Links tagged with “overlinks”
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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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Vadik Marmeladov
Archived copy of his website, pre-LOT-2046, with his “Codes of Practice”. Mainly for the long-term thinking. (via Warren Ellis)
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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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Who’s killing the (self-driving) electric car? – Startup Grind – Medium
Good on predictions about self-driving and/or electric cars, and why the two improvements may not happen together. (via @cityofsound)
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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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Why We Need to Pick Up Alvin Toffler’s Torch - The New York Times
About how futurism isn’t really done any more. Although he only talks to one (maybe) futurist. (via @MikeForester)
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The Future Is A Confidence Trick
“The industry of futurism is bad at the future.”
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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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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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Ten Rules for Creating Awful Scenarios
Good (bad) tips from Jamais Cascio
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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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Homework and Jacuzzis as Dorms Move to McMansions in California - NYTimes.com
Big, cul-de-sac houses in America rented cheap by students. These cut-off developments are ripe to become the same kind of dead-end ghettos as neglected estates and 60s high-rises. (via @GreatDismal)
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A 53% Surge in Poverty Rate Is Reshaping Suburbs - NYTimes.com
I’ve thought for years, decades, that when sprawling suburbs with few through roads stop being comfortably wealthy, their unlivableness is going to be horribly apparent. Dead ends in two senses.
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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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Human Cloning in Japan
Wow. Scroll down… and down… until you get to the dolls with the scary, amazing, horrible, wonderful heads based on scans of real people. Imagine having a collection of one of these for every year of your life… (via @wonderlandblog)
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trendwatching.com: Join our team
TrendWatching have two full-time jobs going in London. A decade ago I expect I would have been super keen on these.
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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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Actroid F Female Telepresence Robot Looks Super Real, Creepy (video)
Watch the videos. Yes, a bit creepy but also amazing progress with making human-like expressions with machines.