The Urban Building of the Future: Prefabbed, Modular, Green and Recyclable
The urban buildings of the near-future will be tall, smart, adaptable, responsive, honest, modular, recyclable, clean, and deeply embedded into the systems of their host cities, if an imaginative vision from Arup’s Foresight team is anything to judge by. In its evocatively titled It’s Alive, Arup (the firm responsible for the structural design of the iconic Sydney Opera House) asks if we can imagine the urban building of the future while simultaneously presenting its take on the matter. The report contains plenty of ideas, albeit briefly stated, so I thought it would be fun to identify some of today’s science and technology that has made it into Arup’s skyscraper of tomorrow and discuss whether Arup’s vision is more grounded in fact or fiction.
(via Envisioning the urban skyscraper of 2050 | Ars Technica)
After The 2012 US Election, Can Big Data Predict The Future Globally?
Today, there are several dozen ongoing, public projects that aim to in one way or another forecast the kinds of things foreign policymakers desperately want to be able to predict: various forms of state failure, famines, mass atrocities, coups d’état, interstate and civil war, and ethnic and religious conflict. So while U.S. elections might occupy the front page of the New York Times, the ability to predict instances of extreme violence and upheaval represent the holy grail of statistical forecasting — and researchers are now getting close to doing just that. In 2010 scholars from the Political Instability Task Force published a report that demonstrated the ability to correctly predict onsets of instability two years in advance in 18 of 21 instances (about 85%), including the prediction of instability in Iran in 2004 and Côte d’Ivoire in 2002, for example. None other than Jay Ulfelder was a co-author of this study, so he may just suffer from excessive modesty.
Just within the environmental conflict realm, a recent report by the Army Environmental Policy Institute lists no fewer than twelve ongoing projects that touch on some aspect of forecasting. These include the USAID’s Famine Early Warning System which tracks and predicts food insecurity around the world as well as the Climate Change and African Political Stability project, housed at theRobert S. Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Outside of the environmental arena, there are more.
The future isn’t like being sucked into a turbine and shredded into bits. It’s like eating: people ingest around 2000 lbs of food each year, and 98% of our atoms are exchanged. But we continue to look like and act like our old selves, even though we are almost completely new, at the atomic level.
We ingest the future, and it invests us.
![Vernor Vinge Still Thinks the Singularity Will Happen Within 20 Years
“…I think calling that the Singularity is actually a very good term in the sense of vast and unknowable change. A qualitatively different sort of change than technological progress in the past.”
He still believes four pathways could lead to the development of the Singularity by 2030:
The development of computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent.
Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect.
When asked which one is more likely, he hinted that he sees a digital Gaia of networks plus people emerging [option 2]
(via The Singularity and schools: an interview with Vernor Vinge | KurzweilAI)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7o5ge5ZPd1qgpcs1o1_500.jpg)
Vernor Vinge Still Thinks the Singularity Will Happen Within 20 Years
“…I think calling that the Singularity is actually a very good term in the sense of vast and unknowable change. A qualitatively different sort of change than technological progress in the past.”
He still believes four pathways could lead to the development of the Singularity by 2030:
- The development of computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent.
- Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
- Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
- Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect.
When asked which one is more likely, he hinted that he sees a digital Gaia of networks plus people emerging [option 2]
(via The Singularity and schools: an interview with Vernor Vinge | KurzweilAI)
A Reality-Based Look at the City of the (Near) Future
By 2050, seven out of every ten people on Earth will live in cities. Compared to the beginning of the 20th century, when just 20 percent lived in urban settings, the increase is staggering.
This rapid urbanization coupled with the population explosion that will see 8.9 billion people living on the planet in 2050 presents the challenge of more total humans and a higher percentage of them flocking to cities to find a better life. So, what is the city of the future and what is the future of cities?
Txchnologist asked a few leading thinkers to give their impression of what future cities in 50-100 years will be like.
(via Bye Bye, Jetsons: Engineers and Consultants Offer A Reality-Based Future | Txchnologist)
(ht futurist.com, ht The Futures Agency)
I have proposed that the “accelerating change” crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists… has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies…
a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization.
… there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex.
Dale Carrico, amor mundi: The Unbearable Stasis of “Accelerating Change”
(HT Charles Stross)
State of the 3D Printing Union, Per The Telegraph
You might not know anyone with a 3D printer yet, but, says Neil Gershenfeld, head of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “digital personal fabrication has been growing exponentially, and the ways these exponentials work is that there’s a kind of barrier to perception. You may think nothing’s happening and then suddenly there’s a revolution.” Brooklyn-based MakerBot has sold around 6,000 machines, to tech-savvy early adopters like the aforementioned eggcup maker, Brendan Dawes.
But we don’t know how many 3D printers there are out there – some, like the RepRap, can make their own parts and reproduce themselves. Bowyer designed them to be “evolutionarily stable”: RepRaps offer people goods so that people will build them, just as flowers offer bees nectar so that they’ll carry their pollen.
Another problem with the perception of desktop 3D printers is that the things people are making at home right now don’t look that exciting. Take the Thingiverse, a website where people upload photographs and design files of things they’ve designed and made themselves. There are plastic kittens. Plastic door stops. Plastic plant pots. Plastic toy planes. Plastic widgets and encoder wheels and screw isolators and servo wheels, individual parts to improve your printer but not much else.
But just when your inner cynic starts to kick in, because homemade plastic tchotchkes don’t look much more appealing than ones made in Taiwan, someone will tell you a cautionary tale. Gershenfeld invokes the name of Ken Olsen. The head of a company called the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), in 1977 Olsen made a famous pronouncement: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” As Gershenfeld says today, “Now DEC is bankrupt, and you have a computer at home.” Underestimating the potential for new technologies to adapt, evolve and thrive can make you look stupid.
(via Make your own: the 3D printing revolution - Telegraph)
(ht BigThink.com)
Vice Interviews a “Cyborg Anthropologist”
Amber Case is like the Socrates of digital natives. She calls herself a cyborg anthropologist, which in human talk means she studies the relationship between man and machine.
Most of us walk around with small computers in our pockets. We’re able to access emails, talk to friends, and make with the mega-lulz whenever we wish. Because of this, Case considers us low-tech cyborgs, emotionally tied to our technology and digital networks whether we like to think so or not.
Our modern lives take place interacting with the human and non-human, using one as an interface to connect with the other. We’re able to instantly access entertainment or friends via our smartphones and other devices. Just try spending a day not looking at Twitter or Facebook or going online. It’s bloody hard. Case calls this phenomenon the “technosocial womb.” Her work concerns understanding this relationship, it’s evolution, and how it defines us and our culture.Continue Talking to the Future Humans
(via vicemag)
Infographic: the Future of Science
For the last year, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future have been researching the future of science to identify big areas of science we think will have a transformative impact over the next decade. We read a lot of papers, conducted interviews, hosted an Open Science unconference, held an expert workshop with researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, UC Davis, SETI, and private industry, and spent many weeks synthesizing what we learned. The result is this map…
The map focuses on six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade:
Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research. We are delighted to share the map with you, under a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
- Decrypting the Brain,
- Hacking Space,
- Massively Multiplayer Data,
- Sea the Future,
- Strange Matter, and
- Engineered Evolution.
(via The Future of Science 2021: A Multiverse of Exploration - Boing Boing, HT youngfuturist)
