Fantastic essay by Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, reframing AI into deep historical and evolutionary contexts.Starts by pointing out that "we are embedded in a living world, yet we do not even recognize all the life on our own Earth. For most of human history, we were unaware of the legions of bacteria living and dy…

For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

Covid-19 pandemic ... leaders are scrambling to manage the immediate fallout... also necessary to prepare for what’s next. Visionary leaders ... didn’t simply react ... also looked beyond ... guided — and guided their people in turn — by their vision for a better future...fundamental assumptions underlying your current business model may have been…

there at least seven things that make this crisis very different... force the return of big government... one more demonstration of the mystique of borders, and will help reassert the role of the nation state within the European Union...The third lesson of the coronavirus relates to trust in expertise... Professionalism is back in fashion...Unfort…

In 2018, I wrote ... that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come... a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19... call them Generation C... shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks...More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza... stealthier... nations must ... identify infected…

An op-ed from the future... In the age of cheap and accessible virtual reality, most consumers prefer to experience their narratives rather than read them... Virtual reality has given us a post-literacy landscape more grimly banal than Bradbury could ever have imagined... Books may be dead, but the stories ... the narratives that delight and disma…

The loss of state control, the fragility of EU institutions, and the rise of populism could bring about a disintegration process in Schengen, the eurozone or "even the Single Market", according to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2016.

The future of the EU is interesting, because it cannot make any significant decisions now, and it cannot decide to dissolve. What will happen is what is happening now: less and less does Europe make decisions, and when it does, European states pay less and less attention to them... Buildings in Brussels continue to issue edicts, and everybody else…

we take a peek into a world where your boss is tracking you, your neighbour is a robot, and it’s cool to be old… employment, but not as we know it

it’s now perfectly clear that mobile is the future of technology and of the internet. But within that, there's a huge range of different themes and issues, many of which are still pretty unsettled.  I outline what I think are the 16 topics to think about within the current generation, and then link to the things I’ve written about them.

we begin to see the complexity at the intersections, the amplification of disruptive power, and the broad implications for the future.

an ongoing conflict between artificial intelligence and the linked but divergent project of intelligence augmentation... the difference between a future in which human capabilities are enhanced by technology and one in which humans are made effectively obsolete, versioned out by the consequences of our own ingenuity... we might be “in for an in…

People don’t leave companies. They leave managers — it’s their number one reason to leave... Modern business structures are built on a fundamental system of mistrust, division, and antagonism I call LCD management — managing to the lowest common denominator... companies of all sizes, in every industry, have operated without managers for decades…

Conversations about the intersection of news, technology, and culture. - Front Page - The Future of News : The Future of News

as the internet of things surrounds us with devices that can hear our words, anticipate our needs, and sense our gestures, what does that mean for the future of design, especially as those screens go away?... It's all about getting away from the touchscreen, and interfacing with the devices around us in more natural ways: haptics, computer visi…

The Old Work organises labour as a factory model of work... focused on fixing the bad stuff and continuous improvement (of the old stuff)... the New Work looks to bring everyone together in a living Community to discover, reconfigure and make new combinations of strengths to innovate. They look to discover through stories the deepest level of e…

The framework probably needs some explanation, and I intend to both refine and provide more detailed explanations of the framework in the near future. In the meantime, here is our Beta v1 of The Future of Work framework. - Launching new framework: The Future of Work - Trends in the Living NetworksTrends in the Living Networks

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.

What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need? - The End of th…

The future of the web is "push-based", meaning the web will be coming to us.... the web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.. content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them... What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get informat…

How do we want to communicate with each other? ... what kind of communicator would we actually want to use?... How do you signal that you're available to talk about movies, but not to talk about work? As we talk to more people more of the time, we'll also need smarter status indicators and smarter ways to break down conversations. The closest t…