The deal: apparently there is a new educational institution, headquartered at the NASA Ames Campus (i.e. right next door to Google), that is entirely devoted to the study of the Singularity. The Singularity being a term borrowed by Vernor Vinge from astrophysics and re-borrowed by boy genius Billy Quizboy Ray Kurzweil to refer to a point in history beyond which human beings are so rapidly and radically transformed by the convergence of networks, neuroscience, robotics and nanotechnology that … I forget what. Google is a major sponsor. There is an informational video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlgHxa9Lsio&hl=en&fs=1]
At first I was all, yeah, right, can you picture some whiz kid high school student being all, I got into Harvard and Cal Tech, but I turned them down ’cause I’m so stoked to go to S.U.? But it turns out that right now they mostly offer a short graduate program and some seminars for executives, which makes more sense, and could add up to $$$. Then I looked at the academic tracks, which seem to be derived from the character classes table from Gamma World, and it seemed funny again. Oh, who knows, 30 years from now I’ll probably be begging Kurzweil’s reanimated brain to let me into his BioDome.