You're all sorta right. I worked at Singularity University for 2 years. They do 2 things: 1. Educate fabulously wealthy people in expensive executive programs 2. Use that money to put on a YC-esk incubator during the program where people come to build companies that use the technology of their sponsors. Google was one of the first sponsors. Peter Norvig was on the Faculty for a couple years. So was Astro Teller who heads their special projects (Google X).

> Why would this not in alignment w/ Google's aim for such a position?

Singularity University helps you meet people who can help you facilitate engineering feats, in the sense that more money helps you facilitate engineering feats. That's okay in my book.

But, you're not going to end up with a working knowledge of mechanical engineering or computational neuroscience by hanging out at the Singularity University lectures.

People are surprised about at how far "Director of Engineering" can skew in that direction, they aren't surprised that Google is interested in the future.

> The people who attend the university are CEOs, CTOs... Directors of Engineering, etc. It's not for fringe kooks

A much larger percentage of CEOs, CTOs, D of E's depend on psychics and astrologers. So that helps define the strength of the "other powerful people follow him" defense.