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Home > Education > College University > NASA & Google Helps Develop New Type of University
NASA & Google Helps Develop New Type of University
Submitted by: Nancy L. Young-Houser

NASA Center is approaching this recession and global crisis by becoming part of a new type of school for meta-thinkers, a recession which is confounding governments and businesses all over the world. The school meanwhile is offering a fundamental technology that provides a new type of thinking and processing breakthrough which began in 2007-2008. Called Singularity University, it is located at Moffett Field—owned and operated by the NASA Ames Research Center--located in California, helping prepare humanity for the acceleration of new technological changes in the future. With the University founders consisting of: corporate founder Google, Inc.; associate founders Moses Znaimer of MZ Media, Keith Kleiner of Haymar Hedge Fund, Barney Pell of Powerset, Klee Irwin of Irwin Naturals, Sonia Arrison of Pacific Research Institute, Dan Stoicescu of Sindan, and Georges Harik of Google Inc., and many others, it is composed of individuals and companies who have provided a basic start-up capital to establish the Singularity University.
The concept of this visionary university was proposed by Dr. Peter Diamandis in 2007, with a founding meeting hosted by NASA Ames in 2008, with the idea behind Diamandis's theory originating from Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" which he was reading while in Chile. A speech in Singularity News, given by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, stated that "along the bell curve of plausible outcomes, the most likely scenarios eventually migrate toward the tails: very wonderful or very catastrophic. And of these two possible outcomes, either is acceptable to investors." In 2007, Thiel was questioning the economic upheaval and reckless profits of the times by asking, "Was the peak of insanity in March 2000 really a peak of clarity?" Because of this sort of questing, the investors behind Singularity are betting on a profit behind the school and its new learning, enable new technologies or recognizing the lack of. Additionally, what will develop is a growing acceptance of an entirely new wave of computing technologies ahead of us---with an entirely new and revolutionary implication for teaching and research.
The book "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil champions the idea that the technology we have today which seems to be grossly undeveloped—nanotechnology and artificial intelligence software---and will by 2030 mature must faster than its creators, the basic linear-minded group of people who are running them and creating them today. According to Singularity supporters, when this happens the computers will leap forward in unimaginable ways we can hardly imagine. In the book by Kurzweil, he presented a vision in which these computers helped instantly human researchers to cure diseases and extend vastly human life. Today, we can see that computers are beating the world's best chess players, considered to be the masters of chess of our time. He states his computers are able to keep getting faster and faster, while the human brain is not. But he wonders if computers are able to do biology by replicating a "multidimensional" nature of human intelligence, even though they can outdo biology with sheer processing power.
Regardless, Ben Goertzel, who is the director of research at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Palo Alto, California, states that computer will become better teachers than human professors once the levels of artificial intelligence exceeds peoples' abilities for several reasons: the machines will have more patience; more individual attention; increasing the level of high-quality education. Not all academics feel this is a plausible development, but just as many recognize that it is. Rapidly changing for sure is how humans interact with data and each other, changing the way people think.
Presently, at the University of Illinois is the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where the web browser Mosaic was invented, led by Larry Smarr. In addition is his California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a joint venture of the University of California's compuses in Irvine and San Diego. A supercomputer expert, he has attended the planning meeting for Singularity University and is in full support of revolutionary research and to speed up developments in a wide assortment of fields.
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Nancy L. Young-Houser is a professional writer and illustrator, in addition to providing a home for dogs on all levels of need with her best friend, Sandra Marquiss. Her writings include controversial subjects as part of the soapbox she has carried around since childhood, never leaving home without it. Part of this soapbox is her website WayCoolDogs.com filled with lots of four-legged information!
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