Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Cory Doctorow, Eric Drexler, Bill McKibben — just a few of the stimulating speakers at Stanford University’s Singularity Summit two days ago. I was there and provided live blogging, which you can read here.
Overall, the event was interesting and well-run. I had a few quibbles with the agenda planning and I was less than satisfied with some of the presentations, but the fact that a large audience at a major university was hearing world-class speakers discuss radical tech-driven change is a good thing.
Truly disruptive global change on a rapid timescale is something that humanity has never experienced. However, it could be coming quite soon. We are presently unprepared for it, and it could even be argued that we are incapable of adequately preparing. I hope that’s not true.