Recap of a fantastic-sounding Long Now talk, reprinted in full from my inbox and the Long Now blog. The concepts Frank Gavin introduces in his talk “Five Ways to Use History Well” are not just useful in analyzing the past, but are critical for interpreting the present. Why do policy makers and historians shun each [...]
William Gibson: Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of [...]
January 27, 2010 – 12:58 pm
As a former management consultant at a firm that specialized in scenario planning, I love reading the sweeping statements and predictions people have made that have turned out to be wildly wrong. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943 “There is no reason anyone [...]
October 15, 2009 – 12:21 am
Stewart Brand is an intellectual magpie, drawing on an incredibly wide variety of sources for his new book Whole Earth Discipline. Fans of Brand will not be surprised at much of the content, as he has written earlier on similar subjects: the scope and scale of climate change, the dynamism of megacities, the controversy and [...]
August 26, 2009 – 11:36 pm
IBM technologist Jeff Jonas thrives on big data sets and personally identifiable information (“PII”). He built his career catching Vegas casino cheats by correlating database records, and now develops “next generation identity analytics” at IBM. I don’t consider myself a privacy fanatic, but I still count a document Jonas compiled on the vast amount of [...]
Former GBN co-worker and Worldchanging buddy Jamais Cascio is in the spotlight this month with two simultaneous big media articles: a WSJ story on geoengineering and an Atlantic story on enhanced cognition. Both have been long-time interest areas of many futurists and foresight groups, but rarely have they gotten airtime like this. Cheers to Jamais [...]
Informative piece from the Wilson Quarterly on recent demographic projections. With such a long-term view, it is typical for small changes in assumptions (e.g., country birthrate shifts) to register major changes in actual numbers. What is atypical, however, is how quickly many of our demographic assumptions have shifted over the past few years. Something dramatic [...]
January 2, 2009 – 3:36 pm
The 2009 EDGE annual question is out: “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” Given that there are over a hundred responses from the Brockman mafia of brainy third culture types so far, I decided to condense the text of every answer into a Wordle in hopes of one-stop [...]
Dan Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) sees oil rising to $150 before policy, technology, and alternative fuels collectively put a halt to the run-up. At the heart of the Break Point scenario is a slow pace of growth in liquids supply that reflects the range of aboveground risks. “Decision making to facilitate new development [...]
DARPA-funded quadruped robot BigDog has officially descended into the uncanny valley. Congrats to DARPA for fifty years of disruptive technology development. The DARPA scientists I have met and worked with have to a person been fascinating individuals working on very tough problems. I don’t always support the military end goal that DARPA projects seek to [...]
