futurism
jdupuis | July 27, 2010A few months ago I posted a fairly long essay on how I was approaching the challenge of thinking about the future. I modelled myself on a few articles by futurist Jamais Casico and focused on why thinking about the future matters, finding the right questions to ask about the future and recognizing that the future arises out of the present.
This time around, I'll use a few more of Casico's articles to explore further the challenges of thinking about the future, specifically mapping the possibilities (Parts I and II) and Writing Scenarios.
Mapping the Possibilities
As we scan the environment,…
jdupuis | March 19, 2010John Scalzi's latest AMC column Why Hollywood Always, Always Gets the Future Wrong is, as usual, very smart and right on target.
And pretty funny too.
Everybody gets the future wrong. It's not just Hollywood or science fiction writers. When it comes to the future, no one knows anything. At the close of the 19th century, British physicist Lord Kelvin declared heavier-than-air flight an impossibility (despite the existence of, you know, birds) and that radio was just a fad. In the '70s, the president of Digital Equipment Corp. voiced doubts that anyone would ever need a personal computer. In…
sciencepunk | August 13, 2009"Our emotional intelligence is not just a sideshow to human intelligence,
it's the cutting edge"
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. And for good reason: Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the…