If you want to give your weekend (or week, depending on when you read this) a real boost of unique and fascinating ideas about the future, give this guy a listen.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My almost 4,000-word essay on futurism and the problems generated by linear projections of technological change is finished and has been loaded onto Scribd. Here's a sample:

Here is where we get to the nub of my contention that projecting linear trends based on what effects future radical life extension alone would have on present-day American society simply is not good enough, certainly not for the well thought out, detailed prognostications we need from professional futurists in order to think through some serious questions on our rocketing, accelerating, technological civilization. We need the kind of robust future scenarios that deal with developments in a wide range of fields and social sectors. We need to see how these developments may fit together, spurring each other on. In short, we need better predictions in order to plan our own lives. Unfortunately, we’re not getting them.

It is misleading to tell people that if you scrimp and save, refuse to retire early, educate yourself for jobs that are quickly vanishing, do this, do that, and do those other things, you may, just may, survive (barely) in an economy dominated by a bunch of healthy, skilled, very experienced old people you can’t possibly compete against.

Why? Why is this misleading? Because this simply will not happen. Yes, I know a number of bad science fiction stories have posited the war between the generations in response to shrinking societal wealth, but as I mentioned above, there is simply no way aging will be cured while nothing else changes. These scenarios are structured in this way by writers in order to give their woebegone protagonists sad, dreary lives that they struggle against in vain. They do this, presumably, to amuse their readers.

It is misleading to assure people that they will continue to enjoy the privilege of living in a society with Social Security, pensions, companies, even money, in a society that has the technological wherewithal to defeat death. Any “technosphere” that’s advanced enough to produce a radical life-extension technological revolution must also be capable of generating technological revolutions of comparable power in all other aspects of life—and will do precisely that.

The trends we are already experiencing in such fields as genetics, manufacturing automation, computer hardware and software, robotics, and finally nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will continue due to popular demand, barring a large disaster. As we track these trends, we foresee them converging in very interesting ways. We can project a wide range of scenarios to a time when we won’t have or need many of the traditional societal institutions we now believe to be indispensable.

We simply cannot tacitly assume that the society we live in today will continue to bump along for 20, 30, 40, 50 years with but a few minor technological upgrades. This isn’t realistic. This isn’t what the trend lines are telling us.

Proponents of the existence of accelerating technology are telling us we will be living in an extraordinarily rich information environment worked by superbly crafted robots that do all of the physical labor far better than we can with the enormous riches of invention and production that only a Midas could envision. And life-extension technologies will play an integral role. They won’t be hermetically sealed away from those other technological developments.

It’s time to replace the linear concept of “this will happen, which will cause this to happen, which will cause this to happen…” with the non-linear concepts of technological synergy and convergence. Synergy occurs when two or more trends catalyze and amplify the effects of one another. 2 + 2 = 16. Convergence occurs when once separate technologies draw closer to one another, integrate, and produce wholly new and largely unanticipated technological offspring.

Posted by Sally J Morem at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I saw this one, I immediately thought of the Speculist:

Within 50 years humans will merge with machines and become both superintelligent and immortal, in an event known as the technological singularity. So says the ever-controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil. We pick his brains on his latest initiative, the Singularity University, and on his plan to use advancing technology to bring his father back from the dead in our exclusive interview with him this week.

Kurzweil is just one of many players who have tried to map out the future of the human race, and tried to ensure that their vision comes true,

Check out the full article here.

The five futurists listed were Vernor Vinge, Walt Disney, Alvin Toffler, the Club of Rome and H.G. Wells. All of the descriptions are interesting. The one on the Club of Rome is particularly interesting in that it stated flatly that all of the predictions as to how economic development would continue on their "business as usual track" turned out to be true. BUT, they failed to account for accelerating technological development. Oopsie. But, I guess they had a reasonably good excuse. Like most futurists in the Seventies, they had either never heard of the concept of acceleration or discounted it as unwarranted optimism.

Posted by Sally J Morem at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The following are outtakes from my essay [work in progress] responding to this particular article:

"Living Longer: Planning for Longer Life-Spans," by Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies. Originally published as "Extended Life-Span," in The Futurist, April 1998, pp. 17-23.

You're wondering why I'm responding to such an old article. Well, there are two reasons, one tied in with the theme of my comments on Steely Dan's song, IGY. The future that never was. The other is more mundane. I stumbled onto it in an old file.

Here we go.

Cetron and Davies discussed [in the article] the 1995 discovery that melatonin acted to slow down aging in mice. It seemed at the time to be the key to solving the mystery of aging.

There were at that point 50 distinct theories of aging. Clearly, researchers hadn't dug deep enough. Metatonin wasn't it. This article does not mention the chromosomes' telemaraes. Clearly their effect on aging hadn't been discovered by 1998 or Cetron and Davies would've mentioned it.

Yet they riffed on all this excitement on melatonin, speculating on all the changes they were expecting in society that would grow out of life extension. Here's a brief summary of how they thought things would go:

Their analysis dealt almost exclusively with the impact that growing average life spans were already having on the American and world economy. Cetron and Davies pointed out that our current retirement systems, including pensions and Social Security, were in 1998 (and are today) becoming rapidly obsolete. We're living much longer now than the old "65 and you retire" paradigm established by Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s when very few workers lived that long.

As you'd imagine, their scenario for how extremely long lives would hit our current system is catastrophic. No company could support the enormous numbers of retirees for decades under such a system, neither could personal savings, neither could government programs. All would be crushed financially under the enormous strain.

[At this point I'll draw out in the full essay some of the very different conclusions on our potential future based on Kurzweil's and others' work on the idea of the Singularity.]

Here is where we get to the nub of my contention that projecting trends based on what effects life extension alone may do to present-day American society simply is no longer enough.

It is misleading to tell people if you do this, that and the other thing, you may survive (barely) in an economy dominated by a bunch of healthy, skilled, very experienced old people.

It is misleading to assure them that we will still have an economy with Social Security, pensions, companies, even money, because with the trends I detailed above, we can project to a time when we won't have any of these things, and make a very good argument for this possibility.

Instead, if my trends hold true, we will be living in an extraordinarily rich information environment worked by superbly crafted robots that do all of the physical labor far better than we can with the enormous riches of invention and production that only a Midas could envision.

Life extension advances will not be hermetically sealed. Any "technosphere" that can produce life-extension technology can also produce, and will produce, all of the other things I've noted in this essay. How? By technological synergy and convergence:

Genetics (curing what ails us, and doing so much more)

Robotics (building whatever we desire on command)

Nanotechnology (doing all of the above at smaller and smaller scale, with the kind of precision that will seem magical to us today)

Information (like the physical side, growing more and more precise, and also far more voluminous)

Computers (directing all of these processes)

Two (of many) results of synergy and convergence of technology trends:

1. Replicators (think Star Trek)

2. Cell repair mechanisms (fixing what ails us cell by cell, so not only do we enjoy a greatly expanded life span, but the elderly no longer are elderly. All are young again as every mistake is fixed)

The lesson here for futurists is simple: Never, ever project your future along one linear cause and effect axis. There will be many changes and they will interweave and interact in many interesting ways. The mistake about melatonin wasn't that big a deal. But the single-minded, single-strand projection based on it was.

Posted by Sally J Morem at 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I started writing a comment in the thread on my Better All the Time piece from Friday when I realized that, length-wise, it was growing into a post of its own. So here we go.

Leo wrote:

Until humans know that happiness results from virtuous behavior and that such knowledge informs and directs our own behavior, we will continue to pursue the gratification of our sensory appetites. Such behavior leads to an every increasing level of vice, accelerating one on the downward spiral into the abyss of despair and unhappiness. It is happiness, so understood, that is the basis of the phrase in our Declaration of Independence, "Pursuit of Happiness".

Sally responded:

[T]he kind of capabilities Singulatarians are projecting for future people and societies allow people to pursue all kinds of fun and take care of their responsibilities and themselves. They want more, more, more, and they get it.

The dissipation of alcohol, sex, drugs noted yesteryear and today are a function of comparatively low level of technological capability as expressed in our amusements rather than punishment for sinners.

I agree. While we do see individuals from time to time falling into the spiral that Leo describes (and that's a tragedy), humanity as a whole pushes on.

If anything, I believe that material progress has aided humanity in becoming more virtuous. I pointed out in my post that we are less violent than our primitive ancestors. Look at how much progress has been made over the past few centuries in recognizing and realizing the idea of human rights. The abolition of first the slave trade and then the practice of slavery was a by-product of the industrial revolution. History shows that more capable people, with better resources at their disposal, tend to be nicer than less capable people with fewer resources.

This doesn't mean that there aren't still bad people, nor does it mean that those same resources never get used to do terrible things. But the trend is towards greater empathy with our fellow human beings. Our future selves are highly compassionate beings -- that's one of the things that makes them so darn sexy.

Mark wrote:

If you extrapolate the evolution from single cell to human (more power, knowledge and longevity) into the future, you eventually get to omnipotence, omniscience and immortality which is a common definition of God. So, perhaps God did not create man, but man's destiny is to evolve into God.

Tracing the progression of humanity towards godhood is something akin to tracing the the progression of our present state of affairs towards "the most wonderful world imaginable." The closer we get to any one conception of it, the more we have to refine what we mean by the term. Let's just take one of your characteristics of God, omnipotence, and give it a fairly standard definition: infinitely powerful. (Omnipotent actually means "all-powerful," not "infinitely powerful," but I think most of us would agree that God is widely described as having infinite power.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky (no fan of the God meme) does an excellent job of showing the fallacy of glibly tossing the term "infinite" around, when in reality we can barely get our heads around very large numbers. He writes:

Graham's number is far beyond my ability to grasp. I can describe it, but I cannot properly appreciate it. (Perhaps Graham can appreciate it, having written a mathematical proof that uses it.) This number is far larger than most people's conception of infinity. I know that it was larger than mine. My sense of awe when I first encountered this number was beyond words. It was the sense of looking upon something so much larger than the world inside my head that my conception of the Universe was shattered and rebuilt to fit. All theologians should face a number like that, so they can properly appreciate what they invoke by talking about the "infinite" intelligence of God.

If human beings are currently at a capability level represented by the number 1, perhaps the powerful beings I described in my piece would be represented by the number 100. If those sexy immortal billionaires with super powers then become a thousand times more powerful than that, and then a million times more powerful than that, and then a billion times more powerful than that, they are still roughly as far from being infinitely powerful as we are right now. Going back to my analogy of a one-celled organism trying to figure out what it needs to do to become human, that woefully simplistic creature is much, much closer to us than we are to an infinite being. (In fact, it is infinitely closer.)

Interestingly, if we were to reach a capability level represented by the vast-beyond-imagining number that Yudkowsky describes above, we would be much more powerful than "God" as conceived in the minds of most believers. In fact, we wouldn't need to go nearly that far to achieve a level of capability that far transcends what most people picture when they think of "God." I don't think this means that we're moving in on divinity. Rather, I think we need vastly expanded imagination when it comes to contemplating human potential, much less the nature of God.

Hitnrun wrote:

"I think they would laugh at that question. The answer is so obvious. Likewise, if we had even a rough approximation of what life will be like for people in the future, we would be equally amused at the suggestion that those folks might be less happy than we are."

That's quite an amazing fallacy. Just because something seems "obvious" to an outsider with no data doesn't make it true.

Of course, in the examples I gave there is some data although it's hardly exhaustive. However, these people aren't entirely "outsiders." Human beings of any era will agree that being eaten by bears is negatively correlated with happiness, while having a warm and dry place to sleep is positively correlated with happiness. The net human experience is that over time we have fewer of the former type of factor to contend with and get many more of the latter as given.

In any case, if it's a fallacy to make assumptions about the level of happiness of people living in other eras, then those who claim that people were happier or just as happy in the past are committing precisely that fallacy.

SparcVark wrote:

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

. . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

-Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Is the "new transhuman man" just the "new socialist man" with slightly updated wishful thinking?

Sally responded:

Good prognosis from Trotsky, but Marxism was a very bad treatment.

Turns out Trotsky was right for all the wrong reasons.

Marx KNEW technological development was accelerating in the 19th century, but failed miserably by not studying the tech itself and not extrapolating those trends.

Well, that was ONE of his many mistakes.

Marx looked at human history and saw an ancient power struggle between classes. He saw technology as an enabler of conducting and winning a war between classes rather than as an evolutionary catalyst to societal change. In his view, it takes an armed uprising to put the means of production into the hands of the workers. Wrong. It turns out that technological development ultimately puts the means of production into the hands of the workers, and that a capitalist system fully supports the transition. The singularity, particularly the economic variety, promises to bring about much of what 19th century communists and other Utopians envisioned. Are we just touting a new version of their "wishful thinking?" I suppose we are, in much the same way that the Wright brothers carried forward a new version of Leonardo's "wishful thinking" about heavier-than-air flight.

Donald Fagen wrote:

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be free when their work is done
We'll be eternaly free, yes, and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be!
What a glorious time to be free!

You know, Donald, I always assumed that your namesake was being sarcastic with this song. But the idea suggested here is pretty much where I think we're headed. The basic programming for that machine ought to be something along these lines.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Dan Gilbert explains.

H/t: Michael Darling

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well, it was a great couple of days.

Our second edition of FastForward Radio presented live at the unconference was even bigger than the first one. I think we had more guests on FFR over those two days than we had had over the previous six months. And what a lineup! Our thanks to all who took part.

George Dvorsky (once again) provides a good recap of the final panel on longevity. I think there are a lot of tremendous developments on the horizon in this field, but the importance of eating right and getting exercise can never be overstated. Not all that cutting edge, perhaps, but perfectly doable.

PJ hosted a terrific session on the importance of empathy, as well recounted by you-know-who (maybe we should just start thinking of The Speculist as a kind of "staging blog" for Sentient Developments.) Some really interesting discussion ensued. I deliberately set my own talk up as a sort of part two of PJ's session, hoping to leverage some of her thoughts on tribalism and fear of the Other in talking about potential audiences.

While my intended topic was a discussion of different outreach channels to a mainstream audience -- and whether people generally thought making such an outreach is a good idea -- I sought to use a little misdirection by giving the session a somewhat provocative title: "Winning the Meme Wars."

I'm very glad that I used that title, although I spent at least half of the time trying to referee discussions about whether memes actually exist and whether Nazi Germany provides a good example of meme warfare in action. (Even after admitting -- let's face it, insisting -- that "meme warfare" wasn't the intended topic!) That was all worth it, though, because of the fascinating perspectives that emerged. And I'm not sure that they would have emerged in response to a less stridently phrased question.

I opened up by asking whether the fact that we're planning to completely transform the world doesn't require us to provide some kind of notice to the people who, you know, live in the current world. In response, I had members of the group tell me...

...that we have no particular obligation to the general public; that there are always leaders and followers in times of change and that it falls on us to be the leaders.

...that the general public is a potential threat to what we're trying to do and that we need to "disarm" them.

...that, after all, the average IQ of the participants at Convergence 08 is a couple or three standard deviations higher than that of the public at large.

A few members of the group objected to this line of reasoning pretty vociferously, but they were apparently in the minority, and the whole atmosphere was a little too collegial for anyone to let loose with a "Hey, knock it off with the mad scientist stuff! We don't want any part of your creepy megalomaniacal ravings!" -- although I did hear a few objections to that effect as asides after the fact.

But honestly, I don't think that megalomania is the issue*. I just think this is PJ's tribalism and lack of empathy in action, and it's really just a kind of preemptive defensive posturing. We're mostly geeks, after all, and by and large we learned early on that there's rarely any point bothering with most of the other kids -- they don't "get" us and they can be pretty mean when they want to. And there's no way of saying it that doesn't sound conceited, but we know it's true: we're smarter than they are. A lot smarter. And one of these days, we'll find a way to settle the score.

Somehow.

So, yeah, I think it would be healthy if we found a way past all this schoolyard trauma. It may be true that -- as the great and wise Gilbert said -- none of us will ever really be free until nerd persecution ends, but what if the persecution is already over? The schoolyard was a long time ago, and in today's world geeks really are powerful. We've got the great ideas; we've got the plan for transforming the world. Besides, it's no longer a question of reaching out to a mainstream audience. Geek culture is becoming mainstream (it's the geekification of culture, to use another one of PJ's favorite terms.) The way I see it, geeks have to act as role models in this new emerging society. Or, if you will, they are the new heroes.

The thing is, heroes really oughtn't to sneer at (or be intimidated by) the people they're helping. It's unseemly. It's unheroic. I think we can do a lot better.

* Well, okay, there is the one dude who always wants to talk to me about his plan for an army of robotic Supermen. (I believe I posted a video of him talking about that at the Singularity Summit last year.) Anyhow I think he's kidding. I mean, he's most likely kidding...right?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

First off, credit where it's due -- our good friend George Dvorsky is providing updates in near real-time via his blog and pretty nearly real real-time via Twitter, so he is the guy to catch you up on the latest Convergence 08 goodness.

I gave a fair run-down of what went on yesterday on the Podcast, but I have a few notes in addition, so here goes:

Once again, George gives the definitive coverage of the opening panel on AI. The entire discussion was worthwhile, and I was particularly impressed with the answers that Ben Goertzel gave to the first three questions. The first question was "Why are you here?" Ben pointed out that he's been thinking about these issues since childhood and that he first attempted to build a thinking machine when he was 16-17 years old. When I look back on the kind of stuff I was doing and thinking about when I was that age, I can't help but be impressed.

The second question had to do with the technology and the Haves vs. Have Nots, (and issue we've been dealing with lately from a somewhat different point of view) and whether technology is exacerbating economic differences. Ben talked about harsh economic conditions that he has observed up-close in Brazil -- and noted that conditions are even worse in other places, including parts of Africa. He said that his heart goes out to people living under such conditions, and that he feels that the greatest leverage he can exercise to help them is to continue his work towards artificial intelligence, noting that AI is a major component in bringing about a world where scarcity no longer exists. Ben notes that in a future world where material scarcity has been eliminated, "haves vs. have nots" will be more a question of psychology and culture than material well-being.

Finally, the third question to the panel was what would you do if you were appointed by President-Elect Obama to the new post of CTO. All the panelists gave intriguing answers, but Ben's cut straight to the heart of the matter. It's insane to put a trillion dollars into corrupt banks and failing auto makers. If you really want to push the economy forward, put that money into nanotechnology and AI research.

Amen.

A couple of additional notes on the Paul Saffo keynote (again, well-covered by George). Paul used the typical S-curve that technological developments follow to show how technologists often make bad predictions twice -- first by being too optimistic just when an initial slow-down is likely to occur, then by being too pessimistic just before the big push is about to occur. Very interesting.

Yesterday, I pondered whether life extension is going to be the next personal computer / Internet revolution. Paul showed a graph tracking both of those major trends, examining what the enabling technologies behind them were, and made the following forecast: the coming thing is robots. So if you're looking to invest in the Next Big Thing, take a look at what's going on in that field.

Folks creating their own agenda with the Big Board.

Our studio.

What it should have looked like.

Day 2 looms. We have our second edition of FFR, pus I think I'll be leading a session. More later.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I met up with P. J. Manney and we attended a Senior Associate get-together in Sunnyvale. Along the way, we bumped into Tyler Emerson and James Clement. At the event, I got the chance to chat with Christine Peterson (briefly) and with John Smart.

The event had two speakers. First up was science fiction writer and UC Irvine professor Dr. Gregory Benford. Benford has won two Nebula awards, one of which was for his ground-breaking novel Timescape. But he wasn't talking science fiction last night; he was giving us the background on his new company Genescient, which develops treatments for diseases related to aging. It sounds like they have some pretty serious research backing up what they're doing; my guess is that we will be hearing a lot from companies like this over the next few years.

I got to pondering similar get-togethers in the Silicon Valley 15-20 years ago, introducing radical new business models based on emerging internet technology -- or maybe even 30+ years ago, where the speaker might have introduced a radical concept like the personal computer. I wonder if businesses built on longevity therapies are going to follow a similar trajectory?

We also heard from Science Comedian Brian Malow, who is carving out an interesting niche for himself. I had the chance to see Brian once before at a Bay Area comedy club, and he is quite a funny guy. Plus he obviously has guts -- would you want to try to make a room full of geeks laugh? I'm hoping we'll hear from him on one of our podcasts this weekend.

Back at the hotel, I got the chance to say hi to James Hughes and Geroge Dvorsky. Looking forward to seeing more of all these folks over the next two days.

This morning I'm getting things organized for the the first day of the unconference, and starting to round up potential guests for this evening's podcast. More later.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the end of our last FastForward Radio show, Phil and I imagined what a future without scarcity would be like. One dystopian possibility is that we all sit in our virtual reality rooms and do basically little else.

Obviously, we hope for a better future than that.

Back when we had Ivan Kirigin on FFR he mentioned the sci-fi novel "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." That novel imagines a world with very little scarcity. Goods are manufactured by robots and everyone has everything they need. "Whuffie" has replaced money. Whuffie is a constantly updated rating that measures credibility and how much esteem and respect other people have for someone. It would be like an eBay feedback score for your entire life. Whuffie determines who gets the few things that remain scarce: the best house sites, a table in a crowded restaurant, or a good place in a queue for a theme park attraction.

The novel's author seems to be preparing for that system. You can download Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for free.

But we don’t have to invent a new currency system like Whuffie to achieve a Magic Kingdom future. If scarcity really came to an end for most things then the prices of those things would fall toward zero. The things that remain scarce –like that Park Avenue penthouse with the choice view – would remain expensive. Money already is a representation of how the world values our contributions – including our credibility. There is always the issue of whether that valuation is fair, but that would be the case with Whuffie too.

But let’s say you find yourself living in a future with little scarcity. You have everything you need and want, you like the place you live, and you’re tired of playing Halo version 12 in your VR room. What do you do next? During the podcast I suggested that self improvement might be a big part of the picture. And it might. But a life spent in self-improvement that is never applied to useful work would seem pretty empty too. What to do?

Continue reading "Our Philanthropist Future" »

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

As a science fiction writer, he was one of the big three -- along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He is no doubt most famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but my personal favorites are "The Nine Billion Names of God" and Rendezvous with Rama (just the first one; the sequels didn't live up.) As a scientist, he will be best remembered for his contribution to the idea of placing communication satellites into geostationary orbit.

In futurist circles, he will long be remembered for his three laws of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
   

I am especially fond of the second one. I hope to live to see the third.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night (Friday, October 26^th), at Phil's kind invitation, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Boulder Future Salon's monthly meeting and participating in a lively and far-flung consideration of the month's selected topic: "Moore's Law"

Continue reading "Boulder Future Salon Considers "Moore's Law"" »

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several days ago PC Magazine published an article entitled "Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Modern Computing."

The writer finished with a 13 year timeline (2007-2020) of "13 technologies guaranteed to change the world."

You'll want to read it all.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This Reuters article:
Centennial time capsule car found ruined | Oddly Enough | Reuters

Got me thinking about a couple of things. First, how might the time capsule have been done better (please confine speculation to approximately mid-century technology), and second, what would constitute

"an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity with the kind of lasting appeal that will still be in style 50 years from now."

with respect to early twenty-first century technology?

Please discuss in the comments.

P.S. I think I'll do some checking into how the economics of the capsule contents might have been improved. I'll let you know if anything particularly interesting comes of that.

UPDATE (Moments later): a bit of searching yields a price range of about $900 to $11,000 for similar era Belvederes in conditions ranging from semi-restored to ... iffy. A restored 1956 done by hot-rod legend Boyd Coddington's shop goes for $29,500

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

I'm reminded of Doc Brown's 70 year preservation of his time traveling Delorean:

Notice how this was portrayed in Back to the Future III. Dr. Brown put the vehicle up on pylons. It's covered. And it's in a sealed room.

A mine would be far superior to a natural cave because caves tend to be damp (they're usually formed by water). The preserver could choose a place in the mine where drainage is assured. Barring a cave-in or the renewed mining activities, this sort of time capsule would be perfect.

But even as portrayed in BTTF III, certain parts - like the rubber wheels - didn't fare so well. Even a carefully preserved car would need a lot of work before it would be ready for the highway.

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's my third and final video from the library conference I attended week before last. This is a kind of rough cut made up of leftover snippets which still managed to work together pretty well. There's discussion of demographics, virtual reality, the economy, bilingual education, and flying cars. James Hughes of Rutgers University gives some more of his rather bleak outlook on the future; then he provides some interesting generational perspectives, along with Karen Hyman and Peter Bromberg of the South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative; as promised, Salvador Avila gives his unconventional views on bilingual education; finally, New Jersey State Librarian Norma Blake provides the best answer ever to the question about why we still don't have flying cars.

Once again, I'm less than pleased with the quality. These videos look great on my computer, but I really have to strip them down in order to get them to "mere" 100 MB mpeg files -- I remember when 100 MB files were considered to be kinda big -- not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I'll keep working on it. This lkast one was little longer than the first two, so it required more extreme scaling down. Meanwhile, I'm putting the nice big fat files onto a DVD for use by the New Jersey library folks. I could probably makes copies available to others, if there's any interest.

Part one in the series can be found here; part two, here.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Heck, don't just think about it. Do it.

Of course, this would be a lot better if we could do it two-way. I'd certainly like to send some e-mails to the me of a few years ago. But I can understand where there are logisitical difficulties in providing such a service.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For the next few days. I'm going to be working at a conference in Las Vegas.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seems like there was not time for half of the celebratory stuff we had in mind. What a shame.

But, we can still cut the cake....

Continue reading "Too Busy a Week...." »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)