The Thiel Foundation is encouraging philanthropists to donate more money to scientific pursuits that could lead to big breakthroughs in medicine, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology, among other fields.

Note that Peter Thiel draws a distinction between ‘extensive’ technologies, which “take things that are working and replicate them”, and ‘intensive’ technologies, which try to “take the things that are best in the world and make them qualitatively and dramatically better”.

“Indeed, the winning technology concept –a pill that could cure cancer– and team were accurately prognosticated by the [prediction] market.“

In its ten tracks Singularity University (SU) tries to cover as much as possible of a vast amount of material. The specifics are steered by the track chairs, with a lot of input from both the students, the teaching fellows, and also sometimes from the outside. The Futures Studies & Forecasting track does indeed cover prediction markets, and yes, if not a proper market, tasks, ideas, and group activities are often evaluated using group raking tools within SU.

David

David Orban
Advisor & European Lead, Singularity University
NASA Ames, Bldg 17 Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA
http://www.singularityu.org/david

- In blue, our good friend Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons;

- In red, the Google guy in charge of open-source software;

- In grey, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

So, my question to Mike:

- Do you sense that prediction markets could be a topic at the Singularity University, or do you think that they couldn’t care less?

UPDATE: See the comments by Mike and a guy at that University…

NASA + Google + Ray Kurzweil + Peter Diamandis

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