Blogs

Come to the WorldFuture Conference in Toronto this July, and you’ll meet innovators and experts from far and wide, all gathered to present on where the world is heading. Here are a few of the many great minds you’ll get to see.

ONE -- Just because futurologists tend to be both foolish and wrong doesn't mean it is always foolish to point out in public places that they are, indeed, wrong.

TWO -- In an era of urgent technodevelopmental quandaries it is actually crucial to understand technoscience questions and their developmental and distributional effects, and every second displaced onto hyperbolic futurological wish-fulfillment fantasizing and disasterbation is a second lost to that deliberation, every techo-transcendentalizing framing of the issues deranges that deliberation from sense into nonsense.

The year is 2032. You have just celebrated your 80th birthday and you have some tough decisions ahead. You can either keep repairing your current body or move into a new one.

The growing of “blank” bodies has become all the rage, and by using your own genetic material, body farmers can even recreate your own face at age 20.

In just 20 years, this is an industry that has moved from the equivalent of Frankenstein’s laboratory to the new celebrity craze, with controversy following it every step of the way.

Computation is mathematical poetry. That may not be self-evident, but when you hear Stephen Wolfram talk about it, there is little doubt. Wolfram arrived to a packed hall at the South by Southwest Interactive conference Sunday, and he came to preach the gospel of computation. It is, he told us, one of the biggest ideas in human history.

Come to the WorldFuture Conference in Toronto this July, and you’ll meet innovators and experts from far and wide, all gathered to present on where the world is heading. Here are a few of the many great minds you’ll get to see.

If you were not at South by Southwest for day #2 of the Interactive sessions, you missed researcher Danah Boyd's truly insightful and thought provoking talk on an issue of critical importance to 21st century society.

I think we all remember the relentless rain that set the film "Blade Runner." It was that type of dystopian gale that soaked Austin, TX yesterday as geeks, techies, designers and, yes, futurists arrived for South By Southwest 2012. One of those futurists, Brian David Johnson, works for Intel and he came to "South by" for a day to talk to us about how the chip manufacturer creates its vision for the future of technology. His message and approach were a welcome contrast to the weather outside.

The “Crisis of Capitalism” has entered a more quiescent phase, leaving massive threats looming overhead like swords of Damocles. After being rocked by financial crises, climate change, political gridlock, and the Middle East in flames, the world seems to have entered an eerie calm reminiscent of the eye of a hurricane.

Question: As physical books go away, and computers and smart devices take their place, at what point does a library stop being a library, and start becoming something else?

Somewhere in the middle of this question lies the nagging fear and anxiety that we see brimming to the top among library insiders.

People who think libraries are going away simply because books are going digital are missing the true tectonic shifts taking place in the world of information.

"But there are no good targets in Afghanistan."

-Donald Rumsfeld, after being told that the 9/11 attacks came from Afghanistan, instead of some place more fun, such as Iraq