Update on All Tomorrow’s Futures
Tomorrow (Tuesday, 7/2) CyberSalon and King’s College London are hosting a panel / discussion with some of the academics who commented on our stories. I hope to be there virtually.
You can watch the livestream on YouTube. 6pm British time, 1pm here (EST) — I think.
Spekkers (like Spekkies, but cooler)
And because I don’t have enough to do, I’ve decided to start what Rotary International calls a Fellowship, an interest group that has no necessary connection to any of Rotary’s causes and does not require Rotary membership. Anybody can join.
I’m looking at it as a way to bridge my work with Rotaract on campus to StellarCon and all my other fanboy / gaming pursuits. For now it’s just on Facebook (ew, but easy). There will be a Substack version soon.
On the Brink of Utopia
Part of a series out of MIT, edited by a philosopher of tech named David Weinberger.
Strong Ideas is a hybrid print and open access book series for general readers, that provides fresh, strongly argued, and provocative views of the effects of digital technology on culture, business, government, education, and our lives. Books in the Strong Ideas series are published in print editions for sale in bookstores and in digital open access editions available on the PubPub platform.
From the forward by Stefan Hell:
The characterization of breakthrough innovators and their personal traits near the middle of the book is an especially enlightening read. Drawing on a few carefully selected examples from history and more recent times, the authors brilliantly reveal the essentials of the human beings that change the course of history with their ingenuity. A great deal of trust in this human ingenuity shines through, and I so strongly share this view.
Given the pairing, at first I had to wonder if that was a pseudonym, but no, he’s a Nobel-winning chemist and a director of the Max Planck Institute.
So these are experts, precisely the kinds of people we’re not supposed to trust any more. But this statement from the Preface really resonated with me:
What if we dreamed bigger? What if the heroes in these utopian dreams were scientists and technologists, for whom progress and innovation were two sides of the same coin? This book’s answer is that we live on the brink of utopia. With science and technology, we can solve all the challenges just described within the next three decades. By 2050, we can live in a world that we want and need because we have the knowledge, the methods, and the financial means to create it. We are being held back by technological incrementalism, fake innovation, and the lack of an optimistic vision of a greener, healthier, and wealthier future.
But of course it would, right? I write science fiction for fun and profit (mostly fun at this point). They’re preaching to the choir, right? But no, they say they’re not part of the entrepreneurial Church of Innovation:
We do not need any more apps, gadgets, platforms, and digital business models that supposedly make our lives easier, but in fact infantilize and control us. What we precisely don’t need is the kind of sham innovation for which there is almost unlimited venture capital available worldwide.
Again, music to my sinful ears. But there’s a point in that same preface where they say “we’ve made little progress fighting cancer.” Well, as it happens, retired cancer doc Jim Granfortuna just a few weeks ago spent a half hour showing my Rotary Club a lot of survivorship curves. According to him, we have been doing pretty good at lengthening the lives of cancer patients. Merely incremental, you scoff, twirling the tips of your Tesla fan mustaches.
![Nikola Tesla Nikola Tesla](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0bdf4822-ec30-41fc-a8e5-eb18cbf8ca9e_537x539.jpeg)
Surely we can load the dice, so that critical hits come more often.
Maybe. Or maybe that’s typical power-gamer wishful thinking.
![DND Dice PNG Photos DND Dice PNG Photos](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d0c8827-768a-4250-885a-83fada7c8e0e_300x435.png)
So I’m going to read this book and respond, a chapter a week, for the rest of this summer. Unless I get frustrated, or captured by something else (like this). The book itself is free, and so will be my modest contributions. Don’t worry, paid peeps; there’s more below the fold.
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