Sci/Tech

The president’s State of the Union Speech was - at long last - the one I wanted him to give. It went after the very poison that has so sickened the United States of America. His call for us to shake off the Cult of Future-Hatred, indulged in by both right and left, was about urging us to start looking forward again, instead of to some mythically better past.

Futurist Film Studies Week continues (concludes, actually) with a brief review of the biographical documentary Transcendent Man, one of two movies intended to introduce Ray Kurzweil’s ideas to a larger audience. The other, a feature-length film version of The Singularity Is Near, directed by Kurzweil along with Anthony Waller and Toshi Hoo, is currently making the rounds on the film festival circuit. Filmmaker Robert Barry Ptolemy and subject Ray Kurzweil are currently screening Transcendent Man in various cities around the country. The full schedule of upcoming appearances and events is on the film’s Web site.

While different futurist-technologist teams and projects are focused on a wide range of topics, 6 grand challenges are more remarkable as they will impact at least one billion people’s lives over the next decade.

Where Are We Going?

On January 13, 2011, IBM's Watson supercomputer competed in a practice round of Jeopardy, marking a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence.

I've been reading Orvar Löfgren's and Billy Ehn's The Secret World of Doing Nothing (University of California, 2010) in preparation for the Spring semester. It's the first time I've used a work of ethnology (i.e., a comparison of different cultures) in the classroom, as opposed to the conventional, in-depth monographs that are the bread and butter of US anthropology.

What will the television-watching experience be like 20 years from now? Will watching TV still be a communal experience? Will we be looking at a device, or will the image be projected? Or will it appear on some sort of digital wallpaper? Will it be portable? Will it be 2D, 3D, or perhaps 4D or 5D? Will it be interactive, reactive, immersive, or participative?

On a recent cold and windy December night, in an office park in northern Virginia, a group of technology industry professionals were holding a fashion show. Volunteers walked the runway in "geek chic" outfits that alternately displayed sophisticated gadgetry and referenced iconic pop culture franchises.

The New York Times has been adding blog content to its online site. One of the most interesting (and most surprising) additions to the unfortunately named "Opinionator" section has been "The Stone," a forum edited by Simon Critchley, chair of the department of philosophy of New School in New York, that began in May.

Smart systems are miniaturized devices that incorporate functions of sensing, actuation and finally control. They are capable of analyzing a situation or problem and taking decisions based on the available data in a predictive or adaptive manner. The goal is that these systems are able to act in a smart way without human interference.