The school is designed to bring together the brightest minds from a multiplicity of academic fields and provide an interdisciplinary framework to better understand (and bring about) the future of technology. Cost for the 9-week summer course is slated at $25,000; since it’s the first year, it’s hard to say how hard it will be to get accepted and how much they will give out in aid, though my guess is hard and little.

The curriculum follows 10 tracks:

* future studies and forecasting
* networks and computing systems
* biotechnology and bioinformatics
* nanotechnology
* medicine, neuroscience and human enhancement
* AI, robotics, and cognitive computing
* energy and ecological systems
* space and physical sciences
* policy, law and ethics
* finance and entrepreneurship

Though this is pretty exciting stuff, and I most definitely support its existence, it seems a bit of a misnomer to call it a “University;” it appears to be more of a business trade show/conference than a school. It’s also quite likely that people who are willing to shell out 25K on a summer course possess ulterior business motives and are piggybacking on nerds to sniff out the “next big thing” while establishing the proper Valley connections. Finally, based on current info, it looks like the SU will just be teaching interested parties about various Singularity-related academic topics, and not performing ANY actual research whatsoever. And isn’t the point of the Singularity that it will pretty much happen no matter what we do… that the seeds are sown, and barring some massive catastrophe that blasts us back to the Stone Age, we are just waiting for the trigger? Personally, I’ll be following the people at the trenches, who, for example, are working and thinking extremely hard on how to actually create a seed AI, rather than the “students” attending a glorified Google networking event.

[Singularity University]
[via TechCrunch]

The paper also has an insightful discussion section looking at the relationship between the incubation of virtual worlds and how it parallels that of the web in the 1990s.

Read the paper here.

I would also like to draw your attention to a quote in the research regarding the versatile nature of collaboration in Virtual Worlds. This quote brings up the term “emotional bandwidth,” which I believe to be one of the mantras of the future of virtual worlds technology and health care.

“Because the full-colour, multifaceted nature of the experience offers so much more “emotional bandwidth” than traditional Web sites, e-mail lists and discussion groups, users say the experience can feel astonishingly real. Participants develop close relationships and share intimate details even while, paradoxically, remaining anonymous. Some say they open up in ways they never would in face-to-face encounters in real support groups, therapy sessions, or even with family and close friends in their true lives.”

“They are sophisticated 3-D environments that allow for a much greater degree of engagement than other tools, and they offer tools for interaction and creative expression that browsers, chatrooms and e-mail do not. However, the grandiose terminology makes it too easy to dismiss their importance,” later writing, “We just need to persuade Linden Labs to rebrand ‘Second Life’ as ‘Additional forms of screen-based interaction.”

This is an interesting point as the dismissal of these environment is often based on terminology and often incorrect associations — such as calling Second Life a game. People need to understand what a component is.

Would you recommend a re-branding of terms in this field? If so, what?