Greetings From Future Camp

“What happened to your finger?” Bruce Klein asked after noticing my bandaged digit. Cooking injury, I told him. “Maybe we can sprinkle some nanobots in there and fix it up,” Klein replied, and chuckled, though he was only sort of kidding.

Prior to hanging his hat here in the administration office of Singularity University (S.U.), Klein produced the film Exploring Life Extension and co-edited the book Scientific Conquest of Death, both of which are pretty self-explanatory. He is reed thin, thanks to strict adherence to a health regimen designed to prolong life (minimal calories, healthy foods, no booze, many supplements) and possibly because of the stress of helping to create and open this, America’s newest and most peculiar institution of higher learning.

S.U., which opened last summer on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, is the kind of place where you can tell your classmates that your goal is to one day upload your consciousness to a computer and they won’t look at you as if you’ve just announced plans to re-create your father using scraps of DNA salvaged from his corpse. Actually, you can say that too. The school’s chancellor, Raymond Kurzweil, has—and will say it again if you ask him.

Kurzweil is one of the most prolific inventors and radical thinkers of the past half-century. His creations include the flatbed scanner, optical character-recognition software, the first text-to-voice reader, and an electronic keyboard that accurately mimics the sounds of a grand piano, which he built at the urging of Stevie Wonder.

For the past decade, however, the 61-year-old has become best known for synthesizing and espousing a set of controversial ideas that have made him an almost messianic figure to transhumanists, cyborg enthusiasts, nanotech evangelists and others on the fringes of the futurist circuit. As argued in his 2005 best seller The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil believes that humanity has entered a period of exponential growth in technology that has us hurtling toward the next great evolutionary leap. By 2029, he projects, computers will achieve human intelligence, and by 2045 we should be able to upload our consciousness into machines, providing eternal life. This is the Singularity. Along the way, we’ll build some seriously smart robots, harness nanotechnology to end disease, custom-manufacture organs and limbs, and generally change the world with tools that we plodding proletarians can hardly imagine today.

So you can see why it’s anything goes around the halls of S.U. And you can see why I arrived on campus for a short visit in July, during week four of the nine-week session, expecting to encounter a bunch of sci-fi nerds who couldn’t wait to plug into the Matrix. Would lesson plans be Bluetoothed into skull implants? And come to think of it, wasn’t the concept of humans gathering in a physical location a little olde-tymey? But I was surprised. The 40 men and women from 13 countries who paid $25,000 each (or received one of about two dozen scholarships) to be part of S.U.’s inaugural Graduate Studies Program seemed almost pathologically grounded—pragmatic people more interested in starting businesses than speculating on the nature of computing in 2045. They were overachievers of the highest order, Type A polymaths with such biographies as: “Luke Hutchison was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and grew up tinkering with computers and building gadgets. He is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and computational biology at MIT. Luke has spent the last two years studying intensive Chinese as a hobby while completing his Ph.D. He is very interested in North Korean human rights as well as skydiving and global off-the-tourist-track travel. Luke is an avid Android hacker and all-around tech geek.”

Certainly, Kurzweil’s specter haunts the halls, but the real idea behind the program is practical and clever: to put together brilliant people who wouldn’t typically interact and get them thinking about how to solve problems and advance technology.

I spent my first afternoon on campus in Melanie Swan’s “Futures Frameworks Simulation Workshop.” Swan, a Silicon Valley hedge-fund manager, is one of the lesser-knowns among a faculty of heavyweights like Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet, and Will Wright, creator of The Sims. On this day, she was demonstrating how to best use prediction models to a group of 10 students, who had already spent the morning buzzing around the Bay Area in a zeppelin to observe cloud formations and witness firsthand the logistics of operating a small aerospace business. (Everything here is viewed through the prism of entrepreneurship.)

Swan clicked through PowerPoint slides of projections of the future as she sees it unfolding. “I predict that the future will merge traditional electronics and molecular electronics, integrating organic and non-organic materials,” Swan said, following one of Kurzweil’s favorite formulations. “By 2018, we should have the ability to do a full human-brain neural simulation. I think it’s possible we’ll be able to do a backup of our mind file before that.” Around the room, students nodded matter-of-factly and tapped along on their laptops, unfazed by the notion.

In truth, S.U. isn’t all about Ray Kurzweil. It wasn’t even his idea. That credit goes to Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation and the annual summer graduate program that S.U is modeled after, the International Space University. ISU is an interdisciplinary crash course in all things space-related that has been attracting the future stars of aerospace since 1987, when Diamandis launched it along with his friends Bob Richards and Todd Hawley.

A few years back, Diamandis read The Singularity Is Near and was inspired to spread its message. He shared it with Richards, who was also fascinated. (“Peter changed his behavior and his diet and started taking the supplements. He drank the Kool-Aid,” Richards says. “I drank the Kool-Aid, but I haven’t had the discipline to execute yet.”) The two began to discuss merging the ideas into ISU but then decided, says Richards, that “the canvas of Ray’s ideas was large enough that this could be a university.”

Diamandis approached Kurzweil in late 2007. “He got it right away,” Diamandis says. By mid-2008, they had hired two S.U. “architects” who, working with Diamandis, organized a founding conference, held that September at Ames. There they recruited sponsors (including Google) and set a general framework. Students would stay on the Ames campus and attend classes just like at college, and the summer session would be split into thirds. The first section would be 10 hours of daily lectures providing an overview of so-called exponential technologies like artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, taught by some of the foremost experts in those fields. In the second section, students would follow specific “tracks,” such as Futures Studies and Forecasting (which is what was going on when I sat in on Swan’s class), and then split into four groups in preparation for the last segment. During the final stretch, each group was to come up with a project that could affect the lives of a billion people within 10 years and that could be implemented almost immediately. The project was dubbed “Ten to the Ninth Power”—scientific notation for the number one billion. S.U. would have no tests or papers. It was to be more intellectual retreat than actual school.