How Was the Billionaire’s Singularity Dinner? We’ll Show You

A gathering of 200 Silicon Valley investors is a good place to ask for money to fund the Singularity.
Five minutes is not enough time to save the world, but it might be enough time to get people to help finance you saving the world. Last night, Peter Thiel and The Thiel Foundation's Audacious Optimism dinner gathered some 200 guests in the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts to hear presentations from eight organizations bent on changing our collective future. Most were focused on the advancing technologies we would associate with the Singularity. All were in need of money. Luckily they came to the right place. As we outlined yesterday, some very wealthy and influential people from Silicon Valley were in attendance. So was I. Now you can be, too. Check out videos of the eight presentations below, along with the closing statement from Peter Thiel. Would you have donated to any of these groups to help them achieve their vision of the future?
The Santa Fe Institute takes a multidisciplinary approach to science. They gather some of the most brilliant names in various fields, promote their work, and try to get them to collaborate in new and interesting ways. Chris Wood is their Vice-President for Administration.
Those who regularly read the Hub will know Singularity University. It's Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamnadis' relatively new educational organization aimed at informing the next generation of leaders about the changes accelerating technologies could create. Students are encouraged to form new entrepreneurial endeavors that could leverage these technologies to help billions of people in the years ahead. Think business school meets the Singularity. Neil Jacobstein is President of SU.
Humanity+ wants the future to be positive. To that end they gather like minded thinkers to contemplate advancing technologies, the problems they could create, and the solutions to those problems. They also openly support human augmentation (transhumanism). Ben Goertzel is a well known researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (and has contributed a post to the Hub in the past).
The Singularity Institute wants to bring science to new places and promote an empirical review of futurism. They regularly gather some of the leading names in advanced technology at their annual Singularity Summit. Michael Vassar is President of SI and has impressed me in the past with his view on the history of science.
Nanotechnology and molecular machines are the central interest of the Foresight Institute. Their Feynman Prize is an annual $5000 award for excellence in molecular nanotech, while their Feynman Grand Prize is a $250,000 bounty that will be given to the first team that can build specific nano devices (including a nanoscale robot arm). Christine Peterson is the President of Foresight.
The SENS Foundation is working to fight aging. It has its own research center and promotes collaborations and longevity related research projects through its extensive network of affiliates. If you're familiar with the work of Aubrey de Grey you understand much of what SENS is hoping to accomplish. Mike Kope is the co-founder of SENS, and its CEO.
Of all the organizations that presented at the event, The Seasteading Institute was perhaps the least connected to the Singularity, yet their ideas about the future were no less world-changing. In the hopes of experimenting with new forms of government, Seasteading is raising capital to build ocean based "startup countries" in the forms of ships, or stationary platforms at sea. These floating nations would be the grounds for discovering new means of governing ourselves and hopefully bring improvements to global politics. Patri Friedman is Seasteading's founder and executive director.
The X Prize Foundation has already achieved worldwide fame by promoting private businesses to enter into the space race. While the original X Prize for traveling to and from near orbit has already been claimed, more are being created in various sciences. The general formula remains the same: offer a substantial reward for the first team that achieves a specific task and through that reward accelerate the competition, innovation, and ambition in a field of technology. Peter Diamandis is a chairman of the X Prize Foundation.
After the lightning talks, Peter Thiel gave a brief speech outlining his beliefs about progress and growth. He called for investors to throw their weight behind new ideas, even if some of them sound 'weird', for the sake of building a better future. Just to show that his money is where his mouth is, The Thiel Foundation announced that they would match the first $1000 donation made by each of the evening attendees to any of the groups presenting.
Talking to various people at the event, it surprised me how many attendees were already affiliated with at least one of the presenting groups. Even when someone hadn't previously donated to any of the organizations, they already knew something about their policies and interests. In other words, I'm not sure how much the lightning talks were really giving new information to their audience. Of course, educating people in the finer points of each institution likely wasn't the point. It was probably more about cross pollinating between the organizations. Apparently, that's how a lot of these fund raisers go. It will be interesting to see how successful the evening proves to be, and to find out whether or not The Thiel Foundation's matching offer entices people to donate.
When I wrote my preview of the Audacious Optimism event I was skeptical of the value placed in investing with these organizations. Why give money to a group that promotes the ideas of the Singularity when you could simply give your hard earned cash directly to the companies and scientists who were working on the technologies that would enable that future to happen? While I haven't completely surrendered that point of view, the presentations from last night made me realize two things. First, some of these organizations actually are the scientists and businesses which are making advances in technology. Secondly, and more applicably, these organizations are part of a larger trend of investing in the far (or radical) future. Whether or not a single group succeeds, the financial power granted to these institutions could have a snowballing effect to attract more mainstream interest to the field of futurism as a whole. That's valuable. If I were a Silicon Valley millionaire would I donate to these groups? Maybe so. It depends on how much money I had already wasted on my robot legs, virtual asteroid, and TRON motorcycle.
*Update 12.13.10: The Thiel Foundation has uploaded high quality videos of the presentations. You can find them via the event's Facebook Page, or their YouTube channel.
[image and video credits: Aaron Saenz/Singularity Hub]
Latest posts by Aaron Saenz (see all)
- How Today’s Jungle of Artificial Intelligence Will Spawn Sentience - August 9, 2016
- Welcoming Your New Robot Overlords - July 16, 2013
- Steve Jurvetson Considers Emerging Fields, Singularity University - September 30, 2012
Discussion — 20 Responses
You must be logged in to post a comment.


This is a bit disappointing as the focus seems to be on “think tanks” and middlemen who don’t actually do anything. Giving money to the Singularity Institute, for instance, is like throwing it down a gopher hole. If I had megabucks to give away I’d focus on things like http://www.emc2fusion.org/
and
http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
Think what would happen if we had fusion power up and running in less the ten years. Henry Markram wants to build the Blue Brain Project into a program that is equivalent to the Hadron Collider. The thought of putting that much brain and research power into reverse engineering the brain, I find tremendously exciting.
It’s true, SIAI is a waste of money. Also, did you really mean $1000? That’s pathetic if true. Thiel probably paid more than that for his last haircut. $1 million might be more reasonable.
@David Rimshnick
If each person donated $1000 then it would be $200k. For 8 groups that’s a maximum of $1.6M. Not bad. I doubt they’ll actually end up shelling out that much…but not bad.
If i read that correctly it would be the first $1k per guest. 200 guests that equal to $200k.
Obviously $1M would be nicer but that could set him back $200 millions
It’s 2010… weren’t we supposed to have immortality by now, according to old-man Ray I’m not aging K? (Yes, he really did say — over 10 years ago — we would have immortality by 2010)
Seriously, it’s a little refreshing to see the lack of overreaching claims and vague predictions in an event about the future of technology (from what I could see). It will attract more rigorous minded people instead of the cultists which is exactly what is needed for this group to attract more scientist types and more funding from agency heads.
Do you have a source that shows he said we would have it by 2010? (I’m not trying to be petty, I actually would like to see that if it’s true.) As far as I’ve seen, he’s been pretty consistent in his predictions (eg. ai by 2029).
Yes I do have a source (and I’m always happy when people ask for citation).
Raymond Kurzweil’s keynote address delivered at the 2000 ACM SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans and published on KurzweilAI.net August 29, 2001.
LINK: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-human-machine-merger-why-we-will-spend-most-of-our-time-in-virtual-reality-in-the-twenty-first-century
Here is the relevant quote:
“and with the revolutions coming in genomics, perdiomics, therapeutic cloning, rational drug design, and the other biotechnology revolutions, within 10 years we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy. So, if you can hang in there for another 10 years, (don’t spend all of your time in the French Quarter!), this will be the increase in human life expectancy. We’ll get ahead of the power curve and be adding more than a year every year, within a decade.”
Note that this speech was given by Ray in 2000.
As for the ever increasing life-expectancy for this decade predicted by Ray, the latest news shows life expectancy went down in the US. Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101210/ap_on_he_me/us_med_life_expectancy
Even if Kurzweil did say 10 years, it wouldn’t be for the average people to begin with. So your link to the life expectancy in the US is meaningless.
I gave a direct first hand source of Ray stating in no uncertain terms that we should expect immortality by 2010 (despite you saying “Ray has never, ever said that we would have immortality by 2010”, in the post below), yet here you are, still trying to defend him. What do you mean *Even if* in your reply? There is no if’s, and’s or but’s about what he said. Face it, Ray was wrong, and what you said as well was wrong.
My second link was meant to show that the continuous exponential curve in life expectancy that Ray wrongly extrapolated for this decade didn’t happen. Life expectancy has ALWAYS been about the average, so if Ray didn’t think average people would get immortality by 2010, why be ambiguous and use life expectancy as the metric to say we will get immortality? He is the one who used Life expectancy as the metric of prediction, so it seems entirely objective to me to say that when L.E. doesn’t agree with his prediction, it’s the proper thing to say he was wrong, instead of trying to come up with excuses. Besides, even if the average life expectancy doesn’t matter, rich people in 2010 still died. There’s no way to remain objective and say he’s right.
Ray Kurzweil did not say “we will be immortal in 2010” – end of discussion.
It’s 2010… weren’t we supposed to have immortality by now, according to old-man Ray I’m not aging K? (Yes, he really did say — over 10 years ago — we would have immortality by 2010)
Seriously, it’s a little refreshing to see the lack of overreaching claims and vague predictions in an event about the future of technology (from what I could see). It will attract more rigorous minded people instead of the cultists which is exactly what is needed for this group to attract more scientist types and more funding from agency heads.
Ummm JonS. Ray has never, ever said that we would have immortality by 2010. He has said that we will reach longevity escape velocity by the 2020’s which is still not immortality, but is getting closer.
Please read the reply to my post above this one where I provided a source. I accidently double-posted the same reply (sorry).
Was Elon Musk in attentance. His Falcon rocket launched the same day and it was a huge success. So i’m just wondering if he still got around to go to this gathering.
@JonS
You’re misinformed to say the least…
Well, don’t leave me hanging. Tell me how I am misinformed.
See my post above.
JonS; My parents were born in the 1920’s when the life expectancy was
Male 53.6, Female 54.6
Yet they are both still alive, as are many others of their generation. Life expectancy kept going up during their lifetime but that was a very hard, or impossible, thing to measure or predict from the data. Only in retrospect was that trend measurable. So, we may well indeed have a completely different life expectancy now due to trends that are not measurable right now. We may have passed that threshold Kurzweil was talking about yet still have an “official” life expectancy that is quite different from actual.
We have to allow for some things here. Lower infant mortality has changed the curve the most. Also, an individual’s life expectancy changes during his lifetime even without a change in the population’s life expectancy because once he gets past childhood you eliminate data that biases the curve toward a lower number. There are also health habits, income and so on.
But the basic logic still stands. We may have passed that threshold but not know it except through inference.
The numbers you cited are for the life expectancy _at birth_, which I will explain are very deceptive for extrapolation purposes. Here is a sobering statistic for you (gathered from link at the end of this post):
In the beginning of the 1920’s, the L.E. of a male at 65 years of age was 12.20 years, and in 2006 (the last year that data is available), that number has climbed up to 17.0 years — an increase of less than 5 years despite about 9 decades worth of medical advances. Similarly, in the early 1920’s, the L.E. of an 85 year old person was 4.21 years and after about 90 years, it’s improved by a ‘whopping’ 2 years! As you can see, this pattern is repeated over and over at every age group — as one grows older, modern medicine becomes increasingly poor at lengthening life expectancy.
(see my next comment for more, along with the source)
(continued from above)
The common mistake that Ray K. and Aubrey (he makes this mistake even more often I think) is to look at the L.E. at birth and say if we can increase that number by 1 year per year every year, then we’ve achieved immortality. But wait a second, look at the age group that really is mostly effected by rampant death — people over 65 — and see how ‘well’ modern medicine has done to improve their chances of survival in the past 150 years of medical advances (impressive as they were for L.E. at birth). So, now you can see why by using L.E. at birth numbers — and claiming that immortality is right around the corner — in his presentations, I think Ray is misleading us, intentionally or not.
When you said “But the basic logic still stands. We may have passed that threshold but not know it except through inference.” My response is that what you said is speculation. It’s not empirical evidence that Ray is right or wrong so I don’t have anything objective to add to that line of reasoning.
(see more on the next comment)
(continued)
Source: Table 11 from the National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 58, No. 21, June 28, 2010.