Stories of the future - science fiction, foresight and the future

It’s been a long time since I saw something as creative as this that made me laugh out loud. This is a disturbing vision of what might happen in the event a freak of nature or mad-scientist experiment goes wrong and spontaneously generates artificial intelligence.

View ‘Animator vs Animation’ at this link: http://alanbecker.deviantart.com/art/Animator-vs-Animation-34244097

Aubrey de Grey’s talk on ‘Why we age and how we can avoid it’.

Whether we agree with Grey’s hypothesis or not, this topic is one that fundamentally questions what it means to live a human life. Grey argues that the first person who lives to 1000 years old may already have been born. That’s an idea from the edge.

The Ted.com website, upon which this presentation is shown, presents some of the greatest ideas about the future from some of the greatest and most controversial minds. It’s well worth browsing.

View Grey’s talk (and the TED site in general) at this link: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

Okay…I found the timing of this slightly uncanny.

This week I was finishing off a uni assignment for my Masters in Futures Study. The assignment looks at research techniques (environmental scanning) that can be used to build conceptual models about the future so as to improve decision making.

The same night I was handing it in, a PhD student (Andreas) emailed me to let me know about a new website that’s been launched in Germany, TechForX.

TechForX is like a virtual trading system for people to participate in ‘grading the likelihood’ of possible future outcomes. A fantastic and unique idea, I thought, to create a highly accessible system that permits widespread social participation in building expectations about the future.

Here’s some information about the intent of the program…

In line with the European foresight project EPIS run by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, which aims at predicting long-term developments in the content industry, the non-commercial play-money prediction market TechForX has been launched parallel to a Delphi study.

While in the Delphi a small number of selected experts are asked to judge predefined theses, it is the goal of TechForX to enhance traditional foresight activities by involving a preferably broad public. Thus, TechForX invites every internet user to participate by revealing his / her opinion on a subset of the same theses that are asked in the Delphi. The results will be incorporated in EPIS to improve strategic decision-making of European policy makers. Thus, for the first time really everybody has the possibility to participate in foresight studies and shape the future.

To get an impression on the discussed topics, here are some of the theses that are currently traded on TechForX:

• More money is spent on internet advertising in search engines and navigation tools than on television advertising.
• On average, users spend more time watching personalized TV on demand than fixed programs.
• A value added tax (VAT) for transactions within virtual worlds (like Second Life) is raised.
• Online self-publication of books (without involving publishing houses) is the predominant way of commercial distribution, even for established authors.
• Virtual visits to museums over the internet are more popular than physical visits.

On TechForX you reveal your information by trading virtual stocks whose market price can be interpreted as the probability for the underlying claim to come true in the future. The stock price reflects the aggregated opinion of all traders in the market and can be interpreted as a forecast of future developments.

For more information visit the site at http://www.techforx.org

Wow….this is the coolest website, I just had to share it with you. It’s for an advertising agency, Red Interactive. When you arrive on the site, you’re prompted as to whether you’ve been there before, and a gnarly character in the bottom left of the screen explains that you can choose an avatar to represent you on the site while you’re there. When you pick your character, then connect, you suddenly see all these other people wandering around an idealic scene. Use your cursor to go up and, hey bingo, you can fly through the star studded sky. Just…a…great…site!

Enjoy it by visiting - http://www.ff0000.com/

The organisers at NatCon have annouced draft topics for a series of panels at this year’s conference.

I’ll be sitting on the panel: “Where the futurists got it wrong - Aaah, the 21st century at last. But where’s my personal rocket pack, and why doesn’t my mobile work in Halls Gap?”

If you have any comments about the topic, please let me know.

The types of things I’ve been thinking about include:
- examples where SF writers have conceived of futures before they’ve come to fruition
- the inspiration SF has provided for scientists and inventors to create (ie. Jules Verne’s books inspired many of the folk at NASA to dream and think about space travel)
- the role of SF and Futurists in creating a ‘future history’ that informs how we think about the future
- conception is half of creation: which is precisely why some SF authors have argued for the patenting of ideas in their stories

For a list of all the NatCon panels, visit http://www.natcon.org.au/2007/Program_Panels.htm.

Alessio

I’m all for reading hard copy books. In this age though, everyone has an iPod, and there are often times when reading the printed page isn’t possible (like when I’m walking to the train station every morning). Audible.com is a partner of Apple and licenses Audio Books for download. They have a pretty good range of books too and their monthly membership plans give you a certain amount of credits each month to download your favorite books. To take a look visit www.audible.com. At first, I thought it was kind of expensive, but each books costs about $10 t0 $15 (depending what plan you’re on) and it gives me something great to listen to when I’m walking.

What does it take to become a writer? What does it take to do anything new, learn a new field, practice a new discipline? I often think about this. I started writing about 5 years ago. At least, in a serious way. I always loved literature and English at school, but it’s only in the last five years that I’ve started to apply myself - do the courses, read the stories, think about writing as though it’s a wicked science problem that I’m constantly tackling. So what does it take?

Well, it’s refreshing that people can always learn new things. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours to learn any new discipline. Which, in itself, requires discipline.

When I was studying one of my earlier years of uni, I became very interested in the idea of neuroplasticity - the idea that we can literally reshape the sructure of the brain through new patterns of behaviour. This is in effect what we do through the process of writing every day.

So, working on a story this morning, I took a break and read through some quotes i’d written down from several years ago:

“The experiences of our lives leave footprints in the sands of our brain like Friday’s on Robinson Crusoe’s island: physically real but impermanent, subject to vanishing with the next tide or to being overwritten by the next walk along the shore. Our habits, skills, and knowledge are expressions of something physical…And because that physical foundation can change, so, too, we can acquire new habits, new skills, new knowledge.”
Schwartz, J and Begley S (2002), “The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and The Power of Mental Force

This is from a book on a book on neuroplasticity. When I attended a workshop three years ago the tutor passed on a fantastic article called ‘Journey With A Little Man’. Cute name and I’ve continually referred back to this gem of advice by Richard McKenna several times a year ever since.

“Learning creative writing is a process of training the unconscious. We all have in us a living something independent of that which thinks it says, “I” for the whole man. It is not enough to know it intellectually; one must also learn it through lived experience, which is quite a different way of knowing.”
Journey with a Little Man’ by Richard McKenna (published in Confessions)

Write in the mornings. Attend the workshops. Meet other writers. Speak it and write it and live it because in every single one of those acts you’re training your unconscious in the language of writing and every single story you write will make you a better writer.

I love this cafe in Swan Street called ‘Flavours of Lakoum’. And a big part of the reason why is the Barrista there makes coffees that look like comic book characters. If you don’t get what I mean, take a look at the link below on the Photo Gallery of his website.

http://www.artoncoffee.com.au/pictures.htm

I thank him for those times when I’m lucky enough to get a coffee with one of his designs. What a way to start a coffee!

Flavours of Lakoum is near the Cnr of Swan and Church Street, Richmond.

This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.

The above quote is from the SeedMagazine.com website.

Download the map at http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/scientific_method_relationship.php

The world is a complex place. As humans, we struggle with the complexity of it, seeking often for new ways to help us synthesize the vast array of data that’s out there into cogent and meaningful patterns.

A friend of mine, Chris Lynch, sent me a link to this amazing map of scientific enquiry. It’s enough to blow your mind. It goes to show what’s possible with visual mapping systems and the ways in which such systems can help us conceptualise the world out there.

Just think, if we can only map story plots in the same way….well, maybe that’s a bit much.

This is a must see for a 4.5 minute snapshot of how the Web is changing our world.