Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/1161
h+: What do you intended to accomplish with SU? 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. h+: The article about SU in the S.F. Chronicle emphasized SU as a locus for problem-solving. Is that a priority? PD: It's an important aspect. I want to be very clear. The first priority is attracting and creating that network of the top people in their fields. There are two elements for our selection process that are important. One is that the students have to be the best in their individual field, but that's not enough. The second part of the equation is that they really have to be demonstrated leaders. They have to be someone who is not passive, but rather able to go and lead and create. And by the time you're in grad school or post-graduate, your attributes, like your willingness to take risks and lead have been demonstrated in some fashion. Once we have a population of brilliant future leaders, the second goal is to teach them across disciplines so that they can create innovation. The third goal… we're hoping they'll start new companies. We really want to create an ethos at SU for the founding of new companies that are right at the birth of these exponentially-growing fields. 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. h+: You mentioned intractable problems. It's an interesting choice of words, since you're trying to make them tractable. So in terms of your own sense of being a visionary futurist, and Ray Kurzweil being a visionary futurist — do you think that the future people have envisioned is in danger of being sort of cancelled by one crisis or another? PD: I think these transformative technologies are powerful and cannot be stopped. They can be slowed down. For example, if you look at the curves that Ray Kurzweil has shown for Moore's law, it's a pretty consistent growth curve across recessions, depressions and wars. The biggest dangers that we have are the things that could fundamentally disrupt humanity — a global pandemic, a nuclear war, a form of terrorism that uses the same exponentially-growing technologies to do as much harm as they could do good. The technologies that we have at hand today are such that small groups of individuals can do extraordinary good or extraordinary harm with them. h+: The original term singularity, from Vernor Vinge, relates to superhuman intelligence emerging decades in the future. Why use the word "Singularity" for this project? PD: We had some discussion and debate about what we should name the university. And, to be clear, the university is not about The Singularity. It's about the exponentially- growing technologies and their effect on humanity. Now, one of the potential outcomes can be what has been referred to as The Singularity. There could be a multitude of futures. We'll find out. But for me, when we talk about Singularity University, it's really about these technologies and their ability to be used for good for humanity. You know, we toyed with other terms… like Convergence University and others. But in homage to Ray and his work and his book, which was sort of the formative document that got me focused on this project, we called it SU. h+: In terms of the Singularity, do you see a relationship between Kurzweil's notion and other people's notion of the Singularity, and your interest in space, and then your work with the X PRIZE? PD: My interest in space is sort of encoded in my DNA. It's my life's mission to open the space frontier. But I remember a moment in early '93. I was in a subway in Washington, D.C. and I noticed that two or three people were on their cell phones. And I pulled out my cell phone, there was a signal and I was able to make a phone call. And