Links tagged with “futures”
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Station Identification – Petafloptimism
A good turn of the wheel for the brain from Kim Stanley Robinson: “one must be anti-anti-utopian”.
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E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The strengths of the academic enterprise (EWD 1175)
“The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans.” (via FaveJet)
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Scenario Magazine
“The magazine about tomorrow – made in collaboration with writers, thinkers, & artists from around the globe.” Quarterly. hadn’t heard of this. (via Ask MetaFilter)
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Top 20 most impactful Foresight & Futures Studies publications in the last 20 years – Rafael Popper’s Blog
All since I studied it. (via Houston Futures)
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Mansionism 1: Building-Milieu Fit
One post in and I’m enjoying this new blogchain looking at which possible futures would be a good fit for mansions.
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Notes on some artefacts | The Monthly
“It is impossible to say whether this is a bot account, though, because conservatives appear to be modelling their online presences on bots.” Good stuff. Like pointing out how much stuff around now is Gibson-esque.
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Setting up a horizon scanning system | Hinesight….for Foresight
Andy Hines on setting one up for the US Forest Service.
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Happy 21st Century! - Charlie’s Diary
Yeah. (via @benhammersley)
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Look for the Lungfish
Some great paragraphs from a good post by Charlie Stross about questioning all assumptions when imagining what our future is like.
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8 Lessons from 20 Years of Hype Cycles | Michael Mullany | LinkedIn
Reviewing past Gartner Hype Cycles. They could do with an alternative line that forks from the trough of disillusionment down into the abyss of failure. (via @tomtaylor)
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Speculating Futures
A reading list. “Speculating Futures looks at past speculative narratives, like those of Ursula K. Le Guin, and past attempts at creating technological utopia, like Chile’s Cybersyn.”
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The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release
Brilliant transcript of a talk by Audrey Watters on predictions about the future of technology, what they mean, why they’re wrong, etc. Very good. (via Russell Davies)
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Tom Vanderbilt Explains Why We Could Predict Self-Driving Cars, But Not Women in the Workplace
We think technology will change much quicker than it does, “but when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same.” Lots of good stuff.
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The Future Is A Confidence Trick
“The industry of futurism is bad at the future.”
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HM Government Horizon Scanning Programme - Social Attitudes of Young People
“The aim of this report is to assess if and how social attitudes of young people in the UK today differ from previous generations, and how they might evolve in the future.” December 2014
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Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse | Cathy Alexander and Graham Turner | Comment is free | theguardian.com
The “Business As Usual” scenario is looking accurate, 42 years on, although we haven’t yet seen if we reach the turning points, which will be the real (unpleasant) test. (via @agpublic)
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Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
In Cambridge, UK, horizon scanning for high impact, low probability events. (via the Guardian)
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The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why
Really good stuff explaining the many possible theories for why we haven’t heard from any alien races given the (potentially) very large number of intelligent civilisations in the galaxy. (via Kottke)
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I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
One thing learned from writing 3000 Motley Fool columns: “I’ve learned that short-term thinking is at the root of most of our problems, whether it’s in business, politics, investing, or work.” One for the futurists there. (via Kottke)
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After You’ve Gone by Thomas Nagel | The New York Review of Books
On thinking about the world after we, as individuals, die. And the importance of “the collective afterlife”, “the survival and continued renewal of humanity after our personal death”. (Subscribers only)
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IBM’s 5 predictions for the future - CNN.com
This is pretty depressing. Five ideas that all involve using computers to measure everything to “improve” our lives. It’s a ruthlessly automated future, with no room for humanity, thoughtfulness, common sense, caring, vision, or true spontaneous innovation. (via @thomasfuchs)
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Potlatch: 20 public-spirited lawyers could change the world
Lawyers are the creators of a future in which the rest of us must live. By Will Davies (it doesn’t say anywhere on the page). (via @moleitau)
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The Online Photographer: (OT) How Do You Build A Starship-Building Organization?
About last September’s first conference by the 100 Year Starship foundation, starting to work out what kind of organisation would be required to launch a starship 100 years from now.
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Why People Really Love Technology: An Interview with Genevieve Bell - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic
Very interesting interview with the Intel researcher. Some good bits on demographics of the internet; fear (or not) of robots; physical vs digital; tactility; fear of the TV red button. (via @annegalloway)
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Foresight and Futures Studies Graduate Programs - Global List
I didn’t know there were so many these days.
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Teaching about the Future: Amazon.co.uk: Dr Peter C Bishop, Andy Hines: Books
New, expensive, book from my old futures professor and an alumni who now also teaches at Houston.
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How low (power) can you go? - Charlie’s Diary
Charlie Stross takes Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law (improving power consumption) for a walk and imagines a very, very conmected city. (via blech)
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Timeline of the far future - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Starts in 10,000 years time and goes on from there. (via Dan Hon)
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Open the Future: The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be
About how so much futurism is about technological change, but how that tech change is very incremental and not as interesting as the bigger, messier societal changes. Yes. (via BERG)
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Imperica - The future of the future
Leila Johnston and Chris Heathcote discuss (in text) visions of the future, and advertising’s representation of the future.
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Futurist-blogs.xls
A spreadsheet of blogs about the future. (via Houston Futures)
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Peak oil, the next Kondratiev cycle, generational turnings, and ERE Early Retirement Extreme: — The choice nobody ever told you about
Great thinking on long term futures. Kondratiev cycles, peak oil, the downturn, the next world war, generations. Well worth a read.
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Noah Raford » Complete PhD Online
“Large Scale Participatory Futures Systems: a Comparative Study of Online Scenario Planning Approaches” focused on the field of urban planning. I would like to work out how to make time to read this. (via @cityofsound)
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Astrogator’s Logs » Blog Archive » If They Come, It Might Get Built
“If we launch starships, whether of exploration or settlement, they won’t be conquerors; they will be worse off than the Polynesians on their catamarans, the losses will be heavy and their state at planetfall won’t resemble anything depicted in Hollywood SF.” (via Futurismic)
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Association of Professional Futurists - V-Gathering Futures Festival
A bit tempted by paying to watch the sessions from this. (via @wendyinfutures)
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The Technium: The Futurist’s Dilemma
“Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. … the sweet spot that science fiction authors aim for” is the point on the cusp of “plausibility and fantasy”.
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Charlie’s Diary: The High Frontier, Redux
Charles Stross on why space colonisation is a ridiculous idea. Colonising our own deserts and oceans is much, much easier but we’re in no rush to do that. (via Tom Taylor)
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Populations: End of history and the last woman | The Economist
Taking projections of declining birth rates literally results in Hong Kong’s population dying out in 2798, Brazil by year 5000.
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BBC News - One word we don’t hear enough: ‘Erm’
From January 2010, Michael Blastland shows how wrong the Bank of England’s GDP projection fan charts can be. (Also, that daft “The face of uncertainty…” stock photo and caption is priceless.)
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Alternatives to the Singularity - “Google Docs”
“A collaborative presentation for/by grumpy futurists” (via @yoz)
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The Technium: Corporate Long-term-ism
“There is a strong anti-government attitude at loose in the world (not just in the US) that believes that government can only screw things up. And at the same time, a belief that corporations are the prime engines of all that is socially good.”
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Hauntological Futures | booktwo.org
The first of seven posts, which I’m looking forward to. I often find myself agonising over related things: a nostalgia for past futures at the expense of… well, whatever I might otherwise think about the future.
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Cognitive Cities Conference, 26. & 27. February, Berlin
Could be interesting, and is in Berlin, and has Hammersley, Greenfield, Voss and others I don’t know. (via @mattb)
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FOODTUBES
“GOODS-IN and WASTE-OUT computer-guided, lightweight capsules, travelling through dozens of interlinking 150 km circuits.” Property crazy-looking 1990s style website too. Brilliant. (via @tomtaylor)
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Utopia - Charlie’s Diary
Charlie Stross on why we need more utopian visions of the future. Not being very up with science fiction, I’ve been wondering recently if there is some of this around. Maybe not, yet. (via Magical Nihilism)
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Optimistontour.com - Pragmatic Idealism for the future
‘An Optimist’s Tour of the Future’ sounds like an interesting book. Today’s future needs more optimism. (via @thestory2011)
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Kardashev scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization.” (via The Speculist)
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A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail
While my favourite Vancouver-based science fiction author (William Gibson) is writing about the present, my favourite Vancouver-based chronicler of the now (Douglas Coupland) has written this about the future. (via @moleitau)
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London futures | images that bring ideas to life and frame the climate change debate in a way that everyone can understand
Images of a flooded future London. (via Beyond the Beyond)
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BLDGBLOG: Predisposed
More on that “how to tell future generations about dangerous things” problem. Fascinating stuff.