More on virtual professors won't ask for tenure

A follow-up to this post almost a year ago. It was about a piece on scientists and business leaders getting together to "plan a new university devoted to the idea that computers will soon become smarter than people."

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education has an update on Singularity University:

Demand for the program was stratospheric, with more than 1,200 students applying to fill 40 slots, according to the institution's leaders. That makes the program more selective than Harvard University. And Singularity University isn't even accredited.

It's all evidence that the university has touched a cultural nerve, playing on hopes and anxieties about how technology is changing society—and tapping into an urge to more actively shape that future.

Those same forces are leading professors at traditional universities to explore similar questions. A high-profile meeting of computer-science professors this year, for instance, explored the potential long-term dangers of computer technologies, with an eye toward shaping policies to avoid the worst-case scenarios popular in Hollywood movies like The Terminator.

Singularity University is itself an innovative approach to education, bearing more in common with a fast-paced start-up company than an ivory-tower university. Some of the professors here—many of whom teach at traditional colleges during the year—said traditional higher education can learn from the entrepreneurial venture.

I tell you, higher education is changing with all kinds of experiments that was previously beyond our imagination, and is changing rapidly. We are at an inflection point, and are ready to take off. Now, do you really want to be "left behind?" :-)

And in case you thought the founders are nutcases, well, think again:

Mr. Diamandis says he dreamed up the idea for Singularity University while trekking in Chile during a vacation. He had brought along Mr. Kurzweil's hefty book, The Singularity Is Near, which boldly pronounces a timeline for drastic technological change over the next few years. Mr. Diamandis says that he felt it suggested a need to study the many technological areas identified as exhibiting exponential change, and that his first thought was to start a university to do just that.

Mr. Diamandis has created an academic institution before. In 1987 he cofounded the International Space University, which has become a leading training ground for officials in space programs around the world. The university has a campus in France, where it teaches a master's-level program, and holds a summer session here at NASA Ames.

Welcome to the future!