In April of 2004--just a bit over 15 years ago--I posted this question to Worldchanging: "What happens when you combine mobile communications, always-on cameras, and commonplace wireless networks...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2019/06/participatory_panopticon_2019.html
The previous entry was my attempt at a "counter-factual" scenario -- that is, a scenario based on the present-day reality, but with a critical element changed. In this case, it was a scenario in ...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2018/04/what_the_heck_was_that.html
This news report slipped through a wormhole from an alternate universe where a sufficient number of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania gave those states to Hillary Clinton in 2016, t...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2018/04/breaking_presidents_advisors_m.html
TL;DR: It would be easy to fake a Trump/Russia "pee tape." If one shows up, there's a very high likelihood it's a forgery meant to undermine the validity of the investigation of Trump when it's s...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2017/08/trumps_pee_tape_the_first_one.html
You may have noticed that Open the Future has taken on a somewhat different design. You may also have noticed that I haven't been blogging lately. These are not unrelated. I've been doing quite a...
(This is the full text of a talk I gave at the Institute for the Future on 21 October 2015, as part of the "New Body Language" workshop on wearable/"body area network" technologies for the Techno...
Reading the continued, ongoing arguments about gun regulations ("reasonable" or otherwise) is frustrating. Not only for the usual reasons (absolutist positions, inability to recognize multi-causa...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2015/10/gun_controls_mp3_moment.html
I stumbled across this transcript of a talk I gave way back in late 2008, at the "Global Catastrophic Risks" conference. I was asked to provide some closing thoughts, based on what had gone befor...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2015/09/uncertainty_complexity_and_tak_1.html
Science and technology luminaries Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak count among the hundreds of researchers pledging support of a proposed ban on the use of artificial intelligence te...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2015/07/high-frequency_combat.html
Yep, pretty busy lately. I hope to have a book announcement soon, though. I was asked to write a short opinion piece for New Scientist on the problem of filtering our reality, based on the succes...
It's a line I've used quite a bit in my talks: "The point of futurism isn't to make accurate predictions. We know that in details large and small, our forecasts will usually be wrong. The goal i...
What responsibility do we have for the things we make? At its root, this is a fairly straightforward science story. Neuroscience researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of C...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2014/12/not_very_uplifting.html
Film student Taylor Baldschun invited me to participate in a project of his, a short documentary on the end of humanity. His final (for the moment) version can be seen here: The Inevitable Future...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2014/11/the_inevitable_future.html
(brushes away cobwebs, wipes dust off of screen, sits quietly for a moment and wonders what happened...) The video of my TEDx talk on the ethics of cognitive augmentation is now up, and you can v...
http://www.openthefuture.com/2014/11/magna_cortica_talk_at_tedx_mar.html
The Climate Engineering Conference 2014 in Berlin has uploaded the videos of all plenary sessions, available here. (http://www.ce-conference.org/conference-videos) The Berlin Museum talk I posted...