The Foundation trilogy by grandfather of futurism and former RAND corporation forefather, Isaac Asimov is a masterclass in playing the long game. If you want to understand foresight and strategy, you could do worse than to "waste" a weekend on this highly entertaining work of science fiction; almost like the Art of War, for nerds. … Continue reading Foundation
Facial Justice by LP Hartley is not a good book. In fact, I would say it is a pretty terrible book. Bad plot, bad characters, badly written. Yet, I am still featuring it here because the book's big idea is brilliant. Facial Justice imagines a not too distant future where women are forced to have … Continue reading Facial Justice
We are currently at a cross roads when it comes to the balance of power across the world. Advances in technology are combining with shifting socio-economic trends to form new ideologies, each pushing for a different versions of utopia. Here follows a set of broad-strokes possible macro socio-economic scenarios that could play out in the … Continue reading Society 2030: A Set of Socio-Economic Scenario Sketches
The following is the original transcript from my TedX talk of the same name. Typos and all. All Illustrations by the lovely Raleen Bagg. Enjoy: Who wants to live forever? From the quest for the Holy Grail to the search for the Fountain of Eternal Youth; human history and mythology is littered with our obsession … Continue reading Do you (really) want to live forever?
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, is a very big book that uses rather a lot of pages to outline a very basic idea: Bad Suff Happens to Countries Which Are a) Run Badly b) by Bad People. That's it. (Also, if you don't know much about global political and economic … Continue reading Why Nations Fail
Big Government has declared war on Big Tech. The EU copyright directive wants to "control" the internet. The EU has fined Google billions for (essentially) being too big and successful. The UK wants a tech-tax. US Senator Elisabeth Warren wants to dismantle big-tech monopolies. The Californian Governor wants big tech to pay people a data … Continue reading The Problem With Big Gov’s War on Big Tech
"Our opinions and beliefs, what we hold to be true and what we think is right and wrong have all become strategic objectives... Each of us has been brought - face-to-face - to a new front line." The (very readable) Death of the Gods by Carl Miller is a whirlwind overview of the biggest Big … Continue reading Death of the Gods
"Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well, or what is the same thing, many not be able to ask for them." ~ Sigmund Freud (emphasis my own) Helmut Schoeck's theory of social behaviour focuses on Envy as the key driving force behind … Continue reading Envy – A Theory of Social Behaviour
Can robots have rights? Should robots have rights? These deceptively big questions regarding "roborights" are shaping up to be among the Big Issues debated by law makers, scientists, engineers, and philosophers in 2019 - and far into the future. I read David J. Gunkel's Robot Rights to get a handle on where academia is "at" … Continue reading Robot Rights
"The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate emphatic failure and ignore empire success." - The Life and Death of American Cities Scale by Geoffrey West may not be the easiest read (it has a highly academic style, complete with lots of highly academic jabs at different academic fields - … Continue reading Scale
