Mark Twain once wrote “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The same might be said about the future – with one significant exception: I don’t think people are talking about it nearly enough. “But what about the energy crisis?”, comes the imagined reply. “What about […]
I’ve been attending the 2008 Space Elevator Conference being held at Microsoft’s Redmond campus this weekend. The many talks and papers given there clearly demonstrate the tremendous dedication and creative engineering that can be found in this nascent field. For those of you who are fuzzy on the concept, the general […]
Fuel prices continue to climb, steadily increasing the cost of every mile we travel. Meanwhile, traffic congestion gets worse with each passing year. And tragically, car accidents kill around 43,000 people in the US annually. What if all of these statistics could be improved with a single technology? Autonomous driving […]
I was in a pub a while back having a pint with a British friend when the topic turned briefly to computing. “What I don’t understand,” he said. “Is how programmers make something from nothing?” I thought for a moment, then started briefly explaining about levels of abstraction, starting from […]
Change frightens us. The uncertainty of the new, the potential for disruption, it’s one of the reasons that our species seeks to anticipate the future – so we can avoid and hopefully survive the worst it has to throw at us. But change also has a huge potential to improve […]
Computers are disappearing. Now before you panic (or in a few cases, jump for joy), what I mean to say is computers are disappearing from view. They’ll still be here, more powerful and in greater numbers than ever. We’ll just not be seeing a growing proportion of them. Consider: Last […]