A university for the coming singularity

Singularity University is a benefit corporation that provides educational programs, innovative partnerships and a startup accelerator to help individuals, businesses, institutions, investors, NGOs and governments understand cutting-edge technologies, and how to utilize these technologies
to positively impact billions of people.

ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen. The Singularity movement sees a time when human beings and machines will merge and overcome illness and perhaps death.

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Peter Diamandis, Chairman and Co-Founder of Singularity University, discusses the best way to predict the future, and shares his personal philosophies on innovation and the commercial space industry. Flimed at Singularity University’s Executive Program, March 2010.

Class Size Doubled to Accommodate Growing Interest in Addressing “Humanity’s Grand Challenges” through Scientific and Technological Collaboration

July 08, 2008 — http://www.ted.com X Prize founder Peter Diamandis talks about how he helped Stephen Hawking fulfill his dream of going to space -- by flying together into the upper atmosphere and experiencing weightlessness at zero g.

Kurzweil is a true scientist—a large-minded one at that—and gives due space both to "the panoply of existential risks" as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What's arresting isn't the degree to which Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision fails to convince—given the scope of his projections, that's inevitable—but the degree to which it seems downright plausible

Singularity University

September 04, 2008 — http://www.ted.com Peter Diamandis says it's our moral imperative to keep exploring space -- and he talks about how, with the X Prize and other incentives, we're going to do just that.

The university’s founder and leader is Peter Diamandis, chief executive of the X-Prize Foundation, which promises large cash awards to designers who break technological barriers and is best known for its $10-million challenge to build a working commercial spacecraft. The new university is modeled on another academic institution run by the entrepreneur, the International Space University, a graduate-level training center to which NASA and other space agencies have sent students for decades.

Running contemporaneously with the International Space University, Singularity U is not an accredited four-year university, but is instead intended to supplement traditional educational institutions.It offers an annual ten-week summer course intended for graduate and post-graduate students and ten day programs for senior corporate executives and senior government leaders.

June 02, 2009 — http://www.ted.com Ray Kurzweil's latest graphs show that technology's breakneck advances will only accelerate -- recession or not. He unveils his new project, Singularity University, to study oncoming tech and guide it to benefit humanity.

Singularity University is an academic institution in Silicon Valley whose stated aim is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges."

January 12, 2007 — http://www.ted.com Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.

The first Graduate program began in June 2009, with full tuition costing US$25,000 (although a majority of the participants were provided full or partial scholarships). The inaugural 2009 class was limited to 40 Fellows chosen from over 1,200 applicants. Eighty graduate and postgraduate students will be accepted for the graduate course beginning summer 2010.

This summer, Rutgers University (the State University of New Jersey) will offer the first-ever accredited college course on the Singularity and associated technologies.