Are We Ready for Our Predicted Future? The implications of our world exploding in digital bits of big data go far beyond privacy as we think of it today; our minds cannot yet grasp the numbers themselves, much less the global economic and social ramifications of our predicted future. Our Brains and Big Data It's hard for the current state of our human brains to understand big numbers. We simply lack adequate frames of reference. The first time I noticed this was when I saw "Powers of Ten" in school and more recently when considering things like incremental budgets cuts to the US Federal budget.
Infographics and data visualizations can help us imagine the scale of big data but somehow relating it to our day to day existence is sometimes just out of reach. If the farthest reaches you've ever traveled in your life is 100 miles, even a trip to the moon seems fantastical. We liken the scale of Facebook to the population of a country, but the amount of sheer data bits being generated every day far exceeds a paltry census. Futures Thinking: The Basics | Open The Future. The first in an occasional series about the tools and methods for thinking about the future in a structured, useful way. For nearly the past fifteen years, I've been working as a futurist.
My job has been to provide people with insights into emerging trends and issues, to allow them to do their jobs better. I've done this work for big companies and government agencies (usually under the Very Professional sounding title of strategic foresight), and for TV writers and game companies. It's quite an enjoyable job, as it allows me to indulge my easily-distracted curiosity about the world. Fortunately, it's also a job with some definite practical uses. There's a bigger picture at work, too -- less practical, perhaps, but just as meaningful.
I've sometimes called futures thinking a "wind-tunnel," a way of testing plans and ideas. But if futures thinking is so important, why don't more people do it? One answer is that they don't know how. Futures Thinking - A Process Overview. Thoughts for an eleventh September: Alvin Toffler, Hirohito, Sarah Palin « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird. 1. I think we actually had two paperback copies of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock floating around the house when I was a kid – at least, I can remember its “computerized” type running against both pale yellow and pale blue covers.
Between the ages of six and fourteen, roughly, you could have wrapped just about anything from Sunday-matinee dystopia to extra-farty prog rock in that particular typeface, and I would have at least given it a look-see; I was a future-oriented kid. So even though this Toffler book seemed conspicuously lacking in sentient starships, lunar bases and the like, I flipped it down from its place on the top shelf and spent a few days paging through it.
Most of it sailed over my head at that age. For a long, long time thereafter, I’d sit in idle moments and wonder just when future shock was going to happen. 2. In such circumstances my instinct is, quite literally, to rationalize. 3. 4. Sadly, heartbreakingly, “hope” isn’t in it. Metaverse stanford. A book one should read, I've been told. Rainbows End is on the Hugo Ballot at the Nippon 2007 world science-fiction convention. Some related pictures Outer and inner illos that Vernor Vinge did for Mysterious Galaxy. UCSD Library as seen from the north and the east. Alexis Smith's Snake Path as seen from an upper floor of the Library. Pyramid Hill as seen from the south. Mass market paperback edition from Tor Books Hardcover edition from Tor Books Vernor Vinge.