America is getting a new university. A rather strange sounding university.

Based at NASA’s Ames facility in California, the Singularity University has been inspired by the writing of ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil. This summer students – who may number 30 or 120 – will start work at the university, which is backed by Google (who else) to the tune of $1 million.

“Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges,” says the institution’s website.

As TechDirt notes, “Ray Kurzweil admitted he was working on the idea at least a year ago, and the details of various planning meetings were made pretty public during last year as well.”

The San Francisco Chronicle explains the name thus:

At the core of the university’s mission is Kurzweil’s theory of “Technological Singularity,” which theorizes that a number of exponentially growing technologies – such as nanotechnology and biotechnology – will massively increase human intelligence over the next two decades and fundamentally reshape the future of humanity. In his 2005 book, “The Singularity is Near,” Kurzweil famously predicted that artificial intelligence would soon allow machines to improve themselves with unforeseeable consequences.

“If anything, this kind of university is needed more than ever right now,” says founder co-Peter Diamandis, the man behind the X Prize (AP). “We expect the next generation of multibillion-dollar companies to come out this university.”