen.” But that begs a question: is Silicon Valley a place where anyone is really afraid to dream big? Must you pay $25,000 for the privilege? The big dreamers, it seems, may be the Singularity University team, hitching a ride on a popular catchphrase and harnessing it to corporate funding, government aid and a steady revenue stream from wealthy students.

Before I left Ames, Ismail loaded me up with swag. He gave me a calendar from Nasa showing pictures of the cosmos, a copy of The Singularity Is Near signed by Kurzweil, and a handful of Singularity University refrigerator magnets – a refreshingly simple technology, reliable, very human, and timeless.

Ha ha ha, what an interesting observation. Obviously, hundreds of people applied for the open slots at Singularity University, so there is the demand. People like a structured environment with nationally recognized scientists as teachers. Conventional universities are very expensive too. If people want to pay $25K for it, that’s their business, and if it gets them thinking more about the benefits and dangers of advanced technology — great! Even though I do criticize some of the positions of Kurzweil, his books are what really, truly made me think seriously about future technological change, and I commend him for it.

Since all of Singularity University’s courses will have their data published online (or so I’ve heard), we’ll all have a chance to evaluate the value of the information they’re selling. Human time is expensive — if it costs a lot to bring together the best professors, then it will have to be funded somehow, preferably through executive and middle-manager students with six-figure salaries.