• So the curriculum here at Singularity University is broken up into three trimesters.  In the first trimester, the first three weeks of the program, students are going to have their core fundamental lectures, meaning what are the fundamentals of nanotechnology, or AI, or medicine, or robotics, or finance.  I mean, its really going to be an incredible psychological tapas for your brain.  The second three weeks, the second trimester, there is a deep dive where we get together and you focus on a particular subject, and the third trimester your focused on the team design project.  So the students are being asked in this team project to really come together, interdisciplinary…the way I like about it is imagine if someone came in and said to you, you 40 are some of the smartest people on the planet, we’ve got this incredibly difficult problem and we want you to figure it out.  You can imagine the sense of my God we need to solve this problem for the betterment of humanity.  So that is the notion of these 40 people top in their field, future leaders, with all these different tools in AI, and nano, and bio, and and finance and saying how do you come together and solve this problem that heretofore has been unsolvable.  We had a big debate about what the design project should be yesterday, you know…should it be about removing carbon, about clean water, about health care, or what are the big problems that humanity is having to deal with that these exponential tools can have an effect on.  I had a brainstorm this morning on a name for the team design project which has become a good organizing theme that everybody has rallied around.  So the design project name for 2009 for Singularity University is going to be 10^9 (ten to the ninth) and Mike Simpson the president of ISU had an addition to it which is a very important one where he said 10^9+ (ten to the ninth plus) meaning how do we affect a billion people positively in ten years.  So I get excited about that because it means how do we use these exponentially growing technologies to fundamentally effect the lives of a billion individuals on this planet in a positive fashion.  Whether it is giving them energy, clean water, or better health care, reduced carbon emissions, whatever it is.  And so that is a very fun subject and something I think everybody is excited to be part of.

So much more interesting than Google’s attempt at an April Fool’s joke.

cvxn:

from deadscreen:

WolverBama

“A new generation of military technology interfaces directly with the brain to target and trigger weapons before our conscious mind is fully engaged.

In a new article in the Cornell International Law Journal, lawyer Stephen White asks whether the concept of a ‘war crime’ becomes irrelevant if the unconscious mind is pulling the trigger…”

IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity

an online presentation on the various issues of the Singularity, or when people and machines merge.

“Call them transhumanists, or extropians, or convergenists. Call their mission GNR, or NBIC, or “RL meets SL.” A new generation of social scientists, with religious zeal, are changing reality as we know it…”