The Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything ... Google?

May 6, 2009 - PRLog -- We get to spend time learning about topics that really interest us, taught by specialists in those areas. It also gives a good insight into what the real world is like, learning to look after ourselves rather than relying on our parents.

Why should it be a surprise that Google (http://www.google.co.uk/ig?hl=en), the company whose mission is to organise the world’s information and make it accessible to everyone, will shortly be opening its own university?  However, Singularity University is no ordinary college.

It’s not just that it will be located on the Silicon Valley campus of Nasa or that each nine week course will cost £17,000. Singularity University will bring together some of the best minds in subjects ranging from nano-technology through to artificial intelligence. The focus of its 40 students will be to address such small issues as climate change (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/campaign/index.htm), world poverty – even the answer to everlasting life.

Singularity University is named after a key theory of Ray Kurzwell (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/02/google-u...). This man is an inventor, board member of MIT, New York Times bestseller author and regarded by Bill Gates as the best person he knows “at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”.

Kurzwell believes that with the completion of the human genome, “we have now the software of life – the code that underlines it.” However, unlike our laptop or iPhone, we don’t upgrade the software running in our bodies – so we’re effectively out of date.

Kurzwell predicts that by 2029 computers will be able to pass for humans in conversation. Shortly after that, we’ll reach the point at which artificial intelligence will so far exceed the human brain that we won’t be able to keep up – the point of ‘singularity’.

Five years further on and the human brain will start to merge with computers – nanobots allowing us to control our senses by computer and live in a ‘real’ virtual reality.

I’m not sure about you, but I find that more scary than reassuring. What happened to finding solutions to our energy crisis or world hunger? Is this the sort of university to really solve our world’s problems? I’ll let you decide as I’ve got some homework to do!