I am already preparing for a long and amazing summer at Singularity University (SU). I have my Singularity email set up, signed into our community portal, and know where I'll be living. I will be in a dormitory on the NASA Ames campus and all my sheets, pillows, and cleaning services will be provided. It's not pretty, but they've made it so we have nothing to do but work and study. I will not need to worry about whose turn it is to clean the toilet, thank God! 

At SU we will get a fast and furious education in 10 different areas of study. The 10 areas of study are: 

• Artificial Intelligence & Robotics
• Biotech & Bioinformatics
• Energy & Environmental Systems
• Finance, Entrepreneurship & Economics
• Future Studies & Forecasting
• Medicine & Neuroscience
• Nanotechnology
• Networks & Computing Systems
• Policy, Law & Ethics
• Space & Physical Sciences

Before I arrive, I have get up to speed on all the aforementioned subjects. To do this, we've been given a substantial reading list. I've got two weeks to become a genius. Well, maybe not, but I definitely have a lot of homework. 

After the break, I've posted some of the articles, links, and readings from the SU list. Feel free to follow along with me and add to the discussion in the comment section as I write and post about some of the articles over the next couple weeks. Be forewarned this list is LONG, I cut it down, but you still may be scrolling for a while. Enjoy!

Must Read: The Singularity is Near by Dr. Ray Kurzweil

AI & Robotics:

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig.UC Berkeley has an excellent course website built entirely around this textbook: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/HomePage
• White paper by Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George on Numenta's Hierarchical Temporal Memory: http://www.numenta.com/Numenta_HTM_Concepts.pdf
• Sebastian Thrun et. al.'s article on "Stanley: the Robot that Won the DARPA Grand Challenge": http://robots.stanford.edu/papers/thrun.stanley05.pdf
• Forbe's collection of articles that survey the past, present and future of AI research: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/22/singularity-robots-computers-opinions-contributors-artificial-intelligence-09_land.html

Biotech & Bioinformatics

• Drew Endy's Long Now talk on synthetic biologyon YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv0hV-gWwGY

Energy & Environmental Systems

• Green Inc.: Scrubbing CO2 With Synthetic Trees  By Jared Flesher
• National Science Foundation's 14 Grand Challenges toImprove the World for the 21st Century http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/
• The Gigaton Throwdown

Finance, Entrepreneurship & Economics

• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
• The 21st Century Economy—A Beginner's Guide by Randy Charles Epping
• Reality Check: the Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging and Outmarketing your Competition by Guy Kawasaki
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
• The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

 Future Studies & Forecasting

• Attributes of a Good Futurist Jim Dator

Medicine & Neuroscience

• Health Informatics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_informatics 
• Information Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science
• Computer Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
• Health Care http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care
• Cancer Stem Cells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_stem_cell
• Future of Medicine http://www.futuremedicine.com/
• Patient, Heal Thyself in the Digital Future, Robert Field, June 24, 2009
  http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=7907291
• The Top 10 Medical Stories of 2008http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6512364

 Nanotechnology

• The Singularity is Near by Dr. Ray Kurzweil
• Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler (specifically chapter 1, sections titled"Two Styles of Technology," "Molecular Technology Today," "Universal Assemblers" and "Nailing Down Conclusions."
• "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" by Feynman
• "Molecularly Precise Fabrication and Massively Parallel Assembly" by Freitas and Merkle

Networks & Computing Systems

• As We May Think, an essay by Vannevar Bush
• DRAM Failures in the Wild, http://www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Ebianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
• Lessons learned at cloud scale (the goal of 10,000,000 servers at Google) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/talks/dean-keynote-ladis2009.pdf
• De-anonymized data, "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization" Paul Ohm, University of Colorado Law School,
• The Digital Divide: Differential Access to Broadband, UNCTAD Information Economy Report 2009
• Web 2.0  The Web is Us|ing Us: http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Policy, Law & Ethics

• A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality By Leslie Wayne
• TED Talks - Martin Reese 
• Aspen Institute Conversation - Genetic Ethics

Space & Physical Sciences

• The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin. Read Chapter 39