The NASA Ames is the campus for SingularityU, would it ever become part of the 'Stanford Torus' (by Donald Davis) ?

“A number of exponentially growing technologies (biotechnology, supercomputing, nanotechnology, robotics, communications technologies and more.) are giving tools for change around the world. These technologies and sciences build on each other: a medical advance may rely on supercomputers, robotics, and sophisticated programs such as machine learning. Singularity University is an academic institution whose students and faculty will study these technologies, with an emphasis on their interactions.”

Angelica, Amara D., Academic Model/Curriculum Lead, Singularity University Arrison, Sonia, Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute Barry, Dan, President, Denbar Robotics, former NASA astronaut Bennetsen, Henrik, Assoc Dir, Stanford Humanities Lab, Stanford University Black, Sarah, Kurzweil Liaison, Singularity University Blakely, Dave, Director of Technology Strategy, IDEO Bloom, Howard, Author, The Lucifer Principle, and Global BrainBoshuizen, Chris, Project/Events Planning Lead, Singularity UniversityByers, Tom, Prof, Stanford Univ; Stanford Technology Ventures Program Byrd, Troy, Education/Business Development, Singularity University Canton, James, CEO and Chairman of the Institute for Global Futures Cerf, Vint, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google Inc.Damer, Bruce, Founder CEO, DigitalSpace; Dir The Contact ConsortiumDator, Jim, Prof & Dir of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures StudiesDebat, Yves, Monterey Institute of International Studiesde Grey, Aubrey, Chair & Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah FoundationdeCharms, Christopher, Founder, Omneuron, Inc.Diamandis, Peter, Founder, X PRIZE FoundationDiBona, Chris, Open Source Program Manager, Google Inc.Ebenstein, Lanny , Professor, UC Santa BarbaraEpstein, Kevin, Executive in Residence, Mohr Davidow VenturesFerriss, Timothy, Author, The 4-Hour WorkweekFletcher, Lauren, Engineer, Astrobiology, NASA Ames Research CenterFonseca-Klein, Susan, VP of Operations, Singularity UniversityFord, Daniel, Senior Mathematician, Google Inc.Freitas, Robert. A., Jr, Sr Research Fellow, Inst for Molecular Manufacturing

Gelobter, Michel, Founder, Cooler Inc; former Pres, Redefining ProgressGlenn, Jerome C., Director, The Millennium ProjectGoertzel, Ben, Founder, Novamente LLC; Dir of Research, Singularity InstGoldberg, Robert, Managing Director, Crossroads VenturesGrossman, Terry, Founder and Medical Director of Grossman Wellness CenterHall, J Storrs, Pres, Foresight Inst; Author, Beyond AI & NanofutureHaussler, David, Professor, Biomolecular Engineering, UC Santa CruzHessel, Andrew, Open source biology, Founding Dir, Pink Army CooperativeHodder, Mary, Founder of DabbleHoffman, Jeffrey, MIT Professor of Aerospace Engineering, former NASA AstronautIsmail, Salim, Executive Director, Singularity UniversityJacobstein, Neil, CEO, Teknowledge; Media X Prog, Stanford UnivJames, Donald, Project Manager, International Space UniversityKammen, Dan, Co-director, Berkeley Institute of the EnvironmentKarkanias, Jim, Senior Director, Applied Research and Technology, MicrosoftKhare, Rohit, Former Director of CommerceNet Labs; Founder, Ångströ Inc.Kim, Stuart, Professor, Developmental Biology, Stanford UniversityKleiner, Keith, Associate Founder, Singularity UniversityKraft, Daniel, Instructor, Cancer/Stem Cell Biology Institute, Stanford UniversityKurzweil, Ray, Founder, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.Langhoff, Stephanie, Chief Scientist, NASA Ames Research CenterLee, Burton, Faculty, European Entrepreneurship & Innovation at StanfordLemmey, Tara is the CEO of LENS VenturesLin, Patrick, Director, The Nanoethics GroupLinksvayer, Mike, Vice President of Creative CommonsLohn, Jason, Senior Research Scientist, Carnegie Mellon UniversityMarshall, William, Academic Model/Curriculum Lead, Singularity UniversityMartin, Gary, Director, New Ventures & Communications, NASA AmesMerkle, Ralph, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Molecular ManufacturingModha, Dharmendra, Manager, Cognitive Computing, IBM AlmadenMetcalfe, Bob, General Partner, Polaris Venture PartnersMullenweg, Matt, Founder, WordPress and AutomatticMyronuk, Kathryn, Library and Knowledge Resources, Singularity UniversityNorvig, Peter, Director of Research, Google Inc.Orban, David, Founder & Chief Evangelist at WideTag, Inc. (OpenSpime)Paul, Sunil, Founding Partner at Spring VenturesPeterson, Christine, Vice President, Foresight InstitutePotter, Michael, Director, Paradigm VenturesReda, Daniel, Co-Founder, CureTogetherReddy, Raj, Prof of Computer Science & Robotics, Carnegie Mellon UnivRichards, Robert, Founder, Odyssey Moon LimitedRose, David S., CEO Angelsoft, Managing Principal, Rose Tech VenturesRutherford, Matt, Media Producer, Singularity UniversitySaffo, Paul, Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X research networkSimpson, Michael, President, International Space UniversitySmarr, Larry, Dir, CA Inst for Telecommunications & Information TechSmart, John, Founder & President, Acceleration Studies FoundationSmoot, George, University of California, Berkeley; 2006 Nobel Prize in PhysicsStott, Christopher, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ManSat LLCTaylor, Robert, Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, PCThrun, Sebastian, Prof of Computer Science and Dir, AI Laboratory at StanfordTomkins, Claire , Project Manager: Gigaton ThrowdownTosh, David, Co-Founder of ElggTracy, James, Educational Consultant, Singularity UniversityVita-More, Natasha, PhD cand, U of Plymouth; Vis Scholar, 21st Century MedicineWhaley, Dan, Founder and CEO, ClimosWorden, Pete, Director, NASA Ames Research CenterWright, Will, Creator: SimCity, Spore; Founder, Maxis (Electronic Arts)

Stuart's Found Futures 'ambient forecasting' postcard

Stuart Candy, a fabulous futurist chap of The Sceptical Futuryst blog fame will be joining the current Design Interactions MA first years in London for several sessions later this month about the future implications of synthetic biology, to help introduce them to futures and its usefulness in supporting design exploration — and vice versa. Im super jealous that I will not be a student during those weeks but am looking forward to being able to attend in a variety of gatherings he will be involved in. Including an event at the RCA between Architecture and  Design Interactions  focusing on ‘What if’ story telling. ‘Parallel Worlds’: projects that hint at alternative sets of underlying values, alternative political/economic/social situations.e about story telling.

I first met Stuart during the Lancaster University  ‘Designing Safe Living’ Conference last July whilst I was the programme rapporteur for the resarch programme. He is a fantastically enthusiastic chap who is currently a researcher at the infamous Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, and research fellow of The Long Now Foundation. A lecturer and PhD student in political science at UH-Manoa, and has worked with Jake Dunagan who is now at the IFTF on a variety of proejcts including FoundFutures, a series of public multimedia interventions that tangibly manifest alternative futures and create meaningful encounters with possibility and installations such as the “Postcards from the Future” project.

He also wrote a really interesting piece on his blog about the Tribal Futures open source design research and commerical partnership project between RCA DI and Vodafone that  I was involved in as an embedded reporter. Commenting on the pedagogical approach this project had and its open source design approach the research blog fostered to create a communicaiton platform between students and Vodafone stakeholders: buzz by association it might also be called!

From Alex Soojung-Kim Pang recent blogessay “thoughts on design + futures”, he discusses the importance of design in discussing futures, this validates exactly how i see design is a tool to debate, discuss, create and influence what happens next through very visually inspiring and disturbing means. Design has always been about planning the next step and making it tangible and design research is constantly evolving in response to exploring ways we understand, visualise, prepare and react to possible, plausible and probable futures. Depending on the design tools that have been learnt (eg. MA Design Interactions, RCA), a designer can create parallel scenarios/worlds/futures/mental models and depending on how empathetic they are to imagining peoples actions/reactions they can then imagine the implications of new services, systems, products and platforms within these future worlds. Depending on the design approach, it is fundamental to how we  make decisions as a collective or help facilitate decision making to provoke the darkest and the lightest of approaches to our futures.

“To create a futures appropriate for the 21st century and its challenges, we futurists don’t have to become designers, any more than we have to be printers or graphic artists today. But we do need to learn some of the tools of design, learn from designers how to study people’s interactions with technologies, and pay attention to how people create mental models and imaginary worlds through things. In exchange, we can contribute to the design of things that make the world and the future more comprehensible, and better.” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Instructor explaining the operation of a parachute to student pilots, Meacham field, Fort Worth, Tex. (LOC)

Who are the future futurists and how were the past futurists defined?

From a paper written by Darlene E. Weingand entitled: Futures Research Methodologies:Linking Today’s Decisions With Tomorrow’s Possibilities

Here she defines 3groups of futurists in to Mainstream, Marginal and Non-Futurist

The Mainstream Futurist typically tends to be a generalist and is identified as a futures researcher or professional futurist, attends futures conferences, and/or contributes to futures journals. Six types can be listed:

The Synoptic Generalist…An Ideal, encompassing the ability to have a sense of the key elements of society, a grasp of trends and discontinuities, a willingness to forecast, a sense of pl ausible alternatives, comfort in dealing with complexity, a sense of values held by self and others, imagination, a theory of social change, direct or indirect optimism, and a sense of history.

The General Forecaster…One who forecasts [not predicts] changes in operating conditions; broad in space and long in time.

The Normative Generalist…One who makes no attempt to forecast the probably future, but rather focuses on “alternative futures”.

The Pop Futurist…the “popularizer” who writes for a broad audience, introduces people to futures thinking, and attracts people to utilizing futures research or becoming futures research ers.

The Multi-Identify Futurist…similar to the Pop Futurist; is well-known and influential, but is also known by other labels and the futurist role may be secondary.

The Specialized Futurist…a specialist in a single problem area, perhaps borrowing a few general ideas.

The Marginal Futurist has four sub-sets:

The Futurized Specialist…only secondarily a futurist; someone who is interested in futures- relevant questions, attends futures conferences and contributes to the literature, but identifies primarily with another field such as medicine, law, physics, etc.

The Closet Futurist…one who seriously thinks and writes about the future, but is in no way associated with futures research or the “futures movement”.

The Future Futurist… one who will become a futurist at a later time; possibly students.

The Forgotten Futurist…a writer or thinker from the past who dealt with futures themes but was not regarded as a futurist.

Two categories of Non-Futurist Futurists can be listed:

The Pseudo-Futurist…one who employs the language of the future, but offers no useful insight as to what might happen or what desirable futures to pursue.

The Straw-Man Futurist…a non-entity that is never defined; a conceptual and rhetorical target.

This man defines himself an astronomer but could quite easily talk about anything else in the universe. As he says so himself..[I am a scientist] “Once I do something, I want to do something else.”

One thing that did light up my buttons was when he spoke of how he is asked quite alot about the future and actually the best people to talk to our kindergarten teachers who spend their days with children..children of today will be voting tomorrow. I have also been reading a book about the history of the future and one person that springs to mind who also has been quoted with a similar way of thinking was a british journalist called John Langdon-Davies (he was also known as a Cassandra, someone who foretells predictions that do not come true, allegedly that is a bad thing but is their a bad prediction?) .He was sent to boarding school when he was a child and he recalls sitting in a chapel with 400 boys all of whom “like myself had come to be trained for a future about which certain guesses had been made.” So children are actually a self fulfilling prophecy, a product of what they are told what could be their possible multiple futures.

Check out these video lectures online with the various directors of the schools of thought at the James Martin C21st School:

Director Interview: Science and Civilization
Professor Steve Rayner

Director Interview: e-Horizons
Professor William Dutton

An article written by Arthur C Clarke for Forbes last December.

Looking back on the appalling 21st century from our vantage point, 500 years later, it sometimes seems incredible that the human race could have survived such a time of troubles. The moment of greatest danger can now be pinpointed precisely–the year 2010.Fifty years earlier, the chief threat seemed to be from thermonuclear weapons; however, these could be manufactured only by wealthy nations possessing both vast financial resources and a high level of technology.Then, suddenly and totally unexpectedly, the situation was transformed by the invention of the Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb. The origin of this terrifying device is unknown: Like most concepts whose time has come, it was probably invented independently in a number of places. However, the first public account appeared in the September 2001 issue of Popular Mechanics under this dramatic headline:

E-BOMB: In the blink of an eye, electromagnetic bombs could throw civilization back 200 years. And terrorists can build them for $400.

The heart of the E-bomb is an incredibly simple device–little more than a copper coil packed with explosives. When detonated, they generate a magnetic pulse more powerful than a lightning bolt that disables electronic systems–and one that can be accurately directed toward any target.

The article thoughtfully supplied full details in a diagram that would enable almost any experimenter to build a primitive but effective E-bomb. Needless to say, this is exactly what happened.

The first, and fortunately last, E-bomb was built by a previously unknown group of Asian terrorists and was taken into New York Harbor on board a small freighter. To cause the greatest possible confusion, it was detonated at midnight.

Instantly, all electrical equipment was immobilized–not only lighting systems but all telecommunications and computers. All radio and TV stations went off the air, and the resulting lack of information increased the chaos. Yet the only immediate deaths were a few hundred people unlucky enough to be wearing cardiac pacemakers.

Perhaps they were the lucky ones, because during the next few days no food was available or could be distributed. There was not even any drinking water, as the pumping systems had been immobilized. Hundreds of deaths by thirst and starvation occurred before rescue operations could be mounted from the surrounding areas.

Yet, once again, New York demonstrated its claim to greatness by recovering almost as quickly as it had done after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. It was helped by the cooperation of the United Nations, because every country realized that the entire world was at risk from such attacks.

The question then arose: What possible defense could there be against such a weapon? Although chief executives and other VIPs could be housed in grounded metal enclosures, this was hardly practical for entire populations.

Fortunately, technology–which had caused the problem–came to the rescue. With the development of reliable psychological probes, any suspected individual could now be painlessly and accurately interrogated, by being asked to answer a series of questions. Most of these would be innocuous, but some were obvious lies, which the subject would be asked to repeat in order to calibrate the “Psi-probe.”

The next step was a highly controversial one. Individuals were selected at random and interrogated painlessly, then rewarded for their cooperation. The difficulty here was determining the size of the sample needed in any given nation, to make sure that the overall result was accurate.

One outcome of this–the greatest psychological survey in the whole of history–was to demonstrate conclusively that the chief danger to civilization was not merely religious extremism but religions themselves. This was summed up in a famous saying: “All Religions were invented by the Devil to conceal God from Mankind.”

Billions of words of pious garbage spoken by statesmen, clerics and politicians down the ages were either hypocritical nonsense or, if sincere, the babbling of lunatics. The new insights enabled by the Psi-probe helped humans finally recognize organized religions as the most malevolent mind virus that had ever infected human minds.

Now that the Psi-probe allows us to link millions of minds together electronically, it has been suggested that something like a “supermind” might be attempted. There is a danger that this will erase the individuality of its components, and whether this is a good or a bad thing has been the subject of endless debate. There are those who think that such a merging would be a blessing–perhaps the only way to reach a true Utopia.

And even beyond that–perhaps the creation of a single super-entity might send a telepathic signal to the stars, announcing that Planet Earth is at last ready to join the Galactic Community.

Welcome, Entity!