Tag Archives: futurism

Today's Tomorrows

Becoming Planetary Gardeners: Geoengineering

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The Earth’s climate is a complex web of systems: ocean temperature and current, sea and glacier ice, air, wind, sun, and more. Strands of that web are being plucked by the variety of things which are causing our climate to change: pollution, extra carbon dioxide, soot, cow farts, and maybe even sunspots. Superpower countries are vying for control of the Northern Passage and energy moguls are making record profits while doing serious damage. We’re letting them do it; it’s convenient to drive and shop and waste and live the lives we were taught we’d have. Me, too. Just as guilty as the next person. Heck, I ordered an ipad the first day I could. I, too, want the newest stuff.

One way out? Undo the damage and apply the principles of engineering to the systems that run the earth. Continue reading Becoming Planetary Gardeners: Geoengineering →

Future Imperfect

Mass Custom Microbots For Everyone… Else.

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Future Imperfect - Sven Johnson

Unlike most people my age, I don’t have a lot of dead tech replacement parts crammed inside my body. No hand-polished titanium joints. No electro-membrane kidney prefilters. No brand name ocular or cochlear augmentation devices. Just some old metal fillings and a couple of porcelain crowns. However, over the past few years I’ve been reaching that point where good genetic fortune runs out and difficult choices need to be made. As a consequence, while recently undergoing a routine physical exam, my doctor recommended I consider having a colony of MoniBots™ injected into my system so they could monitor my physical condition and report back anything out of the ordinary.

I told her I’d give it some thought. Continue reading Mass Custom Microbots For Everyone… Else. →

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Standing on the verge of an epic win: can gaming make the world a better place?

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Jane McGonigal‘s recent TED talk is getting a lot of attention, and with good reason, because it’s a radical idea she’s pushing – radical in both senses of the word, in fact.

Here’s the thesis: computer games give us a sense of being able to achieve greatness, of being able to attempt awesome things and of that attempt being worth the effort, in a way we rarely feel in our meatspace lives. Why else would we spend so much time playing them? Just one gamer might spend thousands of hours a year chasing XP, completing quests and levelling up – but what is it that these people getting good at doing, exactly? And can we maybe encourage them to get good at things that can have an effect in the real world as well as in a virtual one?

McGonigal isn’t talking through her hat, either – she’s been working on this stuff for some years now. She was part of the team behind the Superstruct project, which was mentioned here a number of times (and in which peripatetic Futurismic columnist Sven Johnson took part, alongside Jamais Cascio and many other futurist types, professional or otherwise)… and there’s a new one in the works called Urgent Evoke. But let’s hear her tell it in her own words:

The easy angle for criticism is her incredible optimism (which, incidentally, she ascribes to a fundamental aspect of the gamer’s mindset), but given all the doom and gloom around at the moment, it’s a refreshing change. Instead of saying why it won’t work, maybe we should think about how it could?

And here’s a serendipitous supporting story [via SlashDot]: an Australian lecturer altered the structure of his university courses to reflect that of games – experience points, levelling up, and so on – and saw his students respond with far greater enthusiasm as a result. Now he’s suggesting that absorbing similar ideas into the workplace could engage greater engagement among employees from those notoriously (or allegedly, depending on your point of view) feckless Generation Ys and Millennials. What do you think?

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Only the slums can save us now

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The Rocinha favela, Rio de JaneiroChairman Bruce is still busily curating a canon of Favela Chic thinking over at Beyond The Beyond; this article at Prospect Magazine looks to be a definitive slice of shanty-town futurism.[image by fabbio]

The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” […] Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up.

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Musicians as futurists

If you want to get a passable guess at what the future will look like, maybe you should skip the science fiction shelves and head to the music department instead; The Guardian‘s John Naughton points out that David Bowie made some prescient statements about the current state of the music industry just under a decade ago, and that the Grateful Dead had sussed out a post-scarcity business model for a touring band long before anyone had started bandying that term about in connection with digital media – the latter of which is a riff off an article in the Atlantic which I seem to remember hearing somewhere else in the last week or so, quite possibly at TechDirt.

Of course, the Dead’s “vision” has long been the butt of snark from musicians and critics alike – only now does their anachronistic tribe-first model look like anything more than a weird hangover from the 60s. I very doubt Bowie was the only person who foresaw the impeding self-immolation of the recording industry – in fact, one would assume that a career in the pertinent industry as long as Bowie’s would be a, and I’m surprised that any mention of music and futurism together doesn’t warrant some words on Brian Eno… but Naughton’s post is a healthy reminder that proleptic predictions are as much a function of hindsight as they are of foresight, if not more so.