Blogs

For me, 2011 was highlighted by two events. The first was a trip to the global HRD Conference in Mumbai to talk about Leadership and the Long Term Perspective. This was very well received and I came home with a plaque, trophy, video and terrific memories. The second event was in July when I flew to Vancouver for the WFS conference and The APF meeting. A great time with old and new friends in one of my favorite cities.

V. Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer.

In the March 2012 Wired, an article on the Jerusalem syndrome, the religion-related psychosis associated with visits to Jerusalem ("The God Complex"). The article doesn't really develop any new angles on this culture-bound syndrome, but its appearance in Wired is important. My thought: while we may never travel to Jerusalem, our future will be the Jerusalem Syndrome. Now that we have crossed the tipping point of urbanization (over 50% of the world's population as of 2007), all of us have an opportunity to be overwhelmed and enraptured by our urban lives: the Baltimore syndrome.

Cruising at 34,000 feet back to DC on Southwest flight 891, I'm taking some time to reflect on my days at SXSW2012. If you've never experienced the conference, let me tell you that it's hard to make it through without feeling drained. And no, that's not from the drinking.

Question (to me): What was the most amazing session you saw at SXSW this year?
I only managed to catch two of the four keynote presentations this year, but both of them were huge highlights for me and many other attendees at SXSW 2012.

If you could improve your body, would you do it? It seems a simple enough question with a simple enough answer.

But what if that improvement meant incorporating a mechanical device into your body? Suddenly the question isn’t so simple, is it? And if that integration required the prior removal of a limb, say an arm or a hand, that decision becomes even more complex and controversial.

The topic of artificial intelligence was front and center at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive Conference...the result, I suspect, of Apple launching Siri around the time the panels were selected. Amber Case, a self-styled "Cyborg Anthropologist" got us started off right with a keynote Sunday about the recent history of man's merge with machine.

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.