The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and it doesn’t look like we expect it to When scientists first started talking about Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the discussion centred around how to best create AI that would think like people do. This view of AI has dominated […]
The Future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. – William Gibson That’s the idea that framed yesterday’s post – Where’s My Flying Car? I argued that as innovators, our job is to invent the future – and that in doing so, instead of trying to come up with something that has never existed […]
When Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at WorldCon a couple of years ago, the first question out of Krugman’s mouth was “Where are the flying cars?” Krugman asked this because he knows that science fiction authors like Stross have been imagining the future for quite a while, and that currently impossible technologies […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. One of the critical steps to successful innovation is getting your idea to spread. Hugh MacLeod’s outstanding new book Evil Plans has a lot about how to get your ideas to spread more effectively. One of his tenets is that we should create random acts of traction. There […]
I watched The Future is Unwritten again this weekend, the documentary about Joe Strummer by Julien Temple. The Clash were my absolute favourite band for a long time, and I’ve always thought highly of Strummer. The movie gives a pretty balanced view of his life, exploring his faults as well as his strengths. But the […]
In his thought-provoking new book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand has this interesting passage: In Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000), he quotes William Blake – Without contraries is no progression” – and ventures that Blake came to that view from his immersion in London. “Wherever you go in the city,” Ackroyd observes, “you are […]
Too often people think about things happening to them, rather than thinking about how they make things happen. Agency is important, and we must never forget that we have the capacity to act. You can see the results people can have in the current events in Tunisia and Egypt. Agency is a critical part of […]
