Singularity University - Majoring in Immortality, page

I just found out about this interesting university:

Nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley, the main aim of the curriculum is to develop the technology of the future, which includes a way to download the contents of an individual’s brain to a computer.

For the last two years the university has nurtured a carefully hand-picked group of graduates.

I wonder what they do there exactly, and if the public know of its developments?

Running contemporaneously with the International Space University, Singularity University is not an accredited four-year university, but is instead intended to supplement traditional educational institutions.[3] 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.

The inaugural 2009 class was limited to forty fellows chosen from over 1,200 applicants. Eighty graduate and postgraduate students were accepted for the graduate course beginning summer 2010 from a pool of 1,600 applicants.[4][5] [color=Red]The low acceptance rate and high demand for entry have allowed Singularity University to assemble some of the smartest people on the planet, dedicated to solving the world's most pressing problems[/color].[

The topics include Future Studies and Forecasting, AI Robotics and Cognitive Programming, Space and Physical Sciences, and Biotechnology.

Hmmm...corporate founding partners and sponsers include NASA and Google..

There were moments during a lecture at Singularity University that I had to remind myself the speaker wasn't talking about "Terminator 4," but was conducting a serious-minded exploration about the possibility that one day artificial intelligence will suddenly allow our machines to become self-aware -- and enslave or wipe out humanity as they so choose.

At the same time, the institution is hoping that by educating leaders in various fields about these changes, they'll find ways to harness them to solve the problems that have plagued humanity throughout history, like poverty, poor health care and violence. These are dubbed, not surprisingly, the "grand challenges."

Sources: 1 2



Thoughts?

Technological Singularity

A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so extremely rapid, due in most accounts to the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligences, that it makes the future after the singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict. It has been suggested that a singularity will occur during the 21st century, and there are several mechanisms by which a singularity could occur.[1][2] Vernor Vinge proposed that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence would represent a breakdown in humans' ability to model their future, and was the first to use the terms "singularity" (in 1983) and "technological singularity" to describe such an event. Humans cannot, he says, predict the actions of more intelligent entities. He compared it to the breakdown of the predictive ability of physics at the space-time singularity beyond the event horizon of a black hole.[3]

The second conception of the singularity is that of an "intelligence explosion", a term coined in 1965 by I. J. Good.[4] Although technological progress has been accelerating, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not, according to Paul R. Ehrlich, changed significantly for millennia.[5] However with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is more intelligent than humanity.[6] If smarter-than-human intelligences were invented, either through the amplification of human intelligence or artificial intelligence, it would bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine, or re-write its source code to become more intelligent. This more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability. These iterations could accelerate, leading to recursive self improvement, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in.[7][8][9]

Futurist Ray Kurzweil postulates a "law of accelerating returns" in which the speed of technological change increases exponentially, generalizing Moore's law to technologies predating the integrated circuit, and including material technology (especially as applied to nanotechnology), medical technology and others.[10] But like other authors, he reserves the term "Singularity" for a rapid increase in intelligence (as opposed to other technologies), writing for example that "The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains ... There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine".[11] He also defines his predicted date of the singularity (2045) in terms of when he expects computer-based intelligences to significantly exceed the sum total of human brainpower, writing that advances in computing before that date "will not represent the Singularity" because they do "not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence."[12]

I think the main problem with singularity and immortality lies in inability of uploading of our consciousness from "meatbrain" to cyberspace. While you can create exact virtual copy of neural circuits in your brain, it would not be you, but COPY of you. I could be possible to circumvent it by substituting your neurons with artificial neurons acting exactly as substituted neuron one at a time, but that would require far more than ability of computers to simulate virtual brains (nanotechnology etc.) since it would not be software simulation but hardware realization of the brain.

There is a great novel about the appearance of technological singularity by Charles Stross called Accelerando.

Accelerando wiki link

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