Richard Yonck's blog

With the arrival of the 2012 Olympic Games, we find ourselves focused on the extremes of human performance. But what happens when we reach the natural limits of human ability? What happens when the last record has been broken?

In futures thinking as in life, often it’s important to look back in order to look ahead. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, offering the perfect opportunity to do both.

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.

It seems a day doesn't pass that we don't hear of yet another advancement that will change and improve our lives. Unfortunately, such advances can also have a very negative impact on the welfare of the people and society they should be improving.

At the closing plenary of WorldFuture 2011 in Vancouver, Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute presented Eight Grand Challenges for humanity. It was a thought provoking presentation, though not without its critics.

Recently, SF author Charles Stross posted his thoughts on why he doesn't think the Technological Singularity will happen. Here's why I think he may be wrong.

Today TOP500 released their latest rankings, which put Japan's K Computer in the number one spot with 8.162 petaflops, a jump of more than three times the performance of the now number two Tianhe-1A. How was such a sharp increase realized and what does it mean for supercomputing in the future?

The last few years finally saw the arrival of supercomputers capable of petascale performance. In all, seven systems from the US, China, Japan and France achieved the milestone of processing a million billion floating point operations per second (flops) by the end of 2010. But even before this target was reached, computer scientists and engineers were setting their sights on an even loftier goal: Exascale computing.

I consider myself a techno-optimist, but Watson's performance in Jeopardy's IBM Challenge has definitely exceeded my expectations. While I did predict Watson would win the competition, I didn't think it would be so dominant.

If, like me, you find President Obama's already overused "Win the Future" catchphrase catching in your throat, you might also be wondering how he decided on this feel-good, but nonsensical slogan. It seems incredible that an administration that so readily talks about future technologies doesn't give better consideration to the strategies behind their promotion. Reducing the dialog to the metaphor of competition diminishes it before it has even gotten started.