College of the future: singularity university reimagines education.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns - Singularity University - Column

"MY KID IS GOING to have an extraordinarily interesting life," declares Singularity University CEO Rob Nail. "My kid will never drive a car and never go to college like I did." Instead, ad vehicles will be autonomous, and the school will be unrecognizable.

Singularity University (S.U.), physically located at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in California, was founded by futurist inventor Ray Kurzwed and Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the innovation-promoting X Prize Foundation, in 2008. Its modestly stated goal is to assemble, educate, and inspire a new generation of leaders who will strive to understand and use exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity's grand challenges.

S.U. takes its name from the concept of the Singularity, first popularized in 1983 by science fiction novelist VernorVinge. According to Vinge, the Singularity will occur when technological progress powered by self-improving artificial intelligence (A.I.) becomes so rapid that it speeds beyond our ability to foresee or control its outcomes. Since 2000, when the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence was co-founded by A.I. theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, there have been seven Singularity Summits. In December S.U. became the official sponsor of the conference.

Is interest in Singularity University just a passing technorati fad? It's too early to tell, but initial signs indicate that the college is more than just a summer camp for self-congratulatory nerd millionaires. In fact, Singularity University may well be the prototype institution for revolutionizing education and entrepreneurship.

Consider the university's immersive 10-week summer course, which aims to address the biggest chadenges facing humanity during the next 20 to 50 years. The summer core curriculum engages 80 students drawn from business, research, and government in interdisciplinary hands-on workshops and site visits to leading-edge tech companies. The class of 2012 was drawn from 36 countries and had an average age of 31. Seminars are taught by some of the world's leading researchers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, biotechnology, nano-technology, and digital fabrication. Then the competition begins: Students are divided into "109 Teams," each of which aims to develop a project featuring a technology that will affect at least 1 billion people in the next 10 years.

In addition to...