IEET Director Giulio Prisco reports on his talk on nanotechnology at the In Nano Veritas round table of the THINK BIG - MEDEF Summer University, on August 28 in Paris.

Okay, hang onto your hats. We’re clearly in for a bumpy ride over the next couple of years; even discounting the worst-case scenarios (I’m a happy pessimist: I always need something to worry about) it looks like we’re in for a recession that will be at least as bad as the 1990-92 one, and possibly much worse. 

In the 1980s, the savings and loan meltdown produced a number of amazing stories of greed and fraud. The Keating scandal, involving Lincoln Savings and Loan, was one of the biggest. 

By definition, distant (long-term) problems are those that show their real impact at some point in the not-near future; arbitrarily, we can say five or more years, but many of them won’t have significant effects for decades. Our habit, and the institutions we’ve built, tend to look at long-term problems as more-or-less identical: Something big will happen later. For the most part, we simply wait until the long-term becomes the near-term before we act. 

The mortgage and credit crisis wasn’t merely predictable; it was predicted. It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year. These courses all promised to teach the properly motivated American how to find homeowners down on their luck and approaching foreclosure, as well as how to buy those homes from under them and resell them at a great profit. What made the spectacle doubly outrageous were not the dancing girls or indoor fireworks; it was the fact that most of the participants were themselves desperate former homeowners, whose illnesses, divorces, fires, and floods had put them in to foreclosure, too. Get it? They were paying to learn how to feed on people just like themselves.

A friend of mine believes that all this talk about “accelerating change” and approaching the Singularity is bullshit—in part because he doesn’t see things advancing all that amazingly exponentially rapidly around him.

We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.

In two Capitalism Magazine polemics, Alex Epstein and Wayne Dunn call for CEOs and businesspeople to uphold the principle of self-interest with pride and zeal. “An Open Letter to CEOs: Defend the Profit Motive—or Perish” and “An Open Letter to Businesspeople,” written in 2006 and 2007 respectively, pit entrepreneurs against “moral enemies” and “servitude sheep.”

What’s wrong with this sentence: “give me $700Bn with no oversight and I’ll keep your banking system from going down the tubes by buying up the bundles of sub-prime mortgages and other investments they’re elbow deep in”?

As I see it there are three main categories of risk: bio, nano, and AI/robotics. These man-made risks make up the vast majority of the threat magnitude over the coming century and deserve most of the attention.

In the midst of ongoing wars, accelerating economic collapse, and cascading environmental ruin, it’s easy to dismiss futurism as self-indulgence, a superficial pastime devoted to spotting the next hot gizmo or telling us all how some coming development changes everything. What really matters is the here-and-now. Serious people know that thinking about the future is frivolous; anyone (or any business) not focusing laser-like on the problems of today is wasting time and money. Right?