(Emailed to London Futurists, 5th January 2014)

Dear Futurists,

I wish you all a happy new year 2014. Happy future!

Please find below a number of news items that may be of interest. Feel free to skip to the ones that are most relevant for you.

1.) Five convictions for the future – a thought for the new year

In place of new year’s resolutions, I offer five convictions for the future:

1. First, a conviction of profoundly positive near-term technological possibility. Within a generation – within 20 to 40 years – we could all be living with greatly improved health, intelligence, longevity, vigour, experiences, general well-being, personal autonomy, and social cohesion. The primary driver for this possibility is the acceleration of technological improvement.
2. Second, however, that greatly improved future state of humanity will require the deep application of many other skills, beyond raw technology, in order to bring it into reality. It will require lots of attention to matters of design, psychology, sociology, economics, philosophy, and politics.
3. Third, society needs a better calibre of thinking about the future. Influential figures in politics, the media, academia, and religious movements all too often seem to have a very blinkered view about future possibilities. Or they latch on to just one particular imagining of the future, and treat it as inevitable, losing sight of the wider picture of uncertainties and potentialities. So that humanity can reach its true potential, in the midst of the likely chaos of the next few decades, politicians and other global leaders need to be focusing on the momentous potential forthcoming transformation of the human condition, rather than the parochial, divisive, and near-term issues that seem to occupy most of their thinking at present.
4. Fourth, there are plenty of grounds for hope for better thinking about the future. In the midst of the global cacophony of mediocrity and distractedness, there are many voices of insight, vision, and determination. Gradually, a serious study of disruptive future scenarios is emerging. We should all do what we can to accelerate this emergence.
5. Fifth, this is no mere armchair discussion. It’s not an idle speculation. The stakes are really high – and include whether we and our loved ones can be alive, in a state of great health and vitality, in the middle of this century, or whether we will likely have succumbed to decay, disease, division, destruction – and perhaps death.

That’s a summary of a longer essay that I published on my personal blog earlier today. If you’d like to read the full version, you can find it here.

2.) Forthcoming event: The Burning Question – Climate change in context

The first “real-world” London Futurists meetup in 2014, on Saturday 18th January, is an in-depth analysis of what some people have described as the most complex and threatening issue of the next 10-30 years: accelerated global warming.

Personally I believe, in line with the convictions I listed above, that technology can provide the means to dissolve the threats of accelerated global warming. Carbon capture and storage, along with solar energy, could provide the core of the solution. But these solutions will take time, and we need to take some interim action sooner.

As described by the speaker for the event, writer and consulting editor Duncan Clark,

Tackling global warming will mean persuading the world to abandon oil, coal and gas reserves worth many trillions of dollars – at least until we have the means to put carbon back in the ground. The burning question is whether that can be done. What mix of technology, politics, psychology, and economics might be required? Why aren’t clean energy sources slowing the rate of fossil fuel extraction? Are the energy companies massively overvalued, and how will carbon-cuts affect the global economy? Will we wake up to the threat in time? And who can do what to make it all happen?

For more details of this event, and to RSVP, click here.

Note that, due to constraints on the speaker’s time, this event is happening on Saturday evening, rather than in the afternoon.

RSVPs so far are on the light side for this event, but now that the year-end break is behind us, I expect them to ramp up – in view of the extreme importance of this debate.

3.) Forthcoming Hangout On Air, with Ramez Naam

One week from today, on the evening of Sunday 12th January, we have our “Hangout on Air” online panel discussion, “Ramez Naam discusses Nexus, Crux, and The Infinite Resource”.

For more details, click here.

Here’s an extract of the event description:

Ramez Naam is arguably one of today’s most interesting and important writers on futurist topics, including both non-fiction and fiction.

For example, praise for his Nexus – Mankind gets an upgrade includes:

• “A superbly plotted high tension technothriller… full of delicious moral ambiguity… a hell of a read.” – Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
• “A sharp, chilling look at our likely future.” – Charles Stross
• “A lightning bolt of a novel. A sense of awe missing from a lot of current fiction.” – Ars Technica.

This London Futurists Hangout on Air will feature a live discussion between Ramez Naam and an international panel of leading futurists: Randal Koene, Michell Zappa, and Giulio Prisco.

The discussion aims to cover:

• The science behind the fiction: which elements are strongly grounded in current research, and which elements are more speculative?
• The philosophy behind the fiction: how should people be responding to the deeply challenging questions that are raised by new technology?
• Finding a clear path through what has been described as “the best of times and the worst of times” – is human innovation sufficient?
• What lies next – new books in context.

I’ll add one comment to this description. Over the past week or so, I’ve taken the time to listen again to Ramez’s book “Nexus”, and I’m also well through the follow-up, “Crux”. I’m listening to them as audio books, obtained from Audible. Both books are truly engrossing, with a rich array of nuanced characters who undergo several changes in their personal philosophies as events unfold. It also helps that, in each case, the narrators of the audio books are first class.

Another reason I like these books so much is because they’re not afraid to look hard at both good outcomes and bad outcomes of disruptive technological possibility. I unconditionally recommend both books. (With the proviso that they contain some racy, adult material, and therefore may not be suitable for everyone.)

4.) Early bird registration for Anticipating 2025

There are currently nearly 50 people registered, which is a good start (with more than two months to go) towards filling the venue’s capacity of 220.

Early bird registration, for both days, is pegged at £40. I’ll keep early bird registration open until the first 100 tickets have been sold. Afterwards, the price will increase to £50.

A good way to find out about the Anticipating 2025 event is to look at the growing set of “Speaker preview” videos that are available here.

You’ll notice that at least some of these videos have captions available, to help people to catch everything the speakers say.

These captions have been produced by a combination of AI and human intelligence:

• Google provides automatically generated transcripts, from its speech recognition engine, for videos uploaded to YouTube
• A team of human volunteers works through these transcripts, cleaning them up, before they are published.

My thanks go to everyone involved so far in filming and transcribing the speakers.

5.) Your help to publicise Anticipating 2025

If you’d like to help make Anticipating 2025 a success, here are some simple steps you can take:

• There’s a Facebook page for the event here. If you use Facebook, please consider “liking” this event, sharing the event, and (if you intend to participate) press the “Join” button.
• There’s a Lanyrd page for the event here. Lanyrd describes itself as “the social conference directory”. If you use Lanyrd (which is very easy, if you already have an account with Twitter or with LinkedIn), please add this to the events that you are planning to attend (or, another option, to the events that you are “tracking”).
• If you particularly like any of the preview videos (more of which are being added on a regular basis), consider sharing them among your own social connections.

6.) Interesting futurist events in… the Hague, the Netherlands

See this Facebook page. Organised by Khannea Suntzu. Next event is 24th January.

7.) Interesting futurist event in… Nottingham, the UK

See this Facebook page. Organised by Adam James Davis, on Thursday 9th January.

8.) Two reminders that technological changes takes time, and effort!

I’ll end with a couple of recent well-written articles, from experts in their fields, as reminders that technological change often proceeds at a slow pace (but that’s no reason for us to stop seeking to drive that change faster…)

• “Hyping artificial intelligence – yet again” – by Gary Marcus in the New Yorker
• “Google Glass is doomed” – by Robert Scoble (NB be sure to read to the end of this one).

// David W. Wood