Values

According to The Hollywood Reporter, celebrity tech CEO Peter Thiel is upset that movies like The Matrix and Avatar make technological innovation seem "destructive and dysfunctional."

The American dream seems to be changing. It's been classically defined by upward mobility, and possessions including a house and a car, all in service of family. Now, every aspect of that model seems to be shifting, as Americans change what they want to achieve, and why, and what they want to possess.

 
originally posted at The Trends & Foresight Blog

Over the coming years we will be seeing a mass disassembling of traditional schools, with pieces reassembling around some new system architecture. Some of the missing elements are testing centers, micro-credits, and credit banks. Here is a brief overview of how and why this transition is about to occur.

The Future - Six Drivers of Global Change, former Vice President Al Gore replied, "Random House came up with that title." It's not an auspicious beginning to a talk about the perils of the Global Megacrisis, when you more or less say your title was chosen because the marketing team liked it best.

Many years ago when I took a stone sculpture class, I learned that, to see something clearly and accurately, you need to turn it around and view it from another angle.

Marcia Guttentag was a social psychologist at Harvard University who proposed in her book,

“Bank secrecy is essentially eroding before our eyes,” says a recent NPR article. ”I think the combination of the fear factor that has kicked in for not only Americans with money offshore, countries that don’t want to be on the wrong side of this issue and the legislative weight of FATCA means that within three to five years it will be exceptionally difficult for any American to hide money in any financial institution.”

In order to bridge the holidays, while we cruise the Caribbean and use skepticism to stave off the "end of the world"... here’s a classic bit of blather about the future, written way back in the early nineties, when the web was new and when pioneers like former JPL director Bruce Murray were trying out these new conversational methods utilizing a brand new breakthrough called the "world wide web."

Songwriter Gotye has released a YouTube re-mix of his ubiquitous hit "Somebody That I Used to Know" generated from YouTube clips of his fans doing their own covers of that hit. It is a mildly edifying clip, but seems to me far more interesting than the simple tribute we are being told it is, whether a tribute to Gotye's fans, a tribute to the YouTube utility that mediated and indispensably facilitated his fame, or a tribute to Kutiman's fabulous Thru-YOU project.