This List is a little outdated in terms of publication date, but still relevant in terms of content. Watch the video, it’s kind of fun. Though the content is always good, I have to say the WFS remains the least futuristic-looking organization in futurism. I imagine that they’ll be printing their awesome research on newsprint soon.

Anyway, I quote the list from the World Future Society:

1. Learning will become more social and game-based, and online social gaming may soon replace textbooks in schools.

2. Commercial space tourism will grow significantly during the coming decade.

3. Nanotechnology offers hope for restoring eyesight.

4. Robotic earthworms will gobble up our garbage.

5. The dust bowls of the twenty-first century will dwarf those seen in the twentieth.

6. Lunar-based solar power production may be the best way to meet future energy demands.

7. Machine vision will become available in the next 5 to 15 years, with visual range ultimately exceeding that of the human eye.

8. Advances in fuel cells will enable deep-sea habitation.

9. Future buildings may be more responsive to weather fluctuations.

10. The end of identity as we know it? It may become very easy to create a new identity (or many identities) for ourselves. All we will have to do is create new avatars in virtual reality.

When I think of the future, I think in terms of trajectories: simply take a trend or statistic that has been forcibly moving in one direction for some time and project it into the future.  Then, imagine the implications. This basic kind of forecasting gets better the more trajectories or trends you put into the model. You can imagine very interesting things by extending various uninteresting trends into the future. Trends like population, poverty, resource depletion, social inequity. Trace their trajectories and extrapolate out. It’s what futurists and science fiction writers do all the time.

I call one of the visions I have for our possible future “The Great Social Bifurcation.” I don’t imagine this concept is particularly original on my part, but it goes like this: if you extend the trajectories of various social, economic, security and political trends out into the future, you get a society in which there are two camps: 1) the wealthy, educated, secure, tech-savvy elite and 2) the impoverished, undereducated, crime-ridden, resource-poor masses. This future looks in many ways like the classic third-world banana republic, only on an entirely new scale.

One of the data points that supports the Great Social Bifurcation in the US is income equality. Here’s some income inequality data from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. This particular trend, by the way, is what the Occupy Wall Street protesters mean when they contrast the 1% and the 99%.

In this future, then, there’s no middle and little mobility: you’re born into comfort or scarcity, opportunity or lack. The elite will do wonderful technological things, travel into space, invent AI, cure cancer; the masses will struggle to find clean water.

It’s a future that I do not relish, and one I do not think is inevitable, but the trajectories are there. Interestingly, India provides something of a foreshadowing. Consider these two recent news items:

India to Launch Mars Orbiter in 2013 (CNN)

and

Blackout Shines Light on India’s Bigger Problem (Sidney Morning Herald)

That’s right, India is about to join the international Mars Exploration party, while as many as 400 million of its citizens have no access to electricity.

That’s what The Great Social Bifurcation looks like. Let’s hope we don’t have to get used to it.

In the wake of Facebook’s over-hyped and overpriced IPO, we’ve been hearing a chorus of voices singing the social network’s death. But actually, the dirge started earlier in the year. Jill Kennedy wrote this great fairy tale, and then this more strident protest piece. And that’s just one blogger. A quick Google search on the fortunes of Facebook, as an investment or otherwise, will give any doubter plenty to read.

As many note, Facebook’s been dying from a value point of view for some time. I’ve been a member since 2008, so I’m not an early adopter, but it used to be better. It was a connection to friends, and new and fresh, open and free from protocol and ritual. Now, it’s a crapshoot of shooting the crap.

To quote another Jill Kennedy post:

“My Facebook experience now is basically the same five people posting the same boring crap.

“The Bored Office Worker who posts about “needing coffee” – and “can’t wait for Happy Hour!”

“The Super Mom who claims every morning – “Went to 8 museums adn made banana bread all before 10am!  My kids are awesome and sooooo funny!”

“The Quoter who searches quotation websites looking for some daily affirmation that will get about 15 “Likes” and a few “I’m going to use that!” replies.

“The Reviewer who writes stuff like “Smoke Monster?  Shit Monster if you ask me!”

“The Pissed Off Traveler with daily pearls like “10 hours on the tarmac!” and “Yet another delay, thank you American Airlines!””

So true.

For me, my two biggest issues with Facebook now are that 1) it’s defiled the sacred word “friend” and 2) it’s missed the biggest sociocultural opportunity it had, that is to stimulate meaningful, self-expressive conversation between real human beings.

First, the “friend” issue:

Facebook has redefined and thereby diminished the concept of “friend.” How many of us have “friends” on Facebook we would have previously, more properly, called acquaintances, colleagues or former classmates? As far as Facebook goes, it might be more useful to consider our “friends” content streams (like RSS feeds from online publications). Let’s face it, most of what we do with our friends is to read and sometimes to comment on their posted content. “Friendship” is just about equivalent now to “Likeship,” where each relationship amounts to permission to broadcast to me. It can be an endless stream of smart-ass e-card images, news on Coke products and events, or posts on how your day is going.

In light of this, it may be that we’re using Facebook the wrong way.  If “friends” are just personal content streams, and very little more, the way to get the most value from Facebook may be to simply find personal content streams we like and subscribe to them, whether or not we’ve met that person. We should also “unfriend” every content stream that does not interest us, no matter the fact that we worked with or attended high school with that person 20 years ago. And then, in parallel, perhaps we should invent a new word for people (if we still have any) who we know well, care about, and with whom we share some measure of mutual resonance. The word “friend” no longer means that kind of person, so we may need a new word.

Second, the meaningful conversation issue:

I don’t know about you, but my Facebook friend collection is filled with true friends, old acquaintances, former coworkers, old classmates, family, and so on. It’s a diverse group, who have little in common but the link to me; i.e., their presence in my friend collection. When I float out something I’ve thought about or a topic of any depth, I get one of three results: 1) complete radio silence; 2) a smart-ass comment that deflects or avoids the topic; or 3) a handful of likes. The same thing happens when I comment with any thoughtfulness to the posts of others. In fairness, I have received a message or two over the years on topics, but literally just one or two. On Facebook itself, no conversation, no opposing points of view, no debate or insight, of any depth.

But post a picture of your kid, and you’ll get comments, most of which are predictable and shallow too.

So are we all so mindless? Are we afraid to speak our minds? Maybe we’re too busy to say more than the fact that we just got a blueberry scone from Starbucks? Do I need different “friends?” Well, we know Facebook commercializes our data, we suspect it has links to the FBI and CIA, and we certainly know that employers troll our pages in order to judge us. So I like to believe it’s because we’re chickenshit. The shallow conclusion is just too painful. So Facebook comments and postings are basically the polite and vapid banter of citizens living under the panopticon of a police state. Useless, harmless content.

What an awesome opportunity for a global net of productive communication we’ve missed here. There could have been all kinds of interest groups, poetry, collaborative novels, new philosophies, political action, and more. Some of this stuff does happen, I know, but it happens in remote niches. It doesn’t happen in the person-to-person context that dominates Facebook.

Of course, the reasons why Facebook is crap now have to do with commerce, privacy and all the compromises Facebook has made to grow and enrich itself. But another part of it is us: we must suck. We must be cowards. We’ve surrendered the sacred human bonds of friendship and open interpersonal dialogue to big data, big business and the governmental domestic security apparatus.

And now that the Facebook era is beginning to end, what next?

I hope it’s secure networks of real people with real minds, who are free, safe and interesting enough to generate content worth consuming. Maybe like old-school bulletin boards or certain obscure enthusiast forums. If there’s a social network with depth now, please let me know.

Federico Pistono talks about his new book on the impending future:

Also, visit the book’s web site.

And the Singularity Hub interview.

His basic thesis is right, of course.

I quote from Federico’s book site:

“You are about to become obsolete. You think you are special, unique, and that whatever it is that you are doing is impossible to replace. You are wrong. As we speak, millions of algorithms created by computer scientists are frantically running on servers all over the world, with one sole purpose: do whatever humans can do, but better.

“That is the argument for a phenomenon called technological unemployment, one that is pervading modern society. But is that really the case? Or is it just a futuristic fantasy? What will become of us in the coming years, and what can we do to prevent a catastrophic collapse of society?

“Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK: how to survive the economic collapse and be happy explores the impact of technological advances have on our lives, what it means to be happy, and provides suggestions on how to avoid a systemic collapse and live happier.”

What he calls technological unemployment, most call structural unemployment, because it’s more than technology. It has to do with the entire model. I am eager to read the book and his conclusions.

The Singularity. Earlier this year, I read Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Among other things, it’s a critique of web 2.0 and the tech industry’s high-level obsession with The Singularity. Actually, the book was my first meaningful encounter with this specific concept, in the computer science sense (as opposed to the astrophysics sense). The Singularity is a hoped-for smarter-than-human intelligence that many technorati hope we will create soon, either through artificial intelligence or the morphing of the internet into a kind of hive mind.

The Singularity. It’s a sexy concept filled with hope and terror. We might imagine Richard Brautigan’s pastoral world tended by “machines of loving grace” or we might imagine the Hollywood dystopias of The Matrix or Terminator.

There’s no doubt, however, that a lot of smart people believe in the potential and possibility of The Singularity. One of my favorite websites is The Singularity Hub. There’s a nonprofit research organization called The Singularity Institute. There’s also a Singularity University. And there are big names and big money behind these efforts. The Singularity is serious business. It’s powerful and important, moreover, and I believe it is contributing to the construction of our future.

But, of course, with anything this big, there are concerns. Some of the criticisms of our technological trajectories (which seem to terminate teleologically in the Singularity) are related to the possible dehumanization of the world, a dumbing-down of the population, and the social separation of a small techocratic elite from the masses. Furthermore, there exist many negative (along with possible positive, to be fair) consequences that emerge. I believe that, given our current economic and political momentum, there may be a great bifurcation of society regardless, and the Singularity may hasten the division of the planet into “cloud lords” and “crowd serfs.”

Further, the Singularity also seems to some a mystical endeavor, an attempt to build a deity. There is no mistaking the theological overtones of many of the discussions of it. Read this if you don’t believe me: Facing the Singularity.

So, viewed from a certain perspective, the techies and scientists (like most rational people) cannot believe in the ancient mythology of a supreme being, so they are building one. [We are building one—because we are contributing to its development by feeding the monster that is the web]. They [we] hope it will love us and solve all our problems, but who knows? Again, science fiction is filled with cases of this very enterprise blowing up in our faces.

But here’s the kicker — it seems the Singularists are okay with either outcome. In fact, at times, the whole thing feels apocalyptic. There’s also this idea that humans might be able to transfer their identities into the Singularity and live forever. It’s like going to heaven to be with god. It’s moreover like the Rapture. The elite chosen people will be swept up into the Singularity at the time of the apocalypse and the rest of the homo sapien rabble will be screwed. Like the Christians, Jews and Muslims, the Singularists are eagerly anticipating the apocalypse, perhaps even doing things that will bring it on (or not doing things that will prevent it).

So what to make of it all? It’s freaking amazing to me, and I would dare say that you cannot help but “face the Singularity” if you’re interested in the future. But you don’t have to worship it. It doesn’t have to be god.

A major debate may lie ahead of us: what will the sentient machine mean to us, and what will we do with it? If I were to vote for an application today, I would choose a pastoral future of “machines of loving grace” operating in wisdom, peace and prosperity—perhaps somewhere in space! But I’m a utopian, not an apocalyptic.

In my view, one of the most pressing questions facing the average human being, especially young human beings is: what can I offer the world? Yes, of course, the implication is that the world doesn’t owe us a living. Even if it did, it wouldn’t give it to us anyway. As currently constructed, our world is a global capitalist market system, however imperfect, and you have to pay for every aspect of your life, from the food you eat to the entertainment you enjoy.

Specifically, then, the question is: what value will I be able to exchange in the global capitalist market economy in order to survive in the future?

It’s a hairy question, and we’re not asking it enough. If you look at the trends developing in the world around us, it’s clear that most tasks are being automated at an exponential rate. It’s not just the robotics in factories, it’s most everything. Tax returns, banking, car detailing, you name it. Gone are the days when a high school, or even college, graduate could walk out of commencement and into a programmed profession, into a human resource pool (blue- or white-collar) and thereby secure a living. Those labor structures simply no longer exist.

The result of all this automation may be driving what economists call “structural unemployment,” which is basically the idea that, due to the structure of the economy (i.e., the nature and quantity of jobs available) and the size and skill base of the population, there will always be a good chunk of the population who are unemployable. And many futurists see this chunk getting bigger in the future, as more automatable jobs get automated.

My favorite example, one that I have used this year in a class I teach on Innovation and Creativity in Business, is Foxconn, the Chinese electronics manufacturer that was in the news last year because of worker suicides. Last December, Foxconn broke ground on a fully automated “robot” factory that, they said at the time, would eliminate up to 500,000 jobs. My students are often shocked by the human implications of such an automated factory. A half a million jobs is a stunning number, and it may not pan out for Foxconn, but it’s nothing to the aggregation of small automation-driven layoffs that happen every day in a myriad of industries.

On one hand, history has shown that humans can adapt, even back to the earliest days of the industrial revolution. Automation of English textile mills then changed the workforce, yet mass unemployment didn’t follow. But the coming pace of automation will be intense and widespread. I suspect that every human being will be impacted by it.

So what should we do? As a collective species, or even as a society, I don’t know that we can stop the trajectory of this particular change. As individuals, however, we can become astute students of labor and value. We can develop effective answers to the question of what value we provide that robots or algorithms can’t. You simply won’t be able to just learn a trade and plug into the economy like a cog in a machine.

Creativity, innovation, the human touch. Design. Integration. Strategy. Meta-thinking. Whatever it is, we all need to find that thing that helps us add value, that is irreplaceable, and we’ll be fine. The future will require adaptation, constant learning, and an abandonment of old mental models in regard to work.

I think, more than anything, it will be liberating.

Hi. I’m Eric Kingsbury, and this is my new blog on the future.

I’ve coined the word “Kiteba” for this blog. I’m pronouncing it “kih-tay-buh.”

Interesting, right, but what does it mean?

“Kiteba” is an acronym for Knowledge, Ideas, Technology, Ecology, Biology, and Architecture. It’s a word that combines an integrated set of obsessions I have at present in regard to, again, the future. Changes and advances in these areas are converging at a rapid pace, promising to impact everything from our social existence, to how we learn and communicate, to even the material composition of the planet.

Many changes are small, but they’re happening on an enormous, unprecedented scale. Geologists say we live in the anthropocene now, an age in which human beings are the primary agents of change, for better and worse. And it’s just the beginning of our age; the future stretches before us to the extent that we can imagine it.

Of course, some visions of the future are clouded by nightmare scenarios, and I follow these scenarios avidly. We’re facing negative, unsustainable trends in global population, ecological diversity, climate stability and more. But there are also visions of the future that are different, that leverage human creativity to re-engineer how we build, how we consume, how we interact — in sum, how we live.

The way I think of it, this idea of Kiteba is a path to a variety of opportunities for a good future. From what I can tell, all positive possible futures involve some combination of the Kiteba elements. Kiteba is a kind of magic formula. Mixed with courage and determination, good, integrated Kiteba work may just mitigate the looming disaster inherent in those negative trends I mentioned above.

Kiteba is also about the interdisciplinary mind. Being a generalist. Borrowing ideas and innovating new ones. Ideas and works that defy categories. Redefining models and systems. It means learning and thinking, creating and doing.

As I develop the blog, you’ll see what I mean.

Feel free to comment and share relevant content and insight.