They’re everywhere. Superman or Batman? Star Trek or Star Wars? Football or baseball? It’s one thing to be asked to state a preference, but these choices are increasingly offered as absolutes. The idea that you might really like both of the items in question (in different ways, for different reasons) seems to get in the […]
Blogger Michael O. Church (don’t click if you can’t stand f-bombs) says that it isn’t just automation that is putting our economic future into jeopardy. Rather, it is is a deadly cocktail of automation taking up all the subordinate jobs combined with an employment model that has made most of us — naturally — subordinate. Per […]
Here we have the quiz plus answers and sources from last week’s show about The Shocking Truth. Due to out-of-control residential and commercial real estate development, total U. S. forest acreage is the smallest it has been in a century. Driven by economic injustice and environmental deterioration, infant and child mortality rates are surging in […]
From Science Daily: First Driverless Vehicle to Hit the Roads Singapore’s first clean and green driverless shuttle transportation system will soon see passengers shuttling between Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and JTC Corporation’s (JTC) CleanTech Park. In a partnership between NTU, JTC and Induct Technologies, and supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), an autonomous […]
Related to this week’s The World Transformed — here is some background on the billionaires we’ll be discussing as well as their achievements. Technology: Vanity or visionary? As the son of an angel investor who had made his fortune during the industrial revolution, the younger Darwin was the beneficiary of a similar fount of personal […]
On last week’s World Transformed, we talked about parallel universes in their various theoretical permutations. (This piece on Better All the Time walks through the various levels that we discussed on the show.) The discussion followed the news that evidence for universes outside our own may have been found. Thinking over the discussion, a question occurred […]
New findings suggest that our universe is not the only one. It may be one of many, or one of an infinite number of universes. Phil and Stephen discuss the implications. Does it matter if there’s more than universe? If so, how? And why? Check it out.
Ten years ago, in the early primordial days of The Speculist, I came up with a list of 7 questions that I thought could help us shape an ongoing conversation about the future. Whenever I did a Speculist interview, it would include these seven questions. (A shortened version of these questions were later used in […]
The Planck space observatory has provided us the clearest and most complete picture of the early universe we have ever had, a composite picture of the background radiation of the entire sky. Interestingly, that picture doesn’t look quite like what we were expecting: Cosmologists studying a map of the universe from data gathered by the […]
Nick Van Terheyden has some interesting speculation about the future of health care in a piece written for fast Company with the title Could The Future Of Health Care Mean No Waits In Hospitals? He has some interesting ideas. In one scenario, a conversational user interface and SIRI-like assistants help doctors to focus on the […]