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Education United States

Silicon Valley's Singularity University Is Cutting Staff, CEO Exits (bloomberg.com) 47

Posted by msmash from the stranger-things dept.
Singularity University, a Silicon Valley institute offering education on futurism, is reckoning with its own uncertain future. The chief executive officer is stepping down, and the organization plans to eliminate staff. From a report: The changes were outlined in an email Tuesday reviewed by Bloomberg that was sent to faculty by Erik Anderson, the executive chairman. They mark an extended decline for the company, which has in recent years lost an annual grant from Google and faced allegations of sexual assault, embezzlement and discrimination. Rob Nail, who ran Singularity for the last eight years, is leaving to pursue new career opportunities, Anderson wrote in the email. Singularity is conducting a CEO search, said a spokesman. The announcement of job cuts was made in line with U.S. labor law, which requires 60-day notice for companies with more than 100 employees, the spokesman said. Singularity declined to specify how many jobs would be affected, but a person familiar with the matter put the total at about 60. This person said many of those workers were informed of the news while attending a Singularity summit in Athens that ended Tuesday. Singularity, which takes its name from the notion that humans will someday merge with machines, was introduced in 2009 during a TED Talk by futurist Ray Kurzweil. The group operates for profit but with a mandate for social responsibility. Many alumni of its programs credit the organization with teaching them about cutting-edge concepts and helping them think more expansively.
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Silicon Valley's Singularity University Is Cutting Staff, CEO Exits More

Silicon Valley's Singularity University Is Cutting Staff, CEO Exits

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  • They are headed towards singularity.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      IIUC, they have a rather narrow idea of just how the Singularity will occur. And I'm reluctant to attribute their failure to the onset of the Singularity, though I do attribute Trump and B.Johnson in Britain to that. Possibly also Welsh nationalism...though not Scots nationalism, as that has a long history.

      That said, it's often difficult to figure out what's due to the onset of the Singularity, and what's just ordinary human stupidity. Clearly the increasing automation of the labor force leading to the d

  • The Singularity (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Empiric ( 675968 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @01:39PM (#59410768)

    As I understand the concept, as hype progresses, hype will eventually be able to create an improved version of its itself, which can then repeat endlessly until we reach infinite hype.

    Did I misunderstand something?

  • If someone could please define this for me in real terms, I would greatly appreciate it. In the past, I have been tasked with future-proofing my design so I am now wondering if in the past that I have been somehow living in the future.

    • futurism
      \noun\

      1. A buzzword, typically included in elaborate for-profit schemes to extract money from forward-thinking and easily fooled venture capitalists.
    • The Singularity crowd: a bunch of rich techie dreamers making non sense predictions that by around 2035 technology will have advanced to the point that the rate of acceleration is so fast we can't keep up and then tra la la fantasy land like Star Trek or something. The followers are poor techies who wish they were rich who hang out at the rich people's parties worshipping the rich people as geniuses because they got lucky at startups. The poor techies think some magic will rub off on them if they hang out
      • People lacking imagination such as yourself are such a BORE.
        • Self-identification of poor techie groupie complete. Thanks for outing yourself. Did you buy all the Singularity books? Did you attend the cocktail parties? If you were really cool you would have been invited to the poly orgy after the parole trash uber'd home. I suspect you didn't even know about those, did you?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by spun ( 1352 )

          My four year old nephew has a very active imagination. Doesn't make much sense, but it's active. So, not that different from the Silicon Valley crowd. Except he's not an asshole.

      • They also believe the rich techies who tell them they will lead them to the Promised Land (e.g. Mars) away from the Common Earth People.

        • Lol, yeah, I forgot about that one. Omg so funny. Thanks, it's unfortunately all coming back to me now. I used to hang out with the poor techie groupie types. They also think they're going to live forever by either medical science life extension or freezing their brains until later. Eloi soup is more likely result, however.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Futurism is the practice of attempting to make predictions about the future.

      Anything beyond that is one person's or one group of people's idea as to how to do that or what the results should look like. It's less reliable than economics, but does have modest value...if you don't take it too seriously.

      FWIW, you can't future proof your designs without specifying a time frame. For 5 years you can be fairly accurate, most of the time, if you are conservative. (But would you have predicted that browsers would

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Bunch of snide answers that don't actually explain anything.

      The idea of the Singularity is that technology improves at an exponential rate while its cost also decreases exponentially. This is pretty clearly the case, as corollaries to Moore's Law are everywhere in the realm of technology. If you plot, for example, the improvements in telecommunications are plotted on a graph over time it will generally follow an exponential curve. Same with computing, robotics, medicine, etc., and for most aspects of tec

      • I recommend the first half of the book 'The Singularity is Near', even though
        it's meant for ten year old minds.

        FTFY

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Sorry that you're not able to understand exponential growth, maybe someone will explain it to you when you finish high school.

  • "Many alumni of its programs credit the organization with teaching them about cutting-edge concepts and helping them think more expansively." Wolly, vague New Ageish words.

  • Lol. Unless you're President Obama and the layoff announcements are coming just before the general election for your second term [govinfo.gov] (search for 'ignore' and read the surrounding text).

  • High cost schools are on the way out as people (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @03:00PM (#59411070)

    High cost schools are on the way out as people are stopping taking out student loans.

    • Re:High cost schools are on the way out as people (Score:4, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @03:58PM (#59411266)
      There's still going to be expensive advanced degree programs (e.g. medical school) no matter what just because it costs a lot to provide that education due to the amount of time it takes or the fact that the people who can provide it also needed an extensive amount of education which makes employing them more costly due to limited supply.

      What we'll see instead is that while Nursing programs, Engineering schools, etc. will continue to exist, bullshit degrees like "Futurism" will start to go away because they don't offer any real value.

  • IIRC the primary purpose of this 'Singularity' organization was to make it possible for tech titans to live forever, cybernetically at least. If the expected date of this so-called singularity is now beyond the expected lifetime of these wannabe immortals I imagine that could dry up a lot of funding.

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