Blogs

When (and if) super-intelligent AI arrives mid-century, will it be Friendly or Unfriendly? Averting a "nerdocalypse" is a primary goal of the Singularity Institute, sponsor of last weekend's (August 14-15) Singularity Summit in San Francisco's Embarcadero Hyatt.

Hi,

My name is Ken Harris. For those of you who don't know me, I am Secretary of the World Future Society and an active member of the Washington, DC, chapter of the World Future Society. My futures consultancy is called The Consilience Group, LLC, and you can read more about me and it at www.theconsiliencegroup.com.

Social networking is now more popular online than email and pornography. But while much of its growth is simply people connecting to friends or reading blogs to do their jobs better, an ideology about social media has taken root. And it’s flourishing largely by offering a utopic vision of the future.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about outsourcing – the movement of work to other entities and other places. The most contentious part of that issue was offshoring – the movement of work and jobs to other countries. However, the real issue for the future is othersourcing – the increasing ability to have work done not only off-site and by other entities, but by non-humans.

Welcome! I’m delighted to re-launch my Selling Tomorrows blog on the World Future Society’s new website. As you may know from posts during the beta, I study futurism but am not a futurist.

I don’t create visions of tomorrow -- I take them apart to learn why they work.

Why? So glad you asked.

A:

> p. 9, Artificial Scientist Test: Almost every human can't do this. Are you suggesting that most humans don't have human-level intelligence?? (None of us have gotten a Nobel Prize!) It is important to set the bar at a reasonable level.

Google and Verizon have gone public with a joint policy framework that will have enormous ramifications for the future of the Internet as we know it. You can read it here (PDF).

Storytelling is as old as human history. Traditionally, we have thought of all stories as having a beginning, a middle and an end. But it appears that the non-linear approach is becoming more common in the world today. The popular filmmaker Christopher Nolan exemplifies this approach in his movies. Back in 2000, his film Memento told the story of a man whose memory does not exist.

Urban Chinese society is also undergoing changes, as the rituals of courtship, and traditional definitions of family, are challenged. Rapid modernization has led the country to undergo enormous changes. Sex ratios are becoming skewed in much of the world thanks in part to a growing global imbalance of male-to-female ratios.

“If you were advising your twenty-something children about investing in a pension, where would you advise them to invest?”