Dear Futurists,

There are several events coming up in the weeks ahead. Here are some updates:

1.) Audience questions at “Agenda for the Future”

At our event “Agenda for the Future” taking place on Saturday 2nd September, London Futurists will once again be using the online tool Glisser to help identify the most important questions from audience members for each presentation.

This follows from our successful trial of this tool at the Transpolitica 2016 event last December.

Audience members can access Glisser from their laptops, tablets, or mobile phones, using any web browser. When a presentation is in progress, the Glisser screen will look something like this:

For more details of how to access Glisser and use it – and why we are using it – see this blogpost.

2.) Video previews of “Agenda for the Future”

A couple of preview videos for “Agenda for the Future” are now available. The first is two minutes long, and briefly covers each of the speakers:

The second of these videos goes into more details of what I’ll be covering in my own opening presentation at the event:

If either of these videos strike you as interesting, please consider sharing them, on your own social networks 🙂

To register to attend Agenda for the Future, see here.

3.) The future of healthcare, decentralised – Sat 23rd Sept

On Saturday 23rd September, we’ll have two speakers from Ascendance Biomedical – Aaron Traywick and Matt Johnstone. They’ll be sharing their vision for how cutting edge biomedical technologies can be made available to everyone – without hassle.

The event is described as follows:

Healthcare is suffering from stagnation. Costly barriers to market entry have prevented promising therapies from reaching those who need them. Big Pharma has focused on costly, long-term treatments rather than affordable, cost-effective cures.

However, decentralization allows us to move past this paradigm…

The speakers will draw on their experience with medical solutions in fields such as gene therapy transfection, senolytics, plasmid therapies that provide resistance to viruses, rejuvenation of ovaries, and a vaccine for lung cancer.

They will also outline the potential usage of cryptotokens and a D.A.O. (distributed autonomous organization) to accelerate the development and deployment of innovative new healthcare therapies…

For more details, and to RSVP to attend, click here.

4.) Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution – Sat 7th Oct

Distinguished American futurist Tom Lombardo will be visiting London Futurists on Saturday 7th October.

Tom will be sharing some insights from his decades-long involvement in foresight, education, and the study of consciousness – as captured in his recent new book “Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution”.

Here’s an extract from the meeting description:

How do we create a good future? This deceptively simple question is the central challenge of human life. Indeed, the question brings to centre stage the most distinctive and empowering capacity of the human mind: to be able to consciously imagine, think about, and intentionally pursue preferable futures.

Tom Lombardo, the Director of the Center for Future Consciousness, refers to this multi-faceted psychological capacity within all of us as “future consciousness.” Our unique conscious minds, reflecting and amplifying nature’s vast and pervasive evolutionary process, have achieved an evolution in evolution—a jump to purposeful evolution—through future consciousness.

In his new book, “Future Consciousness”, Tom outlines a “path to purposeful evolution”: through the heightening of future consciousness, we can flourish in the flow of evolution and create a good future for ourselves, human society, and the planet.

For more details, and to RSVP to attend, click here.

5.) Virtual Futures podcast

Many of you will already be aware of the Virtual Futures Salons – a series of events curated and hosted by Luke Robert Mason.

To quote from the Virtual Futures website,

Virtual Futures Salons are a series of highly immersive event experiences that encourage and promote original thinking. They bring together artists, philosophers, cultural theorists, technologists and fiction writers to re-address the potential of looking at our future through a techno-philosophical lens.

The Salon series completes Virtual Futures’ aim to, “bury the 20th century and begin work on the 21st. They will cast a critical eye over the phenomenal changes in how humans (and non-humans) engage with emerging scientific theory and technological development.

There’s now a new way to keep up with the output of Virtual Futures: the Virtual Futures podcast. At time of writing, four editions have already been released, featuring Kevin Warwick (on cyborg experiments), Trudy Barber (on cybersex), Steve Fuller (on transhumanism and risk), and Carla Gannis (on emojis and augmented reality).

You can follow this podcast on either Soundcloud or iTunes. Let me know which editions you find most thought-provoking!

6.) Blockchain Live – Wed 20th Sept

Here’s a controversial viewpoint:

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it’s not social media. It’s not big data. It’s not robotics. It’s not even AI. You’ll be surprised to learn that it’s the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It’s called the blockchain. Blockchain.

Now, it’s not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet, and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually…

You may recognise these words as the opening salvo in a TED talk given last year by Don Tapscott.

Given a choice between AI and blockchain for the most disruptive technology of the next few decades, I would personally choose AI, without any hesitation. Nevertheless, the implications of blockchain are intriguing.

For an opportunity to explore the potential of blockchain for business and for the public sector, consider attending Blockchain Live on Wednesday 20th September. This is taking place at the Brewery, London EC1Y.

You can take part in this event as an “Explorer”, which is free of charge, and enables access to the “Explorer Agenda”. Alternatively, the “Adopter Agenda” has a richer set of presentations and activities for – you guessed it – a more expensive registration fee.

7.) Disruption Summit Europe, Tues 5th Sept

In an age of accelerating technological disruption, how can companies become the ‘Disruptors’ rather than the ‘Disrupted’?

That’s a theme of “Disruption Summit Europe” which is taking place in Bishopsgate, London EC2M, on Tuesday 5th September.

This summit, which is targeted at business and digital leaders, is curated by D/SRUPTION magazine, and brings together over 50 speakers on innovation, disruptive business models, and digital transformation.

The price to attend this event is £495 (plus VAT). However, because a number of friends of London Futurists are speaking at the event, the organisers have very kindly agreed to provide the discount code DSE_DF for use by members of London Futurists. This reduces the ticket price to £200 (plus VAT).

Note however that only ten tickets are available via this discount code! (Hint: don’t delay…)

I look forward to seeing you there.

// David W. Wood
Chair, London Futurists