A crash course in emerging technologies
By David Gelles
Published: April 24 2009 11:27 | Last updated: April 24 2009 11:27
Singularity
n. A point of infinite density and infinitesimal volume, at which space
and time become infinitely distorted according to the theory of General
Relativity. According to the big bang theory, a gravitational
singularity existed at the beginning of the universe. Singularities are
also believed to exist at the centre of black holes.
– The American Heritage Science Dictionary
In a spare one-room office at Nasa’s Silicon Valley campus, a small band of futurists is plotting to save the world. The means are not a revolutionary technology or a new world order (though both may be byproducts). 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.
Forgive them for dreaming big. We’re in, after all, the cradle of the personal computer industry, the neighbourhood that brought forth Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Intel. The Googleplex is just north of SU’s office, Yahoo’s campus just south. Nasa tests the wings of its spacecraft here. Stanford University is up the road. And the Singularity team has landed some of these titans as partners in its endeavour.
Nasa offers more than office space: it’s the host, and will grant access to its specialists and facilities. Pete Worden, the director at Nasa’s Silicon Valley-based Ames Research Centre, is an enthusiastic supporter and brought the university on campus. Meanwhile, Google, the first corporate partner, has contributed $250,000 – and Google co-founder Larry Page attended the first meeting on the university last autumn. As one Singularity staffer said: “Here in Silicon Valley, we’re at the centre of the vortex.”
On a crisp February morning, I made the 45-minute drive south from San Francisco to Ames, hoping to understand how Singularity University might change the world – and why it had backing from such an illustrious group of supporters. After passing through a heavily fortified guard booth, I steered into the heart of the Ames campus, a tranquil collection of sandy, Spanish colonial-style buildings with well-manicured lawns. The stateliest of these structures, topped with a bell tower, is the Lunar Sciences building, where (funnily enough) scientists study the moon. Singularity University is coming together on the ground floor.
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The office has all the trappings of a technology start-up: frisbees and footballs scattered about, a corner full of free snacks and drinks, and a communal table around which all members of the team work. Salim Ismail (his blog’s title: “You’ve Got Ismail!”) is the school’s executive director and a veteran of several technology-based start-ups. Forty-something with a bald pate and an easy smile, Ismail describes himself as “passionate about business, entrepreneurship, technology, skiing, wine [and] tennis” with “a side hobby in metaphysics and philosophy”. In other words, he’s the archetypal Silicon Valley male.
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| The Singularity University’s founders at the Lunar Science Institute |
During the first three weeks of the programme, students will receive an introduction to the school’s 10 main areas of study, including artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and bioinformatics, and futures studies and forecasting. In the same way that a liberal arts education delivers an overview of literature, history and social theory, Singularity University intends to give students a crash course in subjects such as neuroscience and “human enhancement”. The second three weeks of the programme will give students a chance to study, in-depth, a subject new to them. An expert in nanotechnology, for example, might take on energy and the environment. “The biggest innovations in the world happen when you cross two disparate fields,” Ismail says. “[Johannes] Kepler looked at the moon and the tides and thought they may be connected. Today, people are doing 3D ‘printing’ of human organs using stem cells.” Linking early astronomy to stem cell technology is a bit of a stretch, but sure, intellectual cross-pollination can spur on innovation.
Will this model really vary so vastly from ordinary higher education? “Unfortunately, today’s graduate education is very narrow,” says Peter Diamandis, one of the school’s founders and the chief executive of the X Prize Foundation – which administers multimillion-dollar prizes for advancements in space, automotive and genomics technologies. “You become an expert on a particular channel on a nerve cell. That’s great, it allows you to go down deep, but there’s no place that allows you to step back, look at the big issues, and think.”
During the final three weeks of the programme, students will reconvene and focus on “one of the big, hairy challenges facing mankind”, such as hunger, climate change or energy scarcity. One lead contender for the first year’s challenge was how to administer telemedicine in remote parts of the world – but that has been eclipsed by the vaguer, Miss America-esque question: “how can you positively impact one billion people in a decade?”
As part of my tour, Ismail takes me around the Ames campus, or at least those few parts of it we are allowed to enter. At the west end of the complex, Nasa’s kilometre-long wind tunnels (the largest in the world) test the aerodynamics of aircraft and spacecraft. Nearby, control centres support Nasa missions such as the Kepler project, which is searching for habitable planets beyond our solar system.
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| A former zeppelin hangar and retired aircraft at the Nasa Ames campus which houses the Singularity University |
Singularity University was inspired by the success of the International Space University, founded in 1987 in Strasbourg, France – by Diamandis. Through a similar series of courses and projects, the ISU aims to prepare students for work in the space industries – everything from space engineering to space policy and law. What began as a quirky programme for aspiring astronauts has evolved into a well-respected, accredited institution. A few years ago, Diamandis and the inventor Ray Kurzweil, a longtime friend, wondered if they could do the same trick again, with a school educating students about emerging technologies. Using Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near as a sort of founding document, they got to work, and last year secured a lease at Nasa and a team of three full-time employees and 30 largely volunteer faculty members. It is set up as a non-profit-making organisation, with Kurzweil as the chancellor and Diamandis the executive director.
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.
“What is food?” he pondered, lounging on a sofa in one of the hotel’s dining rooms. It was early in the morning, but Diamandis, a short, muscular man with wavy hair and eyes that fix on you like a tractor beam, declined coffee or breakfast. “It’s the rearrangement of atoms in a form the body can take in.” Design a machine that can rearrange dust into an apple, and voilà! – hunger is eradicated.
The term “the Singularity” was popularised by Kurzweil and is now a catchphrase, in tech circles at least. It describes “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”, according to The Singularity is Near, which has become a veritable bible among futurists. In it, Kurzweil speculates that by the middle of this century, artificial intelligence will surpass human intellect, and enhanced humans will work in concert with super-smart machines to manage the world’s resources.
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| Singularity University founder Ray Kurzweil believes that one day the world will be dominated by robots – perhaps successors to “QA” (for Question/Answer), pictured here, the new telepresence robot from Anybots |
And yet while a race of intelligent robots to rival humans is still the stuff of fantasy, machines are advancing at impressive speeds. Earlier this month, a robot at Aberystwyth University in Wales formulated a hypothesis about the genetics of bakers’ yeast – without intervention by its creators. Then, the robot carried out experiments to test its theory. Back at the Singularity offices, Ismail says: “This is going to happen in an increasing way, but how are we going to manage it? We need to be a step ahead of it. SU’s mandate is to understand and manage it in a more proactive way.”
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 “Singulartarians” 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.
Diamandis takes great pains to say that the school is a stand-alone venture, not affiliated with any of the other books, groups or events that also claim the Singularity moniker. “The term ‘singularity’, for me, is a catch-all phrase meaning that we’re dealing with exponentially growing technologies that have huge and powerful implications for humanity,” he tells me. “I am not promoting or predicting what people might call ‘The Singularity’.” Ismail and his team also try to distance themselves from the diehard Singulartarians, despite their many overlapping affiliations.
The week I visited Singularity University’s offices, technology seemed to have let down both Nasa and Google. On the Tuesday, a Nasa satellite meant to study global carbon dioxide emissions failed to reach orbit, scuttling the $278m mission – just when the government institution needed to persuade the new US president of its merits. The next day, Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, experienced a two-hour outage in the middle of the European workday, disrupting productivity and calling into question an increasing reliance on web services.
Technology, as if people outside Silicon Valley need reminding, remains unreliable, and machines, even when running smoothly, remain subject to human error. Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who has spoken out against rapid technological change, told me he was reserving judgment on Singularity University until it was under way. But he seemed sceptical of its ability to effect serious change. He said its success would largely depend on whether “the students who end up there want to solve actual human problems, which can sometimes benefit from technology, usually in tandem with lots of other changes. Or if they are sci-fi, afraid-of-dying types dreaming of the next big score to be made.”
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McKibben also cautions against overlooking ethical concerns amid the heady frenzy of innovation that Singularity University hopes to cultivate. “It’s important to have real, meaningful debates before we cross important lines – germline genetic manipulation, for instance,” he said. “The technical ability to do this stuff confers no special insight on whether it should be done. I trust the visceral revulsion against ‘designer babies’ more than the smooth assurances of the boosters of the sleek future.”
McKibben is certainly not alone in his reservations – and since Singularity University was first announced to great fanfare this winter, both Google and Nasa seem to have begun shying away from their involvement with the school. Worden, the director of the Ames center, one of the University’s founders and the man who got it housed on Nasa’s campus, turned down repeated requests to be interviewed for this piece. In fact, no one from Nasa would speak on the record about Singularity University.
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.”
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.”
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.
David Gelles is a reporter in the FT’s San Francisco bureau
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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