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William Gibson said "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." What futures have you seen that are here, but unrecognized?
In the late 70s, when the Homebrew Computer Club was meeting, its members were beginning to experience the world that we all now take for granted. In 1992, when I published the Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, there were only 200 websites, but we featured the WWW in the book because it was so clearly the shape of things to come. When Jeff Han demoed his multi-touch screen at TED in February 2006, he prefigured the iPhone launch a year later. When the kids at the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition are modifying bacteria, they are showing us homebrew genetic engineering around the corner. Make Magazine's enthusiasts are becoming tomorrow's industrialists, with companies like Makerbot, DIY Drones, and Willow Garage Robotics turning what once seemed like an curiosity into real businesses.
In each case, these people were already living in a future that was soon to rush upon us all.
What have you seen lately that has made you stand up and say "Whoa! That person knows something I don't, is living in a world I haven't seen yet?" The answers can be from technology, but can also be new social forms, and can be positive or negative.
Point me to companies and individuals who tell you something about the shape of the future by the way they are living or the work they are doing.
Josh Nursing
2. Mind-Machine interfaces
Combine the two and you have a thought-controlled computer. The applications are astounding: for creation, ideation, writing, recording dreams, etc...
natasha nikulina 50+
M.A. Lucas-Green
Davis Masten 200+
Gary Rieschel 100+
some observations...
a. most innovation is now in areas that have no legacy resources - so by definition, most of us in the US and wealthy countries won't see it.
b. local local local...the future investment needs to be in the our local communities and the trades that support them.
c. rent the future don't own it...sharing of assets will irreovcably increase in the future.
Gary
Dominique Jaurola 50+
Disappointments in the current ways to construct our ways of being and living boost this along; including the shocks experienced by the hard-nosed commercial endeavours - running enterprises to the ground for lack of perceptiveness among other things.
Increase in activities that seek to understand 'how humanity works' and deliver to the potential; NOT merely looking for the ways to 'manipulate' people for a buck (e.g., consumer needs) but ways to create with meaning to humanity's future.
There are many activities - art, product creation, marketing, strategies, start-ups, thinking etc that are oriented in this way but not nearly as intrenched in it as could be; it is not easy to find the insights and inputs to create along this dimension.
Disclosure: I am working on a means to help this along with www.hunome.com - we're not yet public but I would welcome a chat with anyone who is entrenched/supportive of this kind of thinking.
On an adjacent note:
- There are companies seeking to benefit from neuroscience, sensory inputs and the like for commercial interests. That's fine and much is written about what is possible but very little about the ethics and what could also happen.
- We (humans) have gone full blast ahead with novelties before only to find that meddling with nature (in this case our own) has always unintended consequences; when we meddle with our neurological body we're getting to a tricky bit - can do good and play on singularity's progress but can also make a right royal mess of it. Any company now engaged in the research on possible consequences would be good to shine some light to. Just so we can avoid the ones we can identify.
Greg Stevenson
clay blasdel
Christina Rawls
Patrick Keenan 20+
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/
With more information, more complexity, and a scarcity of attention, visual communication is a must. Not only that, but the tools to communicate visually are only getting people. Its just a matter of time until this comment is a sketch instead. Until then its reserved for the people with whiteboards ;)
Phil Buehler 500+
I went to Blacksburg, Virginia to study how a more mainstream community is adopting these new technologies. Blacksburg was the first internet wired town - I'd heard about it in a conversation with Donald Norman, and first visited in 1995 when Internet penetration there was over 60%, while the rest of the country was below 10%. How technology breaks into the mainstream is following a similar path again - the same reasons I think Kodak, AT&T, Hallmark and early AOL were the original social media - they connect us and strengthen our communities (and those communities include businesses).
The most compelling story I heard about the potential value of Foursquare was how one of the women I interviewed said she'd look in the morning to see who was checked in at her local pool, and then she'd tweet them to see if they'd watch her kids for a bit. It seems like social & mobile media are bringing back the sidewalk and front porch and helping people get out of their backyards and living rooms.
I posted more stories and insights, as well as video, on OgilvyOne's blog: http://sellorelse.ogilvy.com/15-years-later-the-first-internet-wired-town-is-again-worth-watching
Phil Buehler 500+
I went to Blacksburg, Virginia to study how a more mainstream community is adopting these new technologies. Blacksburg was the first internet wired town - I'd heard about it in a conversation with Donald Norman, and first visited in 1995 when Internet penetration there was over 60%, while the rest of the country was below 10%. How technology breaks into the mainstream is following a similar path again - the same reasons I think Kodak, AT&T, Hallmark and early AOL were the original social media - they connect us and strengthen our communities (and those communities include businesses).
The most compelling story I heard about the potential value of Foursquare was how one of the women I interviewed said she'd look in the morning to see who was checked in at her local pool, and then she'd tweet them to see if they'd watch her kids for a bit. It seems like social & mobile media are bringing back the sidewalk and front porch and helping people get out of their backyards and living rooms.
I posted more stories and insights, as well as video, on OgilvyOne's blog: http://sellorelse.ogilvy.com/15-years-later-the-first-internet-wired-town-is-again-worth-watching
David Fishbaine
I worked at a place once where someone, who was not technical, wondered about how anyone could have created a laptop; “How could someone have thought of it all, it’s so daunting!” The answer, of course, is that no ‘someone’ created (this word, in this context, is really loaded!) a laptop. There’s a not-so-far-fetched analogy to deep time and misperceptions caused by inadequate sampling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time.
What popped into my mind when reading “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”, is the turmoil related to uneven social and economic conditions; the first world will have to come to terms with an emerging third world and all those hungry, eager people. The third world has to adapt to all those pesky first world memes. Witness what’s happening recently in the Middle East.
Tech (please… it’s only another tool) has fast-forwarded this and now we all see it coming, whereas beforehand, say twenty years ago, we could imagine it wouldn’t happen, or it would take a ‘real long time’, or that we had some inherent competitive advantage.
Look for economic and social structures that can facilitate and thrive from an evening out of world wealth and society rather than those who imagine they can rely on barriers.
We are living in interesting times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
Robert Schueler
Codruta Marin
First, my emarketing teacher freaked me out a few weeks ago. He started talking about how in 5 years at most, we will all be interconnected. Someone will go in the park and like a flower, take a picture with his/her camera, we will all know about it and experience the whole world through someone else's eyes. He furthermore proceeded to describe that ideal world - that everyone is interconnected, no private space - everything is monitored by us and through us. We become the natural extensions of a huge being - through virtual connection. Price discrimination will be easier to practice; insurance companies will instantly know when we have an accident and who's fault it is, and make us pay without any kind of uncertainty attached to it. Or ''better'' yet, we will all have google cars that never have one single accident. I really think he must stress out when he drives - I would not give up that experience for the world. But, of course, all he said is happening, right now, with FB, Twitter, and technology in general.
On the other hand, there is another movement, or at least so I hope. More and more people are searching for inspiration, for acceptance. Young artists have more and more compassionate songs in which they acknowledge our differences and tell us it's ok to be different. I'm thinking about Pink, K.Perry, K'naan. There's this ''other kind'' of people that is emerging - more focused on inner peace and discovery and self worth rather than constant material progress. More seminars about being responsible for our life instead of searching constantly for more and better. More introspective search for happiness and true self.
Psychology has gone a long way, and so has society in general - although it feels like the more we progress, the more burdens we have, in a way (pollution, technology, we took on ''saving'' the 3rd world countries mainly because we think we have the ultimate answer).
Mike Harrop
Boomers - that's 20% of the world's affluent population - retire this year 2011.
No one has a clue what they'll do, except change the course of history (as usual).
Clue - howsabout continue what they were doing 40 years ago ?
1) Looove, no war
2) Revolución
3) My rules
Including being these...
1. Deep into nature
2. Frugal / non-materialist
3. Fit
4. DIY/maker - constantly inventing simple/funny lifestyle mods to overcome aging constraints
5. Friends with everyone on earth
6. Keen for heart-warming social/cultural/artistic people-experiences
7. Affectionate for the less fortunate
8. Admin-free, paperwork-free, increasingly possessions-free
9. Increasingly vegetarian
10. Bio, but real bio
11. Increasingly oil-free
12. Increasingly sharing
13. On the road
14. Loving it
For boomers, a new lifestyle tool is being designed open-source and local-built worldwide...
See it at http://www.roadmushers.org
Don't laugh - the most disruptive ideas are always the simplest. And always laughed at.
I'm a boomer. I know what we want. I'm making the prototype right now.
Ben Hargreaves
1.) There are a lot of them,
2.) They arguable have the most lose (especially if living off of some sort of fixed income),
3.) They will have a lot of time on their hands (especially to become politically active),
4.) They are not me generation (and therefore cannot necessarily be relied to understand my generation).
Does the future really belong to the youth, or to the Boomers?
Comment deleted
Zdenek Smith 100+
I was surprised that Disney World and SeaWorld are asking their visitors to scan their finger in order to be admitted (thou one has the option to use ID instead) and 99% of them comply without hesitation. Is this a dangerous trend?
Jeannine van der Linden
One of the takeaways from the series is that notions of what is private and what is public do change very greatly. I think you are right that such a change is happening right now; I am not at all sure that this change will destroy the fabric of America -- or anywhere else for that matter. It will certainly change it but I have faith that we will as usual make ourselves over again in response.
I have not however had my 15 minutes of fame yet, despite having a Facebook account -- and a TED profile for that matter. Possibly it's an alphabetical list, in which case I expect they will get around to me.
Zdenek Smith 100+
karen starks
Definitely the future, and I see TED is distributing it.
Larry Winiarski
Well of course solar power and electric cars. I drive a 70 mile range electric car. Haven't been to
the gas station since november (for my lawnmower). Combined with solar panels it costs nearly nothing
to drive.
The price of solar panels has plummeted. It will soon be standard practice to roof the entire house with
some type of solar panel.
Also...
Population growth is negative in much of the developed world. It is moving to the developed world. When population growth truly becomes negative worldwide, some pretty unusual things are going to happen for just about the first time in recorded history.
Alec Perkins
From what I've seen, the traditional top-down organizational structures won't cut it for much longer. The question is, how can we use more bottom-up approaches that can scale, and the interconnectedness provided by the Web, to better organize ourselves in more effective ways? Our current methods are relatively ancient, and have not really evolved at the same rate as our science, technological, and societal development. We need a radical rethinking of governance, and emergent systems plus the Web are a good place to look.
Jeannine van der Linden
I agree with you that new possibilities are appearing for organiszation and governance. In my experience though they all have to deal with the fact that our current methods (as modern society as a whole) are ancient but so is our central nervous system (as individuals).
Ultimately I think this is the reason that an open source model works better than a crowdsourcing one, at least when ordinary, practical matters are what needs to be arranged. Crowdsourcing works particularly well when there is an existing community which commits itself to a goal. Patton said it years ago: Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results". This form of leadership and organization, though, denpends very much on the existence and maintenance of a healthy community.
Most people need leaders. This seems to me to be deeply imbedded in how people work. So I think the possibilities for new forms of leadership are possible, but I do not think that an absence of leaders is possible.
Robert-David Steele-Vivas
Graphic: Open Everything
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/2009/10/graphic-open-everything/
However, after twenty years focused on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) I have realized I have the cart before the horse, and that connecting the five billion poor with OpenBTS etc is Phase One. My short posting on the three phases toward a World Brain and Global Game can be found at this URL:
Strategic Phasing Toward World Brain & Global Game
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/02/strategic-phasing-toward-world-brain-global-game/
Jeannine van der Linden
Alec Perkins
What I envision is not so much a replacement of leaders, but rather a way to enhance the interaction between leaders and followers. I see these new systems of organizing the crowd as a way to enable better feedback from the bottom up. Politicians often ramble about "what the people want", but how do they really *know*? Instead of relying solely on infrequent elections, which rarely match up to the unpredictable pattern of events, how can we really tell the leaders what we want? (And also make the system work both ways, so people can know more about what the government is doing and more about the issues.)
On Slashdot.org, for example, people are given temporary moderation powers over comments somewhat randomly, with merit weighed in. To prevent their abuse of power, ordinary people can "meta-moderate", and moderate the moderators. Poor moderators are less likely to be given the power again. This pattern of moderation and meta-moderation causes the best comments to emerge from the pool. There are many examples of this type of model implemented online. While they are fairly limited and focused in scope, I think they hints at what's possible with a highly distributed and scalable communication network.
I guess what I'm envisioning is a more participatory system, where it's desirable to participate in the process. People need to feel like they have a say, instead of just one of the millions whose vote doesn't really count. I think the Web is a place to look for answers, since it is something radically new, and has demonstrated a capacity for this. (Also, open source is absolutely another place where models can come from, highly merit- and transparency-based. Sounds like good qualities for government.)
Jeannine van der Linden
It's the shadow world of cocreation in some ways: an ever changing group of leaders, a body of followers comitted to an amorphous cause, operating an an organizationally mature way, with its own PR, its own marketing, its own branding. BUt no real identity.
I am tempted to say it is awe inspiring. Is there a better word for exciting and terrifying at the same time?
Tim Colgan 50+
"Big Brother is watching you" has become "we are watching big brother". Although the idea of a camera on every corner may at first be disconcerting, think of the effect it will have on the abililty to wage war - it won't be possible.
And even though it's a bit worrisome to have the government looking at our bank accounts, what will result when we are able to see our governor's bank accounts?
The future in many ways will be like living in a small village. Everyone will be able to see what you're up to. And no one will be able to profit from deceit.