Accelerating Progress: How to Thrive in an Ever Faster, Smarter, Smaller, Richer, Freer, Stabler World

This talk will give you an overview of how and why our world gets faster and better every decade, and how to see and benefit from the next great steps in the human adventure. Specifically, I will tell you ten tales of the future, in Science and Nanotech, Communications and Computing, Media and Education, Wealth and Work, Cities and Urban Life, Health and Longevity, Politics and Laws, Privacy and Security, Resources and Environment, and Death and Afterlife. In each, we’ll consider some predictable “developmental” futures, and a sampling of the many unpredictable “evolutionary” paths we could take to these inevitable futures. The developmental destinations aren’t really in our control, they are predictable physical and informational processes likely to be very similar on all Earth-like planets in our universe. It is the evolutionary paths that we control, and where our greatest responsibility and moral choice lie.