Treder reports from World Future Society

In 2005, for my first appearance at the annual conference of the World Future Society, I was given a small room with only 25 chairs, and I was scheduled for a 9:30 PM presentation. My topic was ”Do Sweat the Small Stuff: Why Everyone Should Care about Nanotechnology.”

To my surprise and delight, the room was full and in fact we had another 10 or 15 people standing at the back.

Last year in Minneapolis, I gave my second talk at a WFS annual conference, this time on the topic of  “Nanotechnology and the Future of Warfare.” The room was larger, with seating for about 50, and again it was filled to overflowing.

Yesterday I traveled to Washington, DC, for the 2008 World Future Society conference, where I gave a one-hour presentation on “Radical Technologies, Rapid Change, and the Real World.” This time, they were prepared for a bigger audience to attend, with a large room and seats for a hundred people. But guess what—it still wasn’t big enough—once again, we had a standing room only crowd.

Here you can download a PDF [4.3 MB] of the presentation I gave yesterday.

I offered to give all attendees a free CD containing the full scenarios series, but it turned out we had more people asking for them than we able to satisfy (I’d brought 100 CDs with me). If you’d like to download each of the eight scenarios, plus the introduction—exactly the same thing as on the disk—you can find links to them at this page.