On Saturday’s podcast I posited that the story of humanity is one of human beings confronting and, where possible, overcoming things that suck. Here’s the podcast to refresh your memory. So what are the sucky things that humanity is working on overcoming now? What is the most likely to be fixed? What is the most […]
Continuing our exploration of what accelerating technological development (especially increasing automation) means for the job market and the future economy, here’s a survey that addresses some of the possible scenarios we have been talking about: A largely stagnant economy not too unlike what we’ve seen over the past decade A huge welfare state wherein the […]
Christian Henrik Nesheim of I Look Forward To wrote me last week inviting me to participate in his latest futurist survey, this time on the subject of life expectancy. The question was as follows: In which decade do you think medicine will enable a human life expectancy of 200 years, and why in this particular decade? […]
Here’s the background. Now tell us what you think. Just a reminder: there’s no good way to “explain” on the form. Use the handy blog comment feature instead! Results are here. Loading…
So here’s the deal: a psychologist is about to publish results of a battery of tests conducted over a number of years which seem to demonstrate a small, but apparently statistically valid, tendency for some test subjects to accurately predict the future: It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In […]
As I noted on Friday, Kevin Kelly’s new book is called What Technology Wants, and it explores the question of how and whether technology is evolving, and to what end. My thoughts on the question of what technology wants kicked off some interesting discussion, which in turn called for a response from me. And it […]
UPDATE: Christian has posted the answers he received from Aaron Saenz, David Pearce, Michael Anissimov, some other blogger, and George Dvorsky over at I Look Forward To. Interesting mix of viewpoints! From our friend Christian Henrik Nesheim comes this question: If you had to guess, what will be the single most significant technological development in […]
Friday night I heard a guy on George Noory talking about how he had predicted that UFOs would be seen in the skies over the world’s major cities on October 13 and that the “events in Manhattan” had proved him right. Meh, it wouldn’t be much of an installment of Coast to Coast without that […]
Later this week we’ll be talking with Max Marty from the Seasteading Institute on FastForward Radio. A couple of weeks ago, Brian Wang had us thinking about domed cities. Seasteads and domed cities are two possible examples of future habitats — and there are several others both from science fiction and from serious future scenarios. […]
Image via Wikipedia The discovery of the first potentially habitable earth-like planet raises questions about humanity’s future in interstellar space. Will we, in fact, “explore strange new worlds” and “seek out new life and new civilizations?” In my previous post I suggested that discovery of habitable, earth-like planets may give us the impetus to begin […]