Sleeping Through a Revolution — Aspen Ideas
In my last letter, I told you there was a time in the late ’60s when the most critically acclaimed movies and music were also the best selling. The Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper album or Francis Coppola’s Godfather film were just two examples. I said that that is not happening anymore, and I wanted to explore with you why this change occurred. Because I spent the first 30 years of my life producing music, movies, and TV, this question matters to me, and I think it should matter to you. So I want to explore the idea that the last 20 years of technological progress — the digital revolution — have devalued the role of the creative artist in our society. I undertake this question with both optimism and humility. In the last few years I have run the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. We have become convinced that only machines and corporations make the future, but I don’t think that is true. Whew! But this does not account for the role of the Digital Bandits.
William Gibson on finding the future in the strangeness of now - Home | q
Tuesday November 25, 2014 It's been 30 years since William Gibson changed the vocabulary of science fiction with his first book, Neuromancer. Now his latest novel, The Peripheral, puts a sci-fi lens on a new set of modern anxieties, including climate change, drones and casual mass surveillance. The Vancouver-based author joins guest host Tom Power to discuss the "unthinkable present", how cyberspace (a term he coined) has colonized the real world, and why he thinks his reputation for prescience is undeserved. WEB EXTRA | Read an excerpt of The Peripheral here Sci-fi master William Gibson envisions a world in which privacy no longer exists (Michael O'Shea/Canadian Press)
The 10 Best Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels of 2015 So Far | Flavorwire | Page 10
Generation ships, sentient forests, exploding moons — there has been no shortage of action, speculation, and mystery in the year’s best sci-fi and fantasy novels. These books are remarkable, too, for the way they brazenly combine tropes from many different genres. In several of these novels, for example, mythological, intellectual, and literary history combine in unfamiliar and enlightening ways. Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson Call it an ark, a generation ship — whatever.
Andrew Curry on Futures
Where did futures work emerge from? There's a really interesting history here. There are two main strands. The first one came out of the war, systems thinking, operations research, RAND, SRI, and that very technocratic American war effort. You have this strand which is relatively analytical associated with American history and then this strand which is about preferred futures associated with Europe. To what extent is futures work about doom and mitigating the bad and to what extent is it about idealism? Roy Amara says there's three types of futures: possible futures, probable futures, and preferred futures. Gramsci has that great quote about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the spirit and I think a lot of futures work is about that. What is that relationship between history, narratives, and futures? There's a saying that a good futurist needs to be a good historian as well. What you get from looking back is that sense of patterns or disruptive moments.
125 Top Women Futurists & the End of Business as Usual
Last week, we published a blog post on the Top 20 Future of Work thinkers and the companies that most connect to them. It included this quote: “What we think will take ten years will likely take two or less,” says Frank Diana, Principal in Business Evolution at the $80B IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services, in a recent blog post. “Therefore, our view of the future in the context of strategy and planning has to change. Future thinking, simulation, and the use of foresight are critical to this change.” But that leads to another question; who will inform our thinking about the future? "Why Aren't There More Women Futurists?” Here at Little Bird, we believe that there’s fundamental business value in listening to and learning from the very best thinkers on any topic you’re considering. So we used our technology to build a list of 125 important women futurists online. How important is it that women futurists get their due in the public eye? Maree Conway’s not so sure.
2015-SOF-ExecutiveSummary-English.pdf
Why Your Company Needs a Resident Futurist
Being far-sighted about your strategy can help you prepare for the big global changes already unfolding. I’ve spent quite some time trying to understand the world of tomorrow – as far away as 2035. I’ll then be 66 years old and ready for retirement, which puts things into perspective - at least for me. This actually started during my university days more than 20 years ago, when I decided to attend a seminar about the aging population. I was finishing up a course in demographics as part of economic history. The topic of the seminar may sound boring to some, but intrigued me based on the focus of the past semester. It was this course which sparked my interest in forces larger than the industry-level trends normally captured by the traditional strategic tools used today (e.g. “Futuring” as a strategy tool One tool that I find useful in handling this is ‘futuring’, a systematic process for thinking about, imagining, and planning for the future. Five global mega-trends 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
forecasting principles
No one cares about your jetpack: on optimism in futurism - Dangerous to those who profit from the way things areDangerous to those who profit from the way things are
This review of Disney’s Tomorrowland (and others like it that I have read) got me thinking about something I was asked at the Design In Action summit last week in Edinburgh. I was there participating in the “Once Upon a Future” event, where I read a story called “The Dreams in the Bitch House.” It’s about a tech sorority at a small New England university. And programmable matter. After I did my keynote and read my story, I did a Q&A. After a few questions, someone in the audience asked: “Why so negative?” I get this question a lot. When I was trained as a futurist (I have a Master’s in the subject), I was taught to see the whole scope of a problem. America’s problem is not that it needs more jetpacks. Jetpacks solve exactly one problem: rapid transit. But railing against jetpacks isn’t an answer to the question. 1) We have more data than we used to, and we’re obtaining more all the time. Why don’t we fantasize about life in space like we used to? Octavia E.
Game of Thrones: why hasn't Westeros had an industrial revolution?
Note: this article is spoiler-free. If you have watched the first three series and want to remind yourself who is who and to catch up on the story so far check out our explainer. Westeros, the primary location of Game of Thrones, has much in common with Western Europe of the middle ages. Its technology is similar, society is feudal and even the climate is roughly the same – save for the odd chilly spell. But the key difference is Westeros has been more or less like this for some 6,000 years. When you consider the evolution of Western Europe in the time since the fall of the Roman Empire – a mere 1,500 years ago – it’s worth asking how its literary sibling could have stayed so undeveloped. The first thing to point out is that economic development is not a simply continuous process, but one of fits and starts. Surging ahead This revolution did not come about overnight. One surge yet to arrive in Westeros is the cannon. Industrial growth also requires energy. The knowledge economy
