Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1161
W illiam Gibson came up with the then-fi ctional notion of cyberspace in the 1980s when he saw a bunch of teenagers playing videogames 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. Diamandis is a serial social venture entrepreneur. He was born may 20, 1961, and graduated from mIT with his fi rst degree in 1983. His enterprises include International space university, the aforementioned singularity university, zero Gravity Corporation, space Adventures, Ltd., and the rocket racing League. Dr. Diamandis' most famous and infl uential creation is the X PrIze Foundation, an educational, non-profi t, prize-granting enterprise that aims to use competition to inspire innovations that are good for human civilization. The $10 million the X PrIze Foundation offered for its Ansari X PrIze competition inspired microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to team up with Burt rutan and create spaceshipOne. It would win the competition by becoming the fi rst non-government- funded spacecraft to reach outer space. The X PrIze is now offered in a growing number of categories, including the heavily publicized Progressive X PrIze for automotive energy effi ciency. We spoke to Diamandis primarily about singularity university. According to su materials, "singularity university, based on the NAsA Ames campus in silicon Valley, is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies (bio, nano, info, AI, etc.), and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity's grand challenges." Their nine-week Graduate studies programs start on June 27 and their executive Programs will start in the fall. h+: Why are you starting Singularity University? 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 fi elds. I feel that all disciplines (some more than others) are critical, and all nations will have a role in the evolution of humanity over the decades ahead. And sometimes, key technology breakthroughs are really fundamentally dependent on other breakthroughs. For example, an engineering concept might never see the light of day because the policies or laws are not in place to support its birth… or because someone can't get the required capital together. So it's very important to take people who are brilliant in their individual fi elds of AI or nanotechnology, robotics… whatever it might be, and help them understand how the other fi elds can fundamentally make or break their work. So a critical aspect of this project is that it's interdisciplinary. And it's important that there may be some ex-Soviet scientist in Kazakhstan who's got a brilliant piece of technology sitting on a shelf or some incredibly creative teenager in India who has a missing piece of the puzzle. These days, of course, innovation and breakthroughs can come from anywhere, so the interdisciplinary and international aspect is a critical part of what we're doing. So those fundamental understandings are what drove me to propose this idea to Ray Kurzweil. We want to create an ethos at singularity university for the founding of new companies that are right at the birth of exponentially-growing fi elds.