From X PRIZE to Singularity University | h+ Magazine - The Diigo Meta page

• 01 Jul 09
  

  isaac Mao

  • William Gibson came up with the then-fictional notion of cyberspace in the 1980s when he saw a bunch of teenagers playing video games while listening to Sony Walkmen. In this interview, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, Chairman of Singularity University (Ray Kurzweil is Chancellor), reveals that he got intimations of “the singularity” in 1993 when he noticed people connecting to others by using their cell phones while traveling underground on the D.C. subway.

    
    

  • PETER DIAMANDAS: [laughs] It’s something that needs to happen. I am absolutely convinced that humanity is going to undergo some fundamental evolution over the course of the next few decades. We’re going from evolution by natural selection to evolution by intelligent direction. And the vast amount of breakthroughs — some of the most amazing breakthroughs are going to occur at the boundary conditions between all these exponentially-growing fields.

    
    

• 27 Jun 09
  

  Takuya Homma

  Singularity

  • PD: The primary goal… primary targets to be accomplished… are assembling a world-class team of graduate and post-graduate students every year that will ultimately build a network of future leaders who know each other, have a common vision, and can work well together.
  • And number four: we’re going to be asking the students to focus these tools — these extraordinarily powerful tools coming out of these exponentially-growing fields — on the world’s biggest problems. We have these large, global, intractable problems — pandemics, hunger, energy… whatever it might be. And the only way we’ll be able to handle them is by wisely using the power of these exponentially-growing technologies.
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  • • . So I asked Hawking why he was doing this? And he answered — before the media at the press conference — that he believed that if the human race does not evolve into space, we don’t have a future. Because there are so many problems — with asteroids, pandemics, war — that we, effectively, have to backup the biosphere.

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