When I was a child my parents loved to sail. We travelled from the California coast to Catalina Island on weekends, and I remember one specific trip back when the waters were full of bioluminescence. Dolphins surrounded us, jumping alongside the boat in playful streaks of light. They might have been fairies from another world. …
Backing into Eden Chapter 6 – What we know about the animals Read More »
Last month, my name showed up on the cover of The Futurist magazine. I didn’t think much about it at the time. They asked me for a brief essay, the request was interesting, and so I wrote about an issue that has been bothering me for a while: that we are no longer inching toward …
At the moment I am feeling very international as I am using a portable computer in the “ICT Experience Center” in the Seoul airport. This is relevent because after being a speaker at the FutureGov Asia conference, I came away very impressed with the clear and committed focus of South Korea on internet infrastructure (including the …
I came across as excellent presentation about the future called Future Agenda. I think it showed up via one of the people I follow in Twitter. It’s gold for an SF writer…very visual, very easy to navigate, very clean, and it fits (in general) with my understanding of likely futures based on my futurist research. …
There are a lot of us being guardians at the gate. Environmentalists warn about species extinction and loss of the wonderful world we’re lucky enough to live on. Scientists and climatologists wring their hands about global warming. Governments worry about terrorism. We need the guardians at the gate, we even need to be the guardians. …
After evaluating my predictions from last year (which were in three separate posts to start with), I decided to keep it simple.  Remember that futurists have no crystal ball and I can no more tell you what a stock will be on a given day than a séance leader can.  We can see trends. We …
 Earlier this year, I attended the FiRE conference in San Diego. It felt like half an almost-typical technology conference (yes, there was a cloud computing session), half a “making the world a better place with technology” and in total, was the best three days I’ve ever spent on either topic. Largely, the value was …
I have been wearing my author hat lately because of book releases, but there are two very excellent futurist events worth discussing: one in the recent past and one in the recent future. I’ll start with the recent past. The Seattle Times did a very nice article about futurists in the Sunday Magazine last week. …
In science fiction, we’ve long assumed that distance would disappear. We do it with FTL travel so we can take our characters between planets the way we now travel between cities, we do it with instant communication devices, and we use teleportation. We wave our science fictional hands at the challenges of communicating over great …
What’s Green, exciting, and then (hopefully) unnoticed? Read More »
My latest futurismic column explores 3D printing. I’m convinced this is a wild card technology. That is, most people don’t actually see it coming, or understand its potential to change our world. Yet the current uses and capabilities are growing exponentially. If “fabbing” (as some aficionados call it) grows as fast as PC capability grew, and the …
3D Printing: Are we moving into a design economy? Read More »
