Top 10 Dystopian Future Films

This is a very good list of the top ten "dystopian" films ever made. Each film communicates its own warning about possible futures worth avoiding. Check out the list at TakePart blog. The blog provides action links related to the issues raised in each film.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Climate Change: Two Book Reviews

I’ve read a lot of books about climate change in the past few years. Two of the most stunning are essentially picture books. I think I know why they had a bigger impact on me than traditional books. When I talk with people about climate change, the ones who live close to the land all, universally, get the stakes. They seem to have a serious sadness, and a fierce determination about them. They know what’s at stake personally – this tree, that animal, this lake, that beach. There’s some variation on how much is our fault and what we should do about it, but there’s no doubt about it happening. When you know nature, and you’ve been watching the last decade or so, rapid climate change is fact. If I’m talking to people who live in cities, many of them are either serious skeptics, or appear to be imitating Chicken Little. These two picture books show us what’s at stake, with the usual power of great photography to speak volumes of words.

The first book is Storm Chaser, A Photographer's Journey, by Jim Reed. Storm Chaser relates well to my own predictions about climate change for 2008, which include more weird weather. The book is a series of beautifully presented professional photographs of storms, and might be worth buying just for the photos. But its real strength is in the straightforward narrative about global warming and climate change. Storm Chaser is organized by season, and each season includes a discussion of storm chasing and of the beauty and mystery of that season. This discussion - and the accompanying photos - show how climate change is now a central thread for people fascinated by powerful weather. It is the elephant in the sky that can't be ignored. The website for Storm Chaser is beautiful, by the way, although only worth visiting with a fast connection.

The second is Vanishing World, the Endangered Arctic, by Mirelle de la Lez and Frederik Granath. The photos are stunning. Unlike Storm Chaser, where the narrative is as important as the photos, Vanishing World is clearly about the pictures. Each shot is spectacular, designed, I believe, to make the reader fall in love with the arctic. To make us see the stakes. Not that the text isn’t moving…it says things like “Old ice…is a tremendous source of information for scientists. It is an archive of the earth’s climate. Dating back thousands of years. When we lose our glaciers, we lose our history.”

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Aging, Health and the Long Term

One of the great thinkers on the future is Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, and The Singularity is Near. A couple of years ago at a meeting of the World Future Society I heard Ray speak, and after the talk during Q&A, a 90-year old man in the audience asked, "How much longer will I need to live, in order to live forever?" It sounds like a crazy question, but Ray had argued that given the current rate of advance in biotech, nanotech and medical IT, it is logical to assume that at some time in the relatively near future the human life span (which has more than tripled in a few hundred years) will begin to increase one year for every year that goes by; in other words, life extension into the infinite future. In aswering the man's question Ray said, it looked like to him about ten years - that if you could hang on for ten more years, then life would begin to extend another year on an annual basis.

Now, this seems too optimistic to me, and if it is indeed a probable future is not likely to be real for some 25 to 100 years. Never-the-less, when we consider the current societal impacts of aging, and then ponder a world in which 100, 120, 150 years old might be common, then we imagine a new world.

A leader in the study of the potential of nanotechnology, Ray was recently interviewed on the future of human health. You can access the audio and the transcript here at Living on Earth. In the interview, Ray discussed among other things the prospect of nanomachines integrating with biology and becoming part of us:

Ah, if you talk to a human in 2035- biological human- they're going to have a lot of non-biological thinking going on inside their brain- it's going to be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking. And the non-biological thinking will expand because of this law of accelerating returns not because it's self-replicating, because that's just the nature of our technology- it doubles in capability every year. But in my view it is still human thinking. It's an expansion of our civilization, which has always been a human-machine civilization.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Yes We Can

Worth watching. As a former speech teacher I love great speaking.

From dipdive.com

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

China Preferred for R&D

It turns out that China is emerging as the preferred global location for doing research and development.

Here are some key facts as summarized at Angry Bear blog.

The original article.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

21st Century Oil Scenarios from Shell

This just hit the web at OilDrum, news of new future scenarios from Shell. Known for their scenario work in the past, the CEO of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, sent this memo to Shell employees, and released it on the Shell website.

What does it say? That the energy picture is changing rapidly. Two alternate scenarios, "scramble" and "blueprints" take us to the same future:

Regardless of which route we choose, the world’s current predicament limits our room to maneuver. We are experiencing a step-change in the growth rate of energy demand due to rising population and economic development. After 2015, easily accessible supplies of oil and gas probably will no longer keep up with demand.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Future Proof Your College

I want to alert those of you interested in the future of higher education to a new book, Future Proof Your College, by Michael Heppell. (I see it is currently unavailable at Amazon U.S., a few copies at Amazon.UK - more on the way.)

This book primarily consists of edited interviews with a variety of experts, employers and college personnel, focused obviously on how to best prepare for the future.

I spent a pleasant hour last Autumn with Michael, who is based in the UK. (Thus the book has a focus on what they refer to as “further education” in the UK.) We discussed for Chapter 26 the major patterns that I see impacting higher education – aging, global emphasis on advanced education for long term success (both for individuals and for national economies) and the ever-continuing information technology revolution.

Regarding the latter, I have suggested for some time to higher education institutions that campuses will remain into the future, but the activities on those campuses will evolve. That, is it seems to me that students will continue to seek out learning communities including residential ones. But, while in residence on one campus or in one community, students may obtain a third or half off their credits via the global information network. This means that colleges will need to adjust to providing high-end IT facilities, such as true telepresence (HP version, Cisco version), and change their credit granting and financial policies to enable locally enrolled students to get much of their education “off campus” as it were.

A couple of days ago the Seattle Post Intelligencer, in a front-page story about community colleges in the state of Washington provided evidence for this trend. In a story entitled “A change in course for college classes,” and subtitled, “Students flocking to online study as a flexible way to work for a degree,” you learn that in the 2006-2007 year 70,000 students enrolled in online universities. This compares to 40,000 four years earlier, a near doubling in four years. This trend has long been anticipated but now is happening due to better technology, more offerings, and perhaps mostly because the digital generation is now the dominant student group.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Economic Meltdown – How Far and What to Do?

Last September (2007) I had occasion to keynote the annual Housing Conference in Washington State. In that speech I suggested to a skeptical audience of housing, building, and real estate officials that the debt problem then appearing was deeper and more structural than currently accepted. The economic indicators, stock market performance, and general near panic in official circles in the past week suggest that my analysis, not unique but unusual at the time, was correct.

This past week we heard the first proposals to shore up the general economy from Democrats and the President. The problem, however, is deep and structural and even cultural. It has to do with energy, with lifestyle, with the shape and form of what we build, and with global politics, and more.

One of most provocative and controversial observers of this scene is James Kunstler. His observations will usually take you over the edge where you peer into a true crisis. But, if you ignore this view you may miss the starker challenges that we face. His most recent blog entry, "Disarray," is one of his best, because it summarizes the data has he sees it, then goes beyond that to list steps that he believes must be taken, soon. These include, stop highway building and instead start building rail, end subsidies to big ag and instead direct dollars to small local farmers, begin planning and construction of harbor and river shipping facilities (less energy intensive shipping), re-direct new development, decide about nuclear power, prepare for the end of current global commerce as currently conducted, prepare psychologically to downscale, take a time out from immigration, prepare for a lot of paper "wealth" to disappear, prepare for a psychology of resentment.

Some of Jim's solutions here are perhaps cases of constant solutions in search of problems to attach themselves to (i.e., his preferred future vision), but this is a useful list of thinking to be considering as the economy plays out in the next months and years.

For a similar analysis of the current economic situation, and another constantly excellent source on economic trends, see the Bondadd Blog. Also available frequently at the Daily Kos.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

The Future of Communication and Conversation

This episode of Future Talks is on the question of what is the future of communication and converstion.

The proliferation of communication technologies is influencing not only what it means to be in touch with our networks of family, friends, and colleagues, but also with ourselves. In observing the ways in which communication—and its more nuanced cousin, conversation—are evolving, we have a chance to reflect on what it means to be connected. The wide-ranging technologies bring a variety of usage styles, defined in part by generational preferences, but also influenced the attraction of novelty.

Brevity is the soul of bits. Studies of online communication done in the 1980’s already pointed to the shortening of messages that is now de rigueur in the world of IM and internet chat. We find politeness often sacrificed in the truncated exchanges, which permit less time for the niceties of face-to-face conversation. But parallel to this, especially among the Digital Natives, we also find that the quickness of messaging and variety of gadgets leads to a type of multi-conversational, multi-media, multi-tasking that allows users to live in a state of near constant electronic contact—a manner of being in the world unknown to previous generations, and one that brings with it different rules of engagement.

To arrive at a complete picture of communication in the digital age, however, we must note that video is on the rise (in contradiction to the expectation that we wouldn’t want to see ourselves “talk on the phone”), and coffee shops, travel opportunities, and social memberships abound—suggesting that we are still very much in tune to our need for a full-on, in person experience of ourselves as part of the human family. The challenge would appear to lie in finding opportunities to productively tune out, capturing the moments of quiet reflection that give our lives depth and balance.

In fact, as each wave of communication innovation subsumes the one that came before, we expect one of our greatest challenges to be not the integration of the technologies, but the ability to remove ourselves from constant connectivity. Will we find ourselves vacationing in electronic communication free zones? Will the Slow Food movement find a new voice in Slow Talk? Whether it is with others or with ourselves, we may the old Ma Bell jingle has a new imperative: “Unplug, unplug and touch someone.”

This program and all the Future Talks programs are available at Media Conversations, both for viewing and as MP3 downloads. And the entire series can be obtained as free podcasts from iTunes. (At the iTunes store, search for “media conversations.”)

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

The Writers’ Strike: a Word

The American Film Institute identified the writers’ strike as the most significant industry event of 2007. Posing questions about how an audience will “receive its storytelling in the years to come, and how creators will be paid for their work,” the Institute’s focus points up two compelling questions tied into the explosion of digital media: who’s creating the material, and how can professional wordsmiths remain competitive?

The quickly rising acceptance of user-generated platforms for creating media is bringing new storytellers into the fold. We have an increase in the numbers of people viewing video online, as well as those generating content. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported an increase from 33% in 2006 to almost 50% in 2007 among visitors to YouTube and other video sharing sites (at least one analyst suggests this uptick to be a direct result of the writers’ strike). The number of these sites continues to grow, as do the users who are creating the content they carry. The Long Tail is growing.

But for the professional bards of our age—those writers whose work we depend upon for their cogent insights, quick wits, and ability to sustain compelling narratives across the arc of a television season—the expanding digital technology poses a tremendous threat in the potential loss of residual payments, which make up a substantial portion of a writer’s salary. Many writers feel they got the short end of the stick when residuals were negotiated for DVD releases, and they want stronger protections out of the gate for Internet downloads. Producers maintain it’s too early to tell what this would look like, and propose a three year evaluation period.

Three years is a long time in the land of the Long Tail. We see the moment coming soon in music distribution when licensing replaces residuals, allowing the artist to draw income through usage fees instead of royalties. Whether this is practical or sustaining in the more resource intensive world of movie and television production is unclear. In the meantime, Steven Colbert’s debut this week as a “writer-less” writer (he, like other members of the Writers Guild, is barred from contributing writing to his own show), spoofed the dilemma to the extreme: without the writers, there was no Word.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, consultant, blogger, internet TV show host and founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.