Welcome to Syd Mead Inc. Mark IV 2010. The long awaited next book from legendary Syd Mead has finally arrived after nine years. Loyal fans and art enthusiasts will rejoice in being able to view what Syd Mead has been imagining for nearly the past decade. Having illustrated the future for us for the past 40 years, Syd Mead continues to amaze and surprise us with his stunning pieces no matter how much of the future we have seen from the start of his career to present day. Looking through his unrivaled artwork, we still find ourselves continuously waiting for his future to be in our present.
Images from countless conceptual projects as well as realized ones will be included in this fantastic visual voyage into the future with the one and only Visual Futurist, Syd Mead. This limited edition hardcover will not be available again. WHEREVER YOU WANT TO GO DOCUMENTARY Syd recently took part in an exciting new documentary “WHEREVER YOU WANT TO GO,” officially released as the premiere series from “BMW Documentaries. Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Life a Hundred Years from Now: Part 2. In part 1 of this two-part series, I discussed predictions, published in 2006 and 2008, about what the world would look like a hundred years from now.
As I noted in that post, it is relatively easy to extrapolate the past into the future at the macro level (i.e., easy to predict that life expectancy is likely to increase, communications will improve, transportation will change, medical care will evolve, and new products will be invented). Today I would like discuss the article that started me thinking about this subject.
I found the article in the New York Post ["Life in the year 2100," by Michio Kaku, 31 March 2011]. The article is based on Kaku's book Physics of the Future. Kaku writes: "If someone from 2100 could visit us now, how would we view them? Probably like the gods of mythology. With that introduction, Kaku provides ten predictions drawn from his book. "1. "2. Kaku may have taken this one a bit too far. "3. Hurrah! "4. "5. "6. "8. "9. "10. Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Life a Hundred Years from Now: Part 1. Earlier this year I posted a few blogs dealing with short-term predictions about the future. A few daring souls have taken the long view and predicted what life might look like some hundred years from now. The thing that always strikes me about early science fiction movies that depict the future is that completely missed miniaturization except perhaps for "ray guns.
" So I'm not too sanguine about anybody's ability to predict things very far into the future. Before looking forward, however, let's look to past. The average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.Only 14 percent of the homes in the United States had a bathtub.Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. Based on what has happened over the past hundred years, it doesn't take a seer to predict that life expectancy is likely to increase, communications will improve, transportation will change, medical care will evolve, and new products will be invented. Varghese sees a very dark future for the nuclear family. Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion. The future we deserve. The Future of Social Objects. The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, has been slow to attract the attention of budding entrepreneurs.
However, there has been some startup action in so-called "social objects. " We've covered two companies in this domain in recent times, StickyBits and TalesOfThings. The New York Times profiled a third company in this space over the weekend, Itizen. All of these startups are searching for a business model, but there is massive long term potential in this market. Leandro Agro, CEO of sensor data company WideTag (our review), says that by 2050 objects will be judged more for their 'sociality' than their aesthetic value. Living Objects In an interview for Wired Italy and the Venice Biennale of Architecture, transcribed on the WideTag blog by David Orban, Leandro Agro said that "tomorrow a social object might be associated with Italy not because of its aesthetic value but because of its level of 'sociality'.
" "Every object should tell its own story. The Future of Public Relations | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Your Job In 2020 - Forbes.com. The map is not the territory, redux – Argleton, the village that doesn’t exist. Art Physics | by Leonard Shlain. Paul B. Hartzog - Google Profile. Questions for Robert Wright - Evolutionary Theology - Interview. Op-Ed Columnist - Death by Gadget in Congo. Michael A. Stackpole: Publishing Crashes in 2012. Michael Shatzkin, a book industry consultant who is widely read and respected, weighed in with an interesting article about how soon the publishing crash could come.
His analysis is fairly solid and he sees a "serious disruption" in book distribution as early as November, 2012. His thinking runs thusly: once ebook sales hit 20-25% of book sales, print run numbers will fall to a point where the current consignment system for sales will break down. Under the current system, most books can be returned for credit, so for every book sold, two are printed.
Those "returned" books have the covers torn off, and the guts discarded, so they cannot be put out into the market again. Ebook sales will create smaller print runs, driving up the unit cost, forcing higher prices which, in turn, will kill sales. Game over. Aside from my discomfort with the vanity publishing companies he cites in the article as self-publishing resources for authors, I think the analysis is fairly solid.
The Coming Celestial Convergence. The Financial Roadblock to Technological Nirvana: Electric Cars and the Smart Grid. I was having a conversation with a wireless firm earlier this week about the potential for broadening the application of Wi-Fi to those involving telemetry and such. Along these lines, the subject of the "Smart Grid" came up, as it always does when industrial applications are the topic. While there isn't broad agreement on exactly what the "Smart Grid" is, the idea in a nutshell is to modernize the grid for demand, management, efficiency, reliability, and undoubtedly, improving supplier revenues, using advanced technologies. Such extends all the way to the consumer (the residence, appliances, and more; read on), so the market potential of the Smart Grid is by any measure or criteria broad, pervasive, and simply enormous.
But I have serious doubts as to whether we'll ever realize the potential here, and the reasons for such have only a little to do with the degree of technological risk involved or innovation required. Both of these are relatively easy to manage. Scenario-based projections of social processes. As we have noted in previous posts, social outcomes are highly path-dependent and contingent (link, link, link, link). This implies that it is difficult to predict the consequences of even a single causal intervention within a complex social environment including numerous actors -- say, a new land use policy, a new state tax on services, or a sweeping cap-and-trade policy on CO2 emissions.
And yet policy changes are specifically designed and chosen in order to bring about certain kinds of outcomes. We care about the future; we adopt policies to improve this or that feature of the future; and yet we have a hard time providing a justified forecast of the consequences of the policy. This difficulty doesn't only affect policy choices; it also pertains to large interventions like the democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. One part of this imponderability derives from the fact that social changes are conveyed through sets of individual and collective actors.
Wired for Anticipation.
The Coming Age of Franken-products. If you've been following IT trends, you already know that netbooks are the some of today's hottest selling computer products. Netbooks are small computers that fill a niche somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop. Apparently, phone companies believe that mobile communications and computing have a bright future and are elbowing in on the netbook market. At a recent IT show in Taiwan, "phone companies aggressively promoted tiny computers that bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops" ["‘Franken-Products’ Abound at Taiwan Computer Show," by Ashlee Vance, New York Times, 7 June 2009]. Vance reports: "Roger L. Such products are obviously suited for frequent travelers and others living a very mobile lifestyle. Vance reports that several "phone carriers plan to release Nvidia-based laptops" in the near future. Apple's best television iPhone advertising demonstrates the number of applications that are already available to consumers.
"Giveaway" Reminder. Economics Of The Jetsons. By Matthew Yglesias on April 22, 2011 at 4:28 pm "The Economics Of The Jetsons" Earlier today, Annie Lowrey drew our attention to the fact that George Jetson enjoyed a nine-hour workweek—thee hours a day, three days a week. Mike Konczal rightly connected this to JM Keynes’ essay on “The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren” (PDF) highlighting the consequences of a super-abundance of material prosperity. It raises, I think, a number of interesting issues. First, for the kids who don’t know, The Jetsons are a middle class family living in the early 2060s and originally depicted in a television program from the early 1960s.
That seems like a valid choice. And what about a rock star like Jet Screamer? You can imagine two different equilibria here. But my suspicion is that people will still want to hear live performances of popular musicians.