Alex Kaminski’s Blog

The Founders of Singularity University (Source)

Science and technology has advanced tremendously in the last 30 years. But, is humanity ready for these new advances? Is our technology developing faster than our society? How is this going to affect us? Are we making the right choices?

On September 20, 2008 a group of the world’s smartest individuals in both science and technology met together in a conference room at NASA’s Ames Research Center. This was the first meeting of the Singularity University, whose missions is to: “to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies (bio, nano, info, etc); and to apply, focus and guide these to the best benefit of humanity and its environment.”

Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha of IBM’s Cognitive Computing Group made a post about this meeting, but it was shortly taken down (per a request by the Singularity University). A copy of that post is reprinted below:

Founding Meeting for Singularity University
via Dharmendra S Modha’s Cognitive Computing Blog von dsmodha am 21.09.08

On September 20, 2008, I was invited by Ray Kurzweil (Co-founder, Kurzweil Technologies),
Peter Diamandis (Chairman/CEO X PRIZE Foundation), and Dr. Pete Worden (Director, NASA
Ames Research Center) to attend a discussion on possible creation of Singularity University
at NASA Ames.

The meeting was beautifully organized and run. Ray Kurzweil made an amazing presentation.
I also made a presentation on Cognitive Computing. Larry Page said that he evaluates projects
on a simple binary metric: “whether, if successful, it can change the world?” Bob Richards
said that in any educational endeavor “peole are the product”.

I had a chance to meet and discuss with Larry Page (Founder, Google), Nobelist George Smoot
(Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), Larry Smarr (Founding Director of the California Institute
for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UCSD), Tim Draper (VC, Draper Fisher
Jurvetson), Stephanie Langhoff (Chief Scientist, NASA Ames), Ralph Merkle (Institute for
Molecular Manufacturing), Michael Simpson (President, International Space University), Bob
Richards (Founder & CEO, Odyssey Moon), Moses Znaimer (ideaCity), Ramez Naam (Microsoft),
and many other distinguished people in different spheres of science, technology, business,
art, and media.

All in all, a weekend day well spent in company of brilliant and sincere people trying to
make a positive impact on the world! As an added bonus, I ran into an old high school friend,
Deep Nishar (Director of Wireless Products at Google).

It will be interesting to see what effect (if any) this institution has. But, the fact that we are at a point where the smartest individuals in science and technology feel we need this type of organization says something.

First reported by Nick Carr.