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What will historians say about our time 100 years from now? How will our world be remembered? According to Lawrence Summers, economist and former President of Harvard, a civilization's legacy has more to do with the work of its many teachers and thinkers -- artists, scientists, writers, philosophers -- than with the elite few who hold positions of power in the political sphere. (Summers should know: he spent two years as Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, and two as an advisor to President Obama.)
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The Internet allows us to do all kinds of things we never imagined possible. It lets us communicate with people across the world. We can learn whatever we want at the click of a button. We can navigate roads using our iPhones, and translate languages within seconds. It makes us smarter, and more versatile, and faster than ever. But the Web isn’t just a truly extraordinary invention, it is the apex of human evolution — and the ultimate evolutionary adaptation. It may seem strange to think of the Web as part of the process of natural selection, but Raymond Neubauer, a professor at the University of Texas, doesn’t think so. In his far-reaching new book, “Evolution and the Emergent Self,” he argues that technology should be seen as part of our planet’s grand evolutionary narrative. He claims that two evolutionary strategies — one, emphasizing simplicity and rapid reproduction (as in bacteria), and the other, emphasizing complexity and hyper-intelligence (as in humans) — have been hugely successful in dominating the planet. The book charts the ways those strategies have managed to pop up everywhere from the animal kingdom to cellphones. Via Wildcat2030
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Walking by a billboard ad in the future might be a bit like stepping on a scale and for advertisers, your weight is valuable.
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On the role of sanitation and energy in fostering progress on a finite planet.
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What corporate-driven science has in mind for the future of humanity is far different from the dreamy utopian landscape that's been portrayed by the mainstream media. Via Panayiotis
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Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.
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By 2075, Twitter will be used by disembodied sprits (e.g. dead people) to send messages to the living. These "spirits" will be the minds of uploaded people who have died, live in "Afterlife Chips," and who will want quick convenient communication paths to the "living." The material in this article is presented in final format in my book The Heaven Virus. Cliff twitters at twitter.com/pickover
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In his Paleofuture blog, Matt Novak reminds us that our big new ideas (Skype, Segway) were actually dreamed up decades, and even centuries, ago.
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It's obvious that time has a direction: you were younger a decade ago than you are today. But according to the laws of physics, there is no intrinsic difference between the past and the future. In our latest One-Minute Physics animation, guest narrator Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, explains why a better understanding of the big bang will help explain the arrow of time.
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War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau set the template for today's bleak science fiction, from Alien to The Terminator.
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This is what you’d call efficient. In two minutes, we watch our planet take form. 600 million years of geological history whizzes by in a snap. Then we see what the next 100 million years may have in store for us. If you don’t have the patience to watch 700 million years unfold in 180 seconds (seriously?), then we’ll give you this spoiler: Coastal real estate is not a long-term buy…
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What’s next? If we had a supercomputer that could predict the future, we would tell you. Then again, if the past is any guide, the predictions would certainly be wrong. This special issue takes a many-faceted look at a set of technologies that are changing the world in more ways than could ever have been foreseen. Some things are clear already: The world of innovation is undergoing tectonic shifts, and the future is likely to look less like Silicon Valley, more like China and Africa. Beyond that? As Theodor Holm Nelson points out in the essay that concludes this issue, we are definitely headed somewhere: “A wall? A cliff? A new dawn? We must choose wisely, as if we could.”
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From scheduling conference rooms to rooting out incipient tumors, computers that can go to the information that we care greatly about...
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In one of the buildings at NASA's Ames Research Center, within walking distance of the Googleplex, elite groups of very smart people are trying to prepare for a future so advanced we can't even predict what it'll look like. This Singularity University is a hub for forward-thinking experts to learn about robotics, artificial intelligence, and other key technologies of the next century. Via Frederic Emam-Zade Gerardino
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(AP) -- Brighten clouds with sea water? Spray aerosols high in the stratosphere? Paint roofs white and plant light-colored crops? How about positioning 'sun shades' over the Earth?
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Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku describes some of the inventions he thinks will appear in the coming century — including Internet-ready contact lenses, space elevators and driverless cars — in his book Physics of the Future.
Imagine being able to access the Internet through the contact lenses on your eyeballs. Blink, and you'd be online. Meet someone, and you'd have the ability to immediately search their identity. And if your friend happens to be speaking a different language, an instantaneous translation could appear directly in front of you. That might sound farfetched, but it's something that might very well exist in 30 years or less, says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. "The first people to buy these contact lenses will be college students studying for final exams," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "They'll see the exam answers right in their contact lenses. ... In a cocktail party, you will know exactly who to suck up to, because you'll have a complete read out of who they are. President Barack Obama will buy these contact lenses, so he'll never need a teleprompter again. ... These already exist in some form [in the military]. You place [a lens] on your helmet, you flip it down, and immediately you see the Internet of the battlefield ... all of it, right on your eyeball." Via Wildcat2030
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Can we capture richness of human creativity in computational models?
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From
io9
The map focuses on six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research. We are delighted to share the map with you, under a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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Areas of science with a transformative impact over the next decade: The Future of Science 2021 via @boinboing http://t.co/bCjxog55 #in...
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When will we be able to enter a room and create an imaginary scenario so realistic that it seems as if we are really there? Sooner than you thin... Via Anise Smith, ABroaderView
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Robo-bar staff, even robo-sex and hotel rooms that change colour, could be commonplace in future travel scenario. Tourism futurologist Ian Yeoman from University of Wellington, New Zealand, said that by 2050 mass tourism would spawn a range of new indoor tourism products. It would include indoor artificial ski centres, circuses, zoos, golf courses and recreated landscapes, as well as giant cruise ships, according to a Wellington statement. Even robot 'prostitutes'' that would not pass on diseases such as HIV could make an appearance, said Yeoman.
's comment October 13, 2011 8:05 AM
Tourism futurologist? The dream job I never heard of! Very interesting but sounds too much like fantasy. Only time will tell, thank you for sharing.
Sakis Koukouvis's comment,
October 14, 2011 3:08 AM
Yes it seems an ideal job ;-)
The time testifies everything!
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In this fantastic clip from a 1964 BBC Horizon program — the same series that to this day explores such illuminating topics as the nature of reality, the age-old tension between science and religion, how music works, and what time really is — legendary science fiction writer, inventor, and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future.
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