July-August 2009

Stephen Thaler’s Imagination Machines

Inventor Stephen Thaler discusses his revolutionary form of AI — a highly proficient synthetic consciousness that has quietly existed for more than 30 years.

Assessing Global Trends for 2025

In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council released a landmark study, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. The report lays out the possibility of a future very different from the reality to which most of the world is accustomed. THE FUTURIST asked four experts — Newt Gingrich, Elaine C. Kamarck, Peter Schiff, Dennis Kucinich — for their views on the report’s key forecasts and what the future of the United States, Asia, and the global economy looks like now, in the wake of the global financial crisis. PDF Available

World Trends and Forecasts

Government Are Small Governments Getting Too Big? Local and state governments in the U.S. may be restricting individual rights.

Technology

Building the Internet of the Future

More fibers, faster downloads are key to more capable Internet.

Economics

Internet Fraud on the Rise

Spike in Internet crime complaints concerns U.S. law enforcement.

Tomorrow in Brief

Ice That “Burns”

Trouble Ahead for Suburbanites?

Sunny—with a 50% Chance of Migraine!

Rising Sea Levels Will Threaten New York

WordBuzz: Open Dictionary

Books

Big Ideas for Saving the Earth

Some of the most thoughtful work on the topic of climate change appears in Jamais Cascio’s new e-book, Hacking the Earth. Cascio is a Bay Area futurist who worked with Global Business Network during the 1990s and is currently a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a global futures strategist at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Review by Bob Olson

How Evolution Is Evolving

Mainstream science maintains that humans stopped evolving about 50,000 years ago. Civilization put an end to process. Therefore, the human of the pre-modern era is the human of today and will be the human tomorrow, right? Not so fast, say scientists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. In The 10,000 Year Explosion, they argue that humankind is evolving even faster in the modern age. We developed new genetic traits as recently as the Middle Ages. The Ashkenazi (or European) Jews, for instance, don’t just seem smarter; they demonstrate a genetic predisposition toward higher intelligence. By Patrick Tucker