It’s been a busy week! Clients, interviews, research, writing and prepping for a TEDx talk had me wearing many hats and keeping lots of balls in the air. (That’s either a mixed-metaphor or I’m in the circus. Perhaps it’s both!) The week started with an interview for the RoboPsych podcast […]
Today’s announcement of the detection of primordial gravitational waves is huge. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics gave a news conference in which it described the first ever detection of these waves which provides a window onto the very earliest stages of our universe. Gravitational waves were the last untested prediction […]
Continuing on the topic of affective computing, I’ve cross-posted a piece at Psychology Today and on my World Future blog. “The Emotional Machine and You” examines the issues we may face when dealing with a technology that can read, act upon and manipulate our most basic human emotions. Such devices […]
I’m pleased to see my recent cover story, “Connecting with Our Connected World” has been included in THE FUTURIST Magazine’s Best Stories of 2013. There are lots of great articles in this year’s issues and I highly recommend reading all of them if you’re at all interested in the future. […]
I recently had the opportunity to speak about our connected world and the Internet of Things at Ada’s Technical Books in Seattle. Ada’s has just moved into a terrific new location on Capitol Hill and I got to be their inaugural speaker. I want to thank Danielle, Alex and all […]
It’s interesting what inspires or motivates an article. It might be a conversation, a good book, a song from days gone by. Sometimes there’s just a deadline waiting to be met. In the case of “Playing the Long Game“, my latest article at H+ Magazine, it was a recent tweet by its editor, Michael Anissimov.
The closing plenary for the WorldFuture conference, held earlier this month in Vancouver, BC, was given by Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute. In his presentation, Frey offered up Eight Grand Challenges for humanity. It was a thought provoking presentation, though not without its critics. To recap, Frey stated that […]
Information. There is probably nothing so important to our lives, to our culture, to our world. Information, and the ability to communicate it, has been at the foundation of humanity’s rise since before we used fire or stone tools. It has allowed us to grow from nomadic clans to villages […]
Earlier this week, Charles Stross posted his thoughts on why he doesn’t think the Technological Singularity will happen. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the Technological Singularity is defined as that point in the future when a self-improving artificial general intelligence (AGI) achieves superintelligence. As Stross recommends, if you’re […]
What do nuclear technology, embryonic stem cells, synthetic life and molecular nanotechnology have in common? For many people, these are strange and frightening concepts which conjure erroneous, often very dystopic visions of the future. They’re also technologies with enormous potential; they could seriously damage our world or they could be […]