A WorldFuture Sneak Preview: William Crossman, Erica Orange, and John Smart

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.

William Crossman

Hailed by the New York Daily News as a “visionary for the twenty-first century,” philosopher and linguist William Crossman has made a name for himself with his advocacy for visual multimedia and voice-recognition software. This gamut of technologies, he predicts, will render written language obsolete and usher in a worldwide renaissance of communication by sound and image. He described this media revolution and why he looks forward to it in his book Voice In Voice Out: The Coming Age of Talking Computers (Regent Press, 2004). He continues to stump for text-free multimedia as director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures, which he founded.

What will this explosion of visual and auditory media mean for art? Crossman will answer that question in his upcoming Toronto conference session, “Exploring the Future Arts: Graphic, Sonic, Kinetic.” Crossman foresees electronic media galvanizing art worldwide by making possible new combinations of sound, graphics, and patterned movement. Session attendees will learn about the new formats and techniques, how artists exercise creativity while satisfying mass audiences, and how artists and their patrons can better promote, finance, and expand the reach of the arts far and wide.

Erica Orange

Today’s young career-seekers face a rapidly changing job market. Luckily, they have Erica Orange to help keep them up to speed. Vice president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.—a futurist consulting firm that advises clients on marketing, product development, strategic planning, investments, human resources, and public affairs—she has firsthand expertise on the trends and technologies that are reshaping workplaces, employment, and career development everywhere. And she is devoted to sharing what she knows with the new generations: For four years, she chaired the Adjunct Board of Directors for ThinkQuest NYC, an annual competition in which student teams build educational Web sites; and she currently serves on Devry University’s Career Advisory Board.

Orange has attended the World Future Society’s annual WorldFuture conference for both of the past two years. She will return this year to co-host with Jared Weiner a third conference session, “Cultural Shifts Among Global Youths: Part III.” Participants will get a robust review of the social, social, technological, economic, political, demographic, and environmental trends that are currently impacting the future of young people around the world, and the strategies that will help young people and their elders alike to meet the looming challenges.

John Smart

It’s a rare speaker who can engage audiences equally in corporate board rooms, university classrooms, and on stage at Burning Man Festival, Nevada’s notorious, annual desert rite of radical self-expression and edgy creativity. John Smart is such a speaker. He’s founder and president of the futurist firm Acceleration Studies Foundation, a respected associate professor of emerging technologies at the University of Advancing Technology, and sits on the Advisory Board member at numerous global futures institutions, including Singularity University. He is also the recurring host of Futurecamp, a Burning Man mainstay that Australian reviewer Amplfy.com describes as “legendary.”

No matter where he is, Smart is a compelling guide to the forces of accelerating technological change, evolutionary development, and social resiliency. You’ll find him at this year’s WorldFuture conference, where he will present on “Chemical Brain Preservation: How to Live ‘Forever.’” He will describe the procedure, now in development, by which doctors might remove a dying person’s brain and preserve it in full, with all of the person’s stored memories and knowledge, so that he or she can be revived at a later date. Smart will forecast when this procedure might debut, and what implications it holds for medicine and society.