A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there’s a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There’s as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.
Earthquakes, global warming, patent lawsuits… it’s all a bit much, sometimes. Even a sober-minded “moral guide to the future” needs a break. So today, we talk about fashion.
GOOD magazine asked “some of the world’s most prominent futurists”—including Esther Dyson, Bruce Sterling, and Jamais Cascio—“to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed.”
IEET Senior Fellow Jamais Cascio has been granted the honorary title of Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future (IFTF) in Palo Alto, California.
In “Futures Thinking: The Basics,” I offered up an overview of how to engage in a foresight exercise. Today, as the next piece in this occasional series, I’ll take a look at the first step in such a process.
Here’s a startling vision for the next decade: two familiar online phenomena converge in an emerging technological arena to strike a fatal blow to American civil society.
As tempting as it is to rely on well-structured tools to prevent disastrous outcomes, even the best tools are ultimately insufficient. Good interfaces need to be accompanied by strong ethics.
As our various electronic devices gain more and more sensory awareness, we open up the potential for entirely new forms of interaction. Not just new interfaces—tapping and shaking and whatnot—but a shift in presence. With few exceptions, we use these new technologies in rather familiar ways. We might speak instead of type, or tap instead of click, or wave a control wand instead of mash a control pad, but these are essentially the same kinds of direct input processes we’ve done for years, just dressed up in a new look.
In 2002, I wrote Broken Dreams, a guidebook for the Steve Jackson Games “Transhuman Space” role-playing game series. Broken Dreams covered global traumas such as conflict, social disorder, economic decline, and intellectual property. Part of the book concerned how various societies reacted to the big changes underway in the world, and in that section I included a brief description of a common response: Social Transition Stress Disorder, or STSD.
Although it’s easy to think otherwise, the structure of the modern global economy is not terribly old, arguably dating back to the collapse of the gold standard in 1971, or the post-World War II “Bretton Woods” conference in 1944. Earlier versions of what we would nonetheless still call “capitalism” had very different degrees (and kinds) of government intervention, roles for labor and capital, even rules about currencies. Add to that the mention more extreme variants such as socialism and communism, corporatism (fascism), and the sundry experiments in anarchism, and you have quite a menagerie of all-but-extinct economic models.
You have my express permission to kick the next person—especially someone advocating the embrace of radical forms of technological advancement—who tells you that they wish nothing more than to get rid of, move beyond, or otherwise avoid “politics.” Kick them hard, and repeatedly. They have adopted a profoundly ignorant and self-serving position, one that betrays at best a lack of understanding of human nature and society, and at worst a malicious desire to preemptively shut down any opposition to their goals.
Some of the most thoughtful work on the topic of climate change appears in Jamais Cascio’s new e-book, Hacking the Earth. Cascio is a Bay Area futurist who worked with Global Business Network during the 1990s and is currently a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a global futures strategist at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Only a third of IEET readers who responded to our recently concluded poll agree that geoengineering is a good idea and should be started as soon as possible. Almost half (47%) of respondents are “on the fence” and believe that more study is needed before they can say for sure, while a small but significant percentage definitely oppose it.
IEET Blog |
email list |
newsletter |
The IEET is a 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt organization registered in the State of Connecticut in the United States.
Contact: Executive Director, Dr. James J. Hughes,
Williams 229B, Trinity College, 300 Summit St., Hartford CT
06106 USA
Email: director @ ieet.org phone:
860-297-2376
Hacking the Earth (without voiding the warranty) 
a guidebook for the Steve Jackson Games “
IEET Blog