Singularity Studies at Rutgers

March 2010
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

OUR LINKS

YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

Singularity Studies at Rutgers

17 March 2010

George Rebane

Rutgers University is announcing a new course on the Singularity – its basis and advent. The online course will be taught this summer. According to the bulleting, “The course is especially recommended for anyone who anticipates working in a high-technology industry or applying future technologies in any area of human endeavor. Future entrepreneurs and innovators are especially encouraged to participate.” More information on the course is here.

RR readers are familiar with the Singularity (if not, then here and the Singularity Signposts section of this blog). My only wish is that public policy makers become aware of what’s happening sooner than later.

Posted in Current Affairs, Singularity Signposts

4 responses to “Singularity Studies at Rutgers”

Mikey McD

17 March 2010

Why?- “My only wish is that public policy makers become aware of what’s happening sooner than later.”

LikeLike
RL Crabb

17 March 2010

While public policy gurus may be slow to realize the implications of this “singularity” phenomenon, Hollywood has been burning it into the human psyche for decades. There was Clarke and Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001” (Only the the dates are off a few years) or my old buddy George Clayton Johnson’s “Logan’s Run”. Some people suspect if you could get close enough to our Governor to pull off some skin you’d find a treacherous cyborg from the future.
Joking aside, I share your wonderment and apprehension of the way technology will shape the future of mankind. Can genetic engineering make Hitler’s dream of a super race a fact? Is faster than light speed possible?
I believe that if we can survive our own cat-like curiosity, the destiny of man is somewhere out there among the stars. It will be the salvation of a race that is outgrowing our little planet.
I only wish I could be there to see it.

LikeLike
George Rebane

17 March 2010

Mikey – I had this wild dream of politicians actually using information for something other than promoting their ability to stay in office.
Bob – yes, sci-fi in pulp, celluloid, and now bits has been exploring various post-Singularity worlds and cultures for decades. And as do you, I have, since starting to shave, applied the meta-criterion for evaluating human enterprises – ‘Does this help us get to the stars?’ BTW, I strongly recommend Kurzweil’s ‘Singularity is Near’. Would love to see some of your art treat notions of the Singularity.

LikeLike
RL Crabb

17 March 2010

Thanks, George. It’s time I put down the history books and looked ahead. Lately, I’ve been going through the 700-odd Village Idiot episodes I’ve done since 1998. There are some that look into the future with amusing results, in hindsight. Some have come true, eerily in a few cases, and some where I appear to be a blithering idiot, but then, that is the name of the strip.
My field leans toward the absurdities of human nature. What is it that makes us who we are? Why do we spend so much of our lives fighting when we could easily turn this world into a garden of peace and prosperity?
One strip that I uncovered is called “Horizons”. It is the compulsion to always see what’s on the other side of the hill, to escape the restrictions put on us by others. It goes back to the moment when the first man stepped off the African continent into a bigger world.

LikeLike