The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it’s ‘plausibly surreal’ – it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.
Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It’s worth the effort.
I have to admit it: I’m not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.
Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real.
Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they’re covering a sufficiently wide set of topics in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise.
Is there a better example of natural selection in action than ‘Project Runway?’
Nature stopped being natural decades ago.
It’s remarkably easy to dig up enormous amounts of information about individuals, without their consent.
Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.
My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.
Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century – in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.
It’s a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.
Fluid intelligence doesn’t look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won’t really take off until it offers broad freedom of use.
Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal – it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political – but it’s insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us?
The biggest potential and actual crises of the 21st century all have a strong, long, slow aspect with a significant lag between cause and effect. We have to train ourselves to be thinking in terms of longer-term results.
Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers – all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.
To be clear, geoengineering won’t solve global warming. It’s not a ‘techno-fix.’ It would be enormously risky and almost certainly lead to troubling unforeseen consequences.
As our various electronic devices gain more and more sensory awareness, we open up the potential for entirely new forms of interaction. Not just new interfaces – tapping and shaking and whatnot – but a shift in presence.