The Next Idea to Impact a Billion Lives

Last night saw the conclusion of the second annual Singularity University, a ten-week graduate program designed to help some of the globes best and brightest understand the implications and opportunities of exponentially increasing technologies. Their task? To use those new technologies to positively impact a billion lives.

"Singularity" refers specifically to a moment in the future in which artificial intelligence matches human intelligence. More broadly though, the conversation about the Singularity refers to the general implications of exponentially increasing technology. Put more basically, the idea is that technology is not just changing more rapidly, but the pace at which it is advancing is not linear but exponential.

This means that innovations that were recently unthinkable are now just around the corner. Our ability to fabricate nanomaterials, understand genomic code, and other similar advances all suggest a very different future. Some of the most notable implications have to do with the way we fight disease and customize medicine to our highly individual genetic makeups.

The man who initiated the movement around understanding the implications of the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Singularity is Near" and co-founder and Chancellor of the Singularity University. The graduate program came out of a conversation with X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, who became the Chairman of Singularity U and helped assemble the team and sponsors to get it off the ground.

The summer program is structured in three parts. In the first part, students learn about exponentially increasing technologies across all fields, from health to space to agriculture and beyond. In the second part of the program, students hone in on one key area from space, food, energy, upcycling waste or water. Their task is to learn about the specific technologies reshaping those fields, and form teams to address key problems in novel ways. The third part of the program is spent coming up with ideas that specifically leverage those exponential technologies to address key needs for a billion people or more.

At last night's graduation ceremony at the NASA Ames center in Silicon Valley, the students - representing literally dozens of countries - showed off their bold ideas. The remarkable thing about the program is not just that it produces ideas, however, but that it produces people with an entirely shifted worldview who are committed to putting those ideas into practice. Something like half of last year's inaugural class ended up staying in or returning to Silicon Valley to continue to build the companies that came out of the program.

The program and its students are a testament to the power of big thinking. While not all of the ideas that come out of the graduate program will end up seeing the light of day, a number of them will, and you can bet we'll be benefitting from it.

For those interested in learning more or in applying to next year's program, apply at http://www.singularityu.org

Photo credit: jurvetson