As Stephen has been mentioning, I had the privilege of attending the Foresight Vision Unconference over the weekend at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale California. In fact, the event was half conference and half unconference.

The conference half included the following:

A talk from David Friedman on how the technologies of public key encryption and surveillance work together and in opposition to each other to make for some very interesting possible futures.

A presentation from Matthew Francis from the department of chemistry at UC Berkley on using biology to build nanoscale materials. We talked on a recent FFR about how proteins are being used as nano-medical delivery devices. Matt showed how both protiens and viruses can serve as the first generation of true molecular technology. Medicine is part of it, but the really amazing stuff was the example of using a tobacco virus to create nano-solar panels. Wow.

Chris Heyward of Kronos Labs gave a thorough overview of current scientific research in the field of longevity.

A talk from Christine Peterson on the complex relationship between privacy, security, and transparency. Chris makes the case that the tech community — Silicon Valley in particular — has the responsibility to keep Washington from overreaching.

The conference portion was the morning half of each day. The sessions were top-notch: fascinating and thought-provoking. But things really got interesting in the afternoon, where the unconference format kicked in. Under the guidance of unconference guru Kaliya Hamlin, those of us who were interested in leading a session announced a topic and put it on the schedule. Here’s the list of topics that were discussed. It was quite a challenge deciding which sessions to sit in on!

My talk was during Session 5. It was an expansion of my recent rework of the map of the emerging technology development space. I’ll be doing some additional updates based on the great discussion we had over the next few days.