Archive by Author
Stepping Back: The Strange Pace of Change
As a futurist, I’m usually watching the leading edge of change: new user interfaces, new ideas, new products. But a futurist also has to think about the way the past impacts the future. About the way living history keeps the future coming a little slower. This past week, six of us took the Coast Starlight [...]
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The Way We Interact
We typically talk to our computers through a set of buttons that transmit one letter of a command at a time, a mouse that can select whole words or phrases, and a smallish glass-like window where we see what we’re saying. We typically do that sitting down and a little hunched over – that’s exactly [...]
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Balancing Powers: The Importance of Seeing Clearly
In America, we are used to thinking of a balance of three powers: the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive. These are directly government, but if you think of government as power, think again. There are at least two other forces that matter as much. Corporate influence is of particular interest because it can align [...]
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Question About the Future: Recruiting the Retired, Our Aging Workforce
Our most recent question about the future is from Deb Palmer, of Washington State Dept of Natural Resources, who asks: “I’d be interested on your thoughts about the workforce—we’re starting to see shortages in some fields. The predictions are that the median age of the middle-class worker will continue to rise. What do we as [...]
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Reading Recommendation: The Dalai Lama on Science and Spirituality
I’ve been listening to The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, by the Dalai Lama. There are strong insights in it about both topics – spirituality and science. There are great stories about many of the famous people in science and about the upbringing of tibetan monks. But that isn’t [...]
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Transparency Endangered in France
Apparently there is a custom followed by some French youths to incite violence, often involving innocent strangers, film the violent acts, and publish the resulting video on the web. The term for this is “Happy Slapping.” French authorities, understandably, want to stop this. They’ve picked the wrong method: a law against any posting of violent [...]
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Robotics: We Seem to be Getting Passed Again!
I noticed a CNN article about a Japanese robot serving tea today. Bill Gates wrote an article about robotics that appeared in Scientific American in January, where he makes the case that robotics today is where PC manufacturing was about the time Bill Gates and others started Microsoft. I think he’s right, and that Japan [...]
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Should we be Optimistic?
A number of the futurist email lists I belong to have been full of questions about how optimistic we should be about the future. Some of the discussion is about whether Ray Kurzweil’s predictions will come true as soon as he thinks (will we have artificial intelligence in 2030 or 2050 or 2070?). Others are [...]
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Follow-up to Global Warming vs. Space Race
Synchronicity, or maybe just the luck of a vague clue about the issues, strikes today. I posted yesterday about a coming budget tension between space (defense, weapons, and exploration) and climate change mitigation. Well, today, Wired is displaying an article headlined: Bush Budget Funds NASA, Cuts EPA, by Luke O’Brien. The article suggests that we [...]
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The Tension Between Global Warming and the Space Program
There has always been tension between space exploration and everything else. Expect that tension to become visible again soon. The fiscal drain of the Iraq war will be set against two needs with far greater long-term impact on our future than the war. First, there will be more demand for funding for climate change mitigation. [...]
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