Via Wired Campus: (CNET has additional coverage)
Today a well-known entrepreneur, leaders from NASA, and a futurist known for his claims that machines will soon outsmart humans announced the creation of an unusual academic institution called the Singularity University.
The university’s goal is to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas across a range of high-tech disciplines in which major breakthroughs are expected in the next decade. The hope is that such communication will speed the use of technology to cure diseases and solve other major problems, while helping to understand emerging technologies to better avoid potential downsides of radical new technologies. Classes will take place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, starting with a nine-week program this summer.
… Although the university will offer courses, one of Mr. Diamandis’s goals is to create a sort of exclusive club where some of the top thinkers in several areas can interact — and maybe team up to start new companies or government projects. “We’re pulling in the future CEO’s and university presidents and government ministers when they’re young in their careers,” said Mr. Diamandis, “pulling them together and allowing them to really meet in a setting where the message is ‘Anything is possible, what is the future?’”
I’m not sure how I feel about the explicitly clubby nature of the venture, but egalitarianism in academe is one of those myths that help us sleep better at night. The question I have is how the organizers will construct a dialogic teaching environment – and prevent this from becoming a 10-week long TED. Close access to top-tier faculty is an exciting proposition if you’re getting beyond the slideshow from their most recent book.
It is an important sign that the organizers are attuned to the club – or network – aspects of this venture. Kurzweil and Diamandis are network entrepreneurs, and this university will create a “network forum,” much like those created by Stewart Brand, and described by Fred Turner in the wonderful book From Counterculture to Cyberculture. I will be watching this with interest – and look forward to checking out Singularity U’s website once it recovers from its Slashdotting.
Tags: academia, singularity
“[E]galitarianism in academe is one of those myths that help us sleep better at night.” Well, no: academia has always been a very pyramidal meritocracy, and this project is ‘clubby’ in the sense that if focuses on the top, without discriminatiing by any illegitimate concern, or even by discipline. It would be not really surprizing that the outcomes aren’t published in any way — but nothing would replace attending, as always.
There are some rival Western paradigms at work here. In essence, a pyramidal meritocracy is egalitarian – one simply needs the merit to rise to the top. Of course this is a naive assumption – many who succeed at the highest levels are products of merit and cumulative advantage. And of course the purpose of this project is to extend cumulative advantage (through participation in the network, access to luminaries, etc.). If it was actually about education this university would last much longer than ten weeks! This doesn’t mean that Singularity U (or the Society of Fellows, or organizations like it) are doing anything unethical or illegitimate, just that the notion of pure egalitarianism is a myth. This makes me think of Loic Waquant’s (a Fellow, by the way) work on marginality.