HORIZON SCANNING: The Global Future
Horizon scanning is a method futures researchers use to expand their personal awareness of weak signals of change that are emerging around them every day, of which they were not previously aware. William Gibson is often quoted as saying “the future is already here, but it’s just not evenly distributed.” Less often quoted, he goes on to point out that it (the future) “is arriving constantly, in bits and pieces.” In other words, the future isn’t here full cloth, but the threads are here, from which the future will be woven. Other people have pointed out the human brain is a “prediction machine,” constantly turning out predictions, mostly subconsciously, scanning for threats, food, sex, money, power, and so forth.…
OPTIMISM/PESSIMISM: Optimism Optimized & Pessimism Prodded
An interview about THE FUTURE with Hugo Winning author CHARLES STROSS!
Fumblingly carried out by John Shirley
Charles Stross is masterfully eclectic. He writes science-fiction (he won Two Hugo Awards, a Prometheus Award and a Locus Award, was nominated for many others), alternate history novels (The Merchant Princes series), fantasy (he won a Locus fantasy award for his novel The Apocalypse Codex), and he combines many of these genres, along with social satire and horror and espionage, in his famous Laundry Files series, starting with The Atrocity Archives. My theory is that he actually has several brains in cold storage, which he switches out, somehow, depending on the project.…
OPTIMISM/PESSIMISM: The Next 50 Years: Why I’m Optimistic Because Everything Will Be Terrible
John Shirley
A while back I did a TEDx talk on the next fifty years. The following contains edited selections of my talk–and some updates.
Two singularities? It’s a contradiction in terms — two singularities. But there are two, there’s the fanciful technological singularity of the imagination, and there is the tech singularity that’s more likely to actually come about. The false singularity, supposed to come between 2030 and 2045, is almost a supernatural event in the minds of many people. With its dream of technologically achieved eternal life, it has the reek of religious mythology; the unconscious fear of mortality.…