Archive for the 'Futurist Posts' Category
An ordinary futurist reads her Seattle Times
I often get asked what makes me a futurist. Fair question, since I don’t have the formal training many futurists have. Mostly I read, and then I think. I talk to other people. I am not an expert in any one field (except maybe writing science fiction) but being a generalist has it’s uses. Anyway, [...]
2010: What we could be doing
This is the third part of my futures post series for January 2010. The first one evaluated my results for 2009. The second talked about what I think will happen in 2010. This is the “what could we do” post. There are a lot of things, but I’m going to pick four. Reform the way [...]
An Ordinary Futurist Predicts 2010 Events
After evaluating my predictions from last year (which were in three separate posts to start with), I decided to keep it simple. Remember that futurists have no crystal ball and I can no more tell you what a stock will be on a given day than a séance leader can. We can see trends. We [...]
Testing Last Year’s Predictions
I’m not as much of a predictive futurist as some of my friends and colleagues, and I do like to play in the space once a year – right about now. I’m going to do this in three steps. Evaluate last year’s predictions, make this year’s predictions, talk about what we need to do this [...]
Kudos to the citizens (that’s us!)
I got a new ipod for Christmas with radio, which meant that while I was at the gym yesterday I watched the news. Obama got it exactly right. He said the government needs to investigate and learn and get better. The government’s part is pretty much what you do anytime you have a failure, whether [...]
Animal Stories
My futurismic column for this month deals with animal intelligence –it’s entitled “What are the Animals Becoming?” I just popped over to Nancy Kress’s blog to see how she’s doing, and it turns out she just blogged on the same topic (or at least mentioned the prevalence of stories about genetically altered animals in her [...]
On Health Care: Fairness vs. Fear
I’ve been listening to the health care debate for some time now. Health care is one of the top things we need to fix to improve our economy (the others are education, broadband, and – most importantly – preservation of the world we live in). I’m not enough of an expert to write intelligently on [...]
Shall we go skiing with robots tomorrow?
This seems to be the moment for robot research for me. At least that’s the topic I picked for this month’s version of my column over at Futurismic, Today’s Tomorrows. Since I don’t like to let my column over there get to be longer than about 1,000 words, I couldn’t include everything. So for the [...]
Good Science News
I’m not really surprised so many people are skeptical about science. After all, what do often hear? Food A or Food B causes cancer. The glaciers are melting faster than we thought possible. Species (your favorite) is now endangered. Drug A which was supposed to be good for you just caused organ B to fail. [...]
How is publishing like the tech industry?
Yesterday, I listened to the Sofanauts podcast #30 while I was pulling out spent daises and mushed iris leaves and planting crocus and narcissus. The conversation is an hour and half long argument where everybody is right. The moderator was Tony C. Smith of Starship Sofa, guests lined up as Jeff Vandermeer and Jeremy Tolbert [...]
Land.”
