Kurzweil to found 'Singularity Uni' in Silicon Valley Renowned futurologist Ray Kurzweil has teamed up with space promoter Peter Diamandis and Google to set up annual techno/zeitgeist workshops at the famous NASA Ames research centre in Silicon Valley. The discussions will be known as "Singularity University", and will offer courses of varying length to paying customers. The …
Ray Kurzweil's scam has always been to make huge numbers of predictions and then later cherry pick the ones that coincidentally came close and hype the hell out of them. The same lemmings that happily created the Internet bubble, the wireless meltdown, etc just keep on drinking his kool-aid.
their entire premise is always couched in terms that suggest that no matter what form their singularity takes, we will have no choice but to bow down before it and submit to the will of the machines, with Ray and the gang presumably installed as the high priests of our new, robotheic society. It's all well and good espousing the many ways in which technological advances will make our lives better, but what's needed is some detail about how the transition from one state to the other will occur. As we've seen with OLPC, the gap between the haves and have-nots tends to grow without the have-nots seeing any of the benefit.
"It is generally understood that there will be chances to soak up wisdom from Kurzweil"
Worth attending just to see this once-in-30-year event.
I wrote a program to simulate exponential growth once but my machine ran out of memory when I ran it. Perhaps Kurzweil has discovered that this "limited resource" pattern exists elsewhere in the world.
At least SU doesn't claim to be in the writing business:
"Several kinds of course will be on offer at Singularity Uni." Really? Several kinds of course?
"*It doesn't seem as though SU intend to be super picky about their "strong command of English" requirement." I'm not sure SU intend to be super picky, but maybe it intends to be super picky?
How am I, as a German, ever supposed to learn your language?
Curious,
Michael
be granted a B.B. (bachelor of buzzwords among other less flattering interpretations).
Seriously, if you're among the 'the smartest and most passionate' you'll be doing this already - I very much doubt that Kurzweil et al will be bringing much to the party.
Brits seem to use the plural to refer to organizations - presumably implying, "...the people who work for SU intend to be super picky" rather than "...SU [the organization] intends to be super picky" - which is what they've actually WRITTEN.
It'd be nice if they could learn proper English.
Aren't we in a singularity already? According to Alvin Toffler, the web resembles that [singularity] in his book "The third Wave". He is the only one on Earth with bragging rights about guessing that the Internet would come to be. He predicted working at home and fax long before they showed up.
Not to mention that anybody coming straight out the '50s would have a hard time adjusting to us. Well, not that hard. But it would be a non-issue traveling from 250 to 200 years ago, ergo...
Can you imagine 50 years from now? I can pretty much guess, but a few things would have decidedly changed, don't you think?
Even El Reg, as it is, would be unthinkable some 100 years ago. Hack, even newspapers were something to wonder. (??)
RIP, because everything happens so fast that in some 100 years we won't even need El Reg, we'll read each others minds (from the write-protected, read-authorized portion, heh?).
> "singularity" from its use in physics to describe the breakdown of normal principles near a black hole.
Smartly hedged physics, Lewis. Lol. OTOH I see what you are driving at - the "black hole" is of course the one-way funding suck-fest, and the "breakdown of normal principles" would be the self-appointed freedom to dispense with the norms of decency and morality for the purpose of group-thinking up the best one-way human fuck-fest for the rest of us.
Were evolution true, the graduates of Hilarity University would surely be distinguishable by extremely lop-sided heads, laterally one hemisphere the size of a planet, the other the size of a pea.
As I understand it, a University is an mutually organised collection of professors and students (this is the minimum requirement; lecturers, administrators, librarians and security staff come later, a building to sit in is nice but not essential) - so a University is a group of people. Hence "....SU (they) intend to be....". For those who think that a University is some kind of building, this can be confusing.
When interacting with the outside world, a 'corporate body' presentation is usually used for administrative and legal convenience, so we also have 'The University (it) is going to seek planning permission for...'.
Exactly what I was thinking. "Pay us for the privilege of doing our work for us."
If the 'singularity' is such a good thing, why aren't the futurologists developing the software/hardware that will bring it about? Right, because they're too lazy and incompetent to be anything but a waste of oxygen.
All I need to know about the future tech is that the great "internet" with all of its promises is 30% pirates yelling "Arr, Information Must Be Free, arr!" and 70% adult material*. Rest of the uses are well within error range of those numbers.
No matter what their workshop predicts, any Sing-Uni prediction that doesn't include smut and thieves is simply forgetting the users from their models.
Paris, as she has more effect to the Future of the Net than any Singular University thus far.
* Actually most of the smut is also stolen, but for some reason copyright activity groups don't seem to care about it.
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