Blogs

You don't have to be reminded. Forward looking folks know this time of year is when we re-assess our annual donations and find ways to help tilt the scales toward a more favorable tomorrow. But is there an aspect of ultimate self-interest?

Everyone can see that North Korea is trapped in a tragic time-warp, a kind of living museum of 1950s style Cold War socialism. Its political bubble of unreality is likely to burst open with great force well before mid-century.

The BBC reports: The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will study dangers posed by biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and climate change. The scientists said that to dismiss concerns of a potential robot uprising would be "dangerous".

“Look, but don’t touch.”  It’s a common refrain in outdoor education programs for today’s children, and—according to a recent New York Times blog post—it is creating a new generation of kids without much interest in nature.

On Nov 26-28th, I will be speaking at the Creative Innovations 2012 event in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of the conference will be “Wicked Problems, Great Opportunities! Leadership and courage for volatile times.” One rather unusual interview was with The Age Magazine on the future of visual arts. Writer Michael Lallo encouraged me to go a little crazy in our discussions so here is what we talked about.

My blogs over the past few years have agonized over the American Decline, but I was gratified that my last blog forecasting an Obama re-election proved accurate, and I also got the move to collaboration right. Lord knows we futurists need credibility.

A recent article over at io9 offers a rapid-fire scroll of lovely pictures of lovely gardens from Tivoli and Versailles to Suzhou and the Mehtab Bagh. The bright-green images are from Flickr, their vapid captions read like snippets from Wikipedia, but the ideological operation of the article (which may fancy itself "Bright Green") is pure, pernicious futurological bunkum.

According to Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, one of the world’s languages dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will disappear, as young people abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and find that our air is going extinct?

Is it ethical to put money and resources into trying to develop technological enhancements for human capabilities, when there are so many alternative well-tested mechanisms available to address pressing problems such as social injustice, poverty, poor sanitation, and endemic disease? Is that a failure of priority? Why make a strenuous effort in the hope of allowing an elite few individuals to become “better than well”, courtesy of new technology, when so many people are currently so “less than well”?

By Michael Lee

Adopting a satirical tone, self-confessed sceptic Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller The Black Swan ridicules the idea of predicting the future. Instead, he argues that the world is dominated by the impact of rare, unforeseen, random, highly improbable and yet influential events. These Black Swans, he says, happen abruptly, coming from outside the range of our vision.