BinaryWolf

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Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, provided the two grants with which the Long Bets website was built.

The Long Bets website is designed…
…as an arena for competitive, accountable predictions (Long Bets).
…as a forum for focused discussion and debate about prediction.
…as an attractive tool for philanthropic giving.
…as a way to foster better long-term thinking.

Prediction 86
“By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.”

Comments about that prediction:

So how do you fight a robot that probably has a rail gun or something even more powerful? My guess would be you don’t try to beat on it, you probably try to hack it’s security codes and reprogram it, although I suppose if you just happen to have your own robot near by you can have them duke it out. Of course, the robot may have much more sophisticated means at its disposal than something like Robocop possibly masquerading as a human. Part of the class could be learning to spot them before it’s too late.

An environmental message from Bruce Sterling.

If you’re the kind of guy or gal who attends SIGGRAPH, then you are best described as an end-user of Gizmos. You’re not here just to shop, to buy stuff in styrofoam blocks. You come here to participate in your industry. Your parents were consumers, back in the 1960s. But you are here to add value and advance the state of the art, so you are some kind of participant. Not a consumer. An end-user. An end-user is the historically evolved version of a consumer.

The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a “Spime,” which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a “Wrangler.” At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

Scenario: You buy a Spime with a credit card. Your account info is embedded in the transaction, including a special email address set up for your Spimes. After the purchase, a link is sent to you with customer support, relevant product data, history of ownership, geographies, manufacturing origins, ingredients, recipes for customization, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update its data in your database (via radio-frequency ID), to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. This removes guesswork and streamlines recycling.

We are filling the atmosphere, and the seas, and the surface of the planet, and our own bodies, with our industrial emissions and our dead junk. In a world with 6.3 billion people, trending toward 10 billion, there is no “Away” left in which we can throw our dead objects. Our material culture is not sustainable. Its resources are not renewable. We cannot turn our entire planet’s crust into obsolete objects. We need to locate valuable objects that are dead, and fold them back into the product stream. In order to do this, we need to know where they are, and what happened to them. We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.

Are there dark sides to this vision? Oh yes indeed. Genuine menaces.

It’s possible to live in a cleaner way. We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary. Those who know, know. Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us. Such acts of evil must be combated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Wanting to know, wanting to do it, that’s half the struggle right there. Our capacities are tremendous. Eventually, it is within our technical ability to create factories that clean the air as they work, cars that give off drinkable water, industry that creates parks instead of dumps, or even monitoring systems that allow nature to thrive in our cities, neighborhoods, lawns and homes. An industry that is not just “sustainable,” but enhances the world. The natural world should be better for our efforts and our ingenuity. It’s not too much to ask. When Blobjects Rule the Earth.

Are his thoughts “leftist ramblings” or “the balancing counterview”?

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There’s nothing more inventive than a 15-year-old.

So writes Howard Rheingold in an interview for BusinessWeek Online He goes on to say:

I don’t think that’s going away. If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I’m spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you’re going to make a billion dollars off it.

The author of Smart Mobs the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he’s starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.