Futuring

As the summer heat comes blasting across the country, it’s a perfect time to relax in a beach chair by the pool and read a book. Luckily, the World Future Society has a Summer Reading List to help you pick the perfect read. As a bonus, you can come to the WorldFuture 2012 conference in Toronto this July and meet these authors!

“I think envisioning the future is very much at the root of what we do as science-fiction writers,” said Steve Wilson, author of the SF science-fiction audio series The Arbiter Chronicles. “We look at the world today and pick our own piece of it—say, technology—and what it will do Earth, or to society, or to us as humans.”

Eric and I got haircuts yesterday afternoon, and while I was waiting I flipped through magazines.

Here are the online articles and essays that I feel are useful for bringing “newbies” up to speed on some of the main currents of modern transhumanist / radical-futurist / Singularitarian thinking, science and technology.

WorldFuture 2012, the annual conference of the World Future Society, is your opportunity to take part in the biggest discussions of our day.

Register before the price goes up, so you don't miss your chance to meet...

Disney's EPCOT Center pays tribute to Walt Disney’s dream of what the city of the future might look like, or more accurately what that city might contain. This "Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow" would have plenty of robots, to be sure. He envisioned a city that would entertain, inform, foster human connection and collaboration, improve overall quality of life, and serve its inhabitants...And though the two parts of EPCOT are separated from one another for the sake of entertainment, staging and creating the magic for which Disney is so very famous, it’s in the meshing of these two images that a more accurate "city of tomorrow" is realized.

Last week I read a piece in Forbes about how young people today should not complain about "underemployment," the phenomenon of working part-time or at a job unsuited to one's level of education.

When imagining the changes we may see by the turn of the next century, we might no longer find it very useful to look back to changes occurring in the same amount of time in the past. Eighty-eight years ago, in 1924, movies were silent, and the Great Depression was an inconceivable wild card. But change is accelerating exponentially, as The Singularity Is Near author Ray Kurzweil has argued, and the next 88 years could see the equivalent of the last 10,000 years worth of change.

What if we treated the human body as well as car lovers tend their treasured old Volkswagen Beetles? It would mean continuous maintenance, repairing even the most minor bits of damage before they accumulate and ultimately lead to the body’s demise.

We usually think about difficult problems of future and alternative strategies for coping with them, but we rarely find effective solutions.