Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist to start a university. Peter Diamandis, founder of the Ansari X-Prize, which has promoted private space travel, started a graduate summer program three years ago called Singularity University. For $30 K, 40 or so participants who are usually graduate or post-graduate students, get ten weeks to listen to the likes of John Gage, Raj Reddy, Wil Wright, and Timothy Ferriss (?) while joining teams to create the basics of a new venture that will positively impact the lives of one billion people.
At this year's graduation ceremonies, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the globally diverse teams presented their grand schemes for improving the world through the creative application of technology. AstroTrash -- a plan for eliminating trash in outer space that might interfere with satellite communications -- had a cool name but was a little murky in concept, whereas Matternet, which will build thousands of battery-empowered flying devices that could transport anything from vital medicines to love letters and other "matter" over impassable roads, seems more grounded on this planet. An actual mock-up of a low-cost, lightweight solar panel from IgniSolar looked like a winner in the sustainable energy space, and CorruptionTracker.net seemed like a very cool way to empower people to eliminate barriers to integrity and transparency in government and business (as long as no one can track the source of the informant, especially in countries that don't handle whistleblowers with kid gloves).
It was obvious the SU participants enjoyed the process as much as the results of their team efforts, and that several new companies will succeed as a result. Vinod Khosla, the technology booster who cofounded Sun and has invested so well he's considered a god among the tech digerati, gave the keynote. He castigated forecasts of McKinsey and similar soothsayers, and threw a curveball quote from Karl Marx to back up his point. "When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals falls off," said the progenitor of his eponymous theory.
According to Khosla, "To invent the future, we have to ignore the experts." This was well received by an audience too young to appreciate the vagaries of the history of computing, although, ironically, we were seated upstairs from one of the largest collections of computer history in the world. Khosla went out to pitch his "black swan" theory of economic advancement, much like Joseph Schumpeter once decreed that "creative destruction" was the driving force behind economic progress. Black swans are disruptive technological visions like cold fusion and battery-powered Matternets that can create radical change to improve the world's environment, economy, and political processes. I don't know why, but Khosla very much reminds me of the architect in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged who thought that if you were smarter than everyone else, you were always right about everything, even about things -- like governance -- in which you had no expertise or experience.
Singularity University is predicated on Khosla's belief that new tools can improve "humanity's grand challenges." This philosophy seems to inspire expansion. This summer, Singularity held a session in Brazil, received financial support from the government of the Dominican Republic (which I always assumed was an underdeveloped nation), and is talking to the mayor of Milan about a technology partnership for a future World Expo.
I suppose at best SU is like boot camp for aspiring techpreneurs. My driver, William Abernathy, a tech writer and writer for Make magazine, said the atmosphere at the graduation reminded him of a cult gathering, and one wonders whether a belief in the omnipotence of technology might obscure the complexity of change.
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