Our friends over at Singularity University are described in some detail in a long article in the New York Times. An excerpt, with names familiar to Nanodot readers as speakers at Foresight conferences:
Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process…
Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook, is a Singularity devotee who offers a “Singularity or bust” scenario.
“It may not happen, but there are a lot of technologies that need to be developed for a whole series of problems to be solved,” he says. “I think there is no good future in which it doesn’t happen”…
[Peter Diamandis] is also a firm believer in the Singularity and is a technocelebrity in his own right, primarily through his role in commercializing space travel. At a recent Singularity University lunch, he hopped up to make a speech peppered with passion and conviction.
“My target is to live 700 years,” he declared.
The students chuckled.
“I say that seriously,” he retorted.
Read the whole thing. (Full disclosure: I am an SU Advisor.) —Chris Peterson
