When Singularity University was announced in February, its organisers said that during the 10 week summer course, which concluded today, students would work together to solve humanity’s “grand challenges.” By combining their supposedly above-average wits with Silicon Valley’s latest technologies, the 40 or so SU students would find innovative solutions for perennial problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.
The effort, backed by Google and NASA, came across as innovative, if a bit hubristic. With its emphasis on smarter-than-human computers, it also raised plenty of concerns. As we wrote at the time, “many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.”
At its closing ceremony today, four teams of SU students presented their projects. What emerged were not futuristic plans to embed computer chips in the brain and build super-smart machines, but noble (if half-baked) plans that leverage existing technologies to address important (if not entirely grand) challenges. One team, calling themselves XIDAR, presented a convoluted system that would help people overcome the communications network failures that typically occur during disasters. The team, led by SU student and FT contributor Simon Daniel, aims to use applications loaded on smartphones to ease evacuations and medical triage, and distribute aid during natural disasters. Questions as to how the system would integrate with existing governmental response programmes, or what happens when a phone’s power runs out, were sidestepped.
Another group of students, calling themselves Gettaround, talked up the potential of an “intelligent transportation grid” to reduce energy consumption. But its first proposed move was a baby step. It suggested developing an automobile sharing programme, where auto-less city dwellers could rent their neighbour’s car. While the technology for such a marketplace is readily available, it’s not clear that people want to loan out their cars to strangers. Besides, companies such as Zipcar already fill a similar niche.
The most promising project was dubbed ACASA, and seeks to produce cheap, high-quality homes in the developing world. Instead of building a house brick by brick, the ACASA team proposes automating the process and “printing” concrete walls. The technology for such an endeavour is already in place, and the ACASA team presented a sharp business plan with believable budgets and time lines. Not ones to be limited in their ambitions, the ACASA team was keen to note that the same process could be used to build houses on the moon.
The aspirational, if impractical, nature of the SU projects spoke to the school’s strange philosophical underpinnings, a topic we explored in April. While modeled on the International Space University, which was founded by Peter Diamandis in France, SU traces its ideological roots to The Singularity is Near, a 2005 book by inventor Ray Kurzweil. In it, we wrote, “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.”
The event had some relative star power. Kurzweil (SU’s chancellor), Diamandis (an SU cofounder) and former Yahoo exec Salim Ismail (the school’s director), were all in attendance, congratulating one another on the successful first term of a project they dreamed up just 11 months ago. But evidence of SU’s baffling affiliations were also in evidence. On a table at the event was a pamphlet for the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the cryonics group that advocates freezing the recently deceased in hopes of reviving them with future technologies.
As for the students, who paid $25,000 each for the privilege to attend SU, Ismail said he expects their teams to become real, profitable companies. That may be difficult, however, as the students came from disparate parts of the globe, and many are otherwise engaged. Mr Daniel, for example, is already the ceo of Moixa Energy, a renewables company in the UK. If they are to succeed in turning these pseudo-academic SU exercises into real companies, the students will need to escape the idealistic orbit of Singularity University, where larger-than-life dreams are encouraged, and navigate the complex, bureaucratic and cash-strapped landscape of today’s business world.
