Open the Future
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Latest posts
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Participatory Panopticon: 2019
In April of 2004--just a bit over 15 years ago--I posted this question to Worldchanging: "What happens when you combine mobile communications, always-on cameras, and commonplace wireless networks?" I called the answer the Participatory Panopticon. Remember: at that point...
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What the heck was that?
The previous entry was my attempt at a "counter-factual" scenario -- that is, a scenario based on the present-day reality, but with a critical element changed. In this case, it was a scenario in which Clinton managed to eke out...
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BREAKING: President's Advisors Mull Resignation, Sources Claim
This news report slipped through a wormhole from an alternate universe where a sufficient number of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania gave those states to Hillary Clinton in 2016, thereby making her President of the United States. Otherwise, the...
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Trump's "Pee Tape": The First One Probably Won't Be Real
TL;DR: It would be easy to fake a Trump/Russia "pee tape." If one shows up, there's a very high likelihood it's a forgery meant to undermine the validity of the investigation of Trump when it's shown to be a fake....
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A New Look
You may have noticed that Open the Future has taken on a somewhat different design. You may also have noticed that I haven't been blogging lately. These are not unrelated. I've been doing quite a bit of public speaking, all...
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A World in Which
(This is the full text of a talk I gave at the Institute for the Future on 21 October 2015, as part of the "New Body Language" workshop on wearable/"body area network" technologies for the Technology Horizons program.) Why...
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Gun Control's MP3 Moment
Reading the continued, ongoing arguments about gun regulations ("reasonable" or otherwise) is frustrating. Not only for the usual reasons (absolutist positions, inability to recognize multi-causal phenomena, relentless hostility towards different opinions, etc.), but because of…
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Uncertainty, Complexity, and Taking Action (revisited)
I stumbled across this transcript of a talk I gave way back in late 2008, at the "Global Catastrophic Risks" conference. I was asked to provide some closing thoughts, based on what had gone before in the meeting, so it's...
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High-Frequency Combat
Science and technology luminaries Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak count among the hundreds of researchers pledging support of a proposed ban on the use of artificial intelligence technologies in warfare. In "Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI...
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In the Press
Yep, pretty busy lately. I hope to have a book announcement soon, though. I was asked to write a short opinion piece for New Scientist on the problem of filtering our reality, based on the success of the "Here Active...
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Usefully Wrong
It's a line I've used quite a bit in my talks: "The point of futurism [foresight, scenarios] isn't to make accurate predictions. We know that in details large and small, our forecasts will usually be wrong. The goal is to...
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Not Very Uplifting
What responsibility do we have for the things we make? At its root, this is a fairly straightforward science story. Neuroscience researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen successfully transplanted human glial progenitor cells (hGPCs) into...
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The Inevitable Future
Film student Taylor Baldschun invited me to participate in a project of his, a short documentary on the end of humanity. His final (for the moment) version can be seen here: The Inevitable Future from Taylor Baldschun on Vimeo. On...
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Magna Cortica talk at TEDx Marin
(brushes away cobwebs, wipes dust off of screen, sits quietly for a moment and wonders what happened...) The video of my TEDx talk on the ethics of cognitive augmentation is now up, and you can view it at the TEDx...
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Berlin Videos
The Climate Engineering Conference 2014 in Berlin has uploaded the videos of all plenary sessions, available here. (http://www.ce-conference.org/conference-videos) The Berlin Museum talk I posted below can be listened to here: Climate Engineering and the Meaning of Nature…