It's a pretty widely-accepted notion that the atmosphere is a ridiculously complex system, and the best we can do with our models is a rough approximation.
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use.
With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, de...
Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal - it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political - but it's insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swi...
The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined...
Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earths geophysical systems in order to change the environment.
I don't think that a Singularity would be visible to those going through one. Even the most disruptive changes are not universally or immediately distributed, and late followers learn from the reactions and dilemmas of those who had initially encount...
Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.
Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.
Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers - all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.
Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.
A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.
Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.
Thinking about the future is fundamentally important to dealing with the challenges of today.
Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.
Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio...
I do think that fashion may end up being the 'killer app' for wearable augmented reality systems. This is in part because it's not simply task-oriented - like finding a restaurant or where your friend is currently lounging about - but experience-orie...
Back in the 1500s, the culture that we had built in the West embraced multigenerational projects quite easily. Notre Dame. Massive cathedrals were not built over the course of a few years, they were built over a few generations. People who started bu...
