Monthly Archives: February 2010

FastForward Radio — The New Economy Part 2 — with Special Guest Cory Doctorow

In Part 2 of our three-part series on the new economy, Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcome New York Times bestselling author and Forbes.com Web Celeb Cory Doctorow to FastForward Radio to discuss his novel Makers. 

 

Set in a highly plausible near future, Makers is the story of the next great economic boom and bust cycle — empowered by 3D printers, useful refuse, and the unstoppable hacker urge to get out there and make something cool. Along the way we meet inventors, bloggers, Big Money Men, sexy political activists, house-proud squatters, evil Disney execs, and a goth kid with a heart of gold. New industries rise and fall. Obesity is cured. The world changes radically, and yet stays very much the same.

 

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Is this our future? How will the ongoing (and closely related) trends of increased productivity and increased individual control of production impact our economy? Are we heading for a world in which, as we discussed in Part 1, robots take all our jobs away? If so, how much of that damage will be offset by technology that let’s us “print” the stuff we need — including housing?

 

What does the future hold in store for us — the consumer welfare state? The luxury shanty town? Or something else altogether? Tune in and find out.





Hotels on the Moon

An interesting tidbit from the most recent season of Mad Men (the critically acclaimed drama series about Madison Avenue advertising execs in the early 1960′s) was the depiction of Conrad Hilton as seriously interested in putting a hotel on the moon. I don’t if this is historically accurate, but it was completely believable. It made for a wonderful moment wherein our heroes, having delivered an impressive pitch to Hilton touting his hotel chain’s international cred, are completely deflated when the magnate icily demands to know what happened to the moon.

I ask for the moon and you give me this?

They thought he was being metaphorical about thinking big or something. He wasn’t.

He wanted to put a hotel on the moon.

Maybe he was a little eccentric, or maybe he was just a bit ahead of his time.

Fast Forward Radio — The New Economy Part 1

How long before a robot gets your job?

Phil and Stephen begin a three part series on the New Economy with Special Guest Martin Ford. Ford’s new book, The Lights in the Tunnel, takes an in depth look at current trends in technology and globalization and examines what the likely economic impact will be in the coming years and decades.

  1. Globalization. Collaboration. Telecommuting. Are these the forces that will shape the workplaces of the future? Or is there something bigger lurking?

  2. How will job automation impact the economy in the future?
  3. How will the offshore outsourcing trend evolve in the coming years?
  4. What impact will technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence have on the job market?

And most importantly, what should we do next? Listen and find out!

Click “Continue Reading” for the show notes:

The Speculist Essentials

Here’s our list of essentials to date:

1. Movie or TV show
Field of Dreams | Johnny Quest | Star Trek (all editions) | Blade Runner | 2001: A Space Odyssey | Gattaca | Wall-E | Battlestar Galactica (re-do) | Being John Malkovich | Dr. Zhivago

2. Fiction book
Permutation City | Blood Music | The Golden Age trilogy | Rainbow’s End | A Wrinkle in Time | Burning Chrome collection | Brave New World | Great Sky River | Earth

3. Nonfiction book
It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 years | The Age of Spiritual Machines | The Singularity Is Near | Radical Evolution | Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny | Evolution: The Triumph Of An Idea | Plough, Sword, and Book | Supercrunchers | The Meaning of the 21st Century

4. Website
The Speculist | edge.org | Evo Devo Universe | Instapundit | Google.com | newscientist.com | Wolfram Alpha | Wikipedia | Stratfor.com

5. Event
2003 Foresight Vision Weekend | Founding of the Foresight Institute | Witnessing the in-progress CGI work on the Genesis Planet sequence for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the first fully CGI sequence in film history | Accelerating Change 2005 | The World Transformed on FastForward Radio | The Scientific Revolution | Burning Man (back in the day) | The Internet | H+ Summit 2009

6. Person
John Smart | Buckminster Fuller | Aubrey de Grey | Bill Gates | K. Eric Drexler | Karl Popper | Craig Venter | Joseph Campbell | Ray Kurzweil

Thanks to the futurists who have contributed to our list:
Phil Bowermaster | Stephen Gordon | Alex Lightman | Jef Allbright | P. J. Manney | Wayne Radinsky | Sally Morem | David Meskill | Belle Black | Josie Valderrama |

Why Did Pluto Change Color?

All the ink and pixels spent in recent years on the question of whether Pluto ought or ought not be considered a planet missed the most interesting development in the story of this distant rock (or whatever it is.) Astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology puts it this way:

“You’re looking at the surface in the solar system where there are the biggest changes we’ve ever seen,” Brown said.

The color of the surface of Pluto changed so markedly, particularly between 2000 and 2002, that Buie has spent years checking and rechecking his work, just to make sure the differences weren’t an artifact of faulty equipment or calculations.

“I got that result years ago but it’s just so hard to understand and believe that I’ve been checking everything that I can think of,” he said. “I’m still nervous about it. It could be that I’ve just completely screwed this up, but I can’t find where.”

Until someone can provide a plausible reason why a planet (dwarf or otherwise) would just up and change color like that, I have to lean in the “he screwed up” direction.

But it’s intriguing…

Check out this composite video of Pluto rotating.

This apparently shows Pluto post-color-change. I wonder what it looked like before?

Friday Videos — The Amazing Pickle Platter

Speaking of Harvey’s contributions to the culinary world, we were talking in the chat room after last week’s podcast and everyone agreed that he has summed up the coming economy very well with the technology he has been predicting: the sandwich printer.

FastForward Radio — Groundhog Day 2010

In honor of the prognosticating rodent, Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon give their own thoughts on when Spring will arrive, along with other upcoming positive developments.



Click “Continue Reading” for the show notes: