Radical Future of Food

Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas.

Algae

....Algae are at the bottom of the food chain but they are already eaten widely in Japan and China in the form of seaweeds, and are used as fertilisers, soil conditioners and animal feed. "They range from giant seaweeds and kelps to microscopic slimes, they are capable of fixing CO2 in the atmosphere and providing fats, oils and sugars. They are eaten by everything from the tiniest shrimp to the great blue whales. They are the base of all life and must be the future," says Edwards.

Artificial meat

It looks like meat, feels like meat and it is meat, although it's never been near a living, breathing animal. Instead, artificial or "cultured" meat is grown from stem cells in giant vats.

...Much of the research into artificial meat is being done in Europe with scientists in Holland and Britain developing edible tissue grown from stem cells in laboratories. But while the first artificial hamburger could be developed next year, it might taste of nothing at all...studies show that artificial meat wins hands down in the environmental stakes, using far less water, energy and land.

New crops

Few people have heard of Zhikang Li, but history may judge the Chinese plant breeder to be one of the most important people of the century. Last year, after 12 years' work with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, he and his team developed "green super rice", a series of rice varieties which produce more grain but which have proved more resistant to droughts, floods, salty water, insects and disease.

...Green super rice, which could increase yields in Asia enough to feed an extra 100 million people, will be rolled out in the coming years....Last year more than 350m acres – about 10% of global cultivated area, or the same area as Germany, France and the UK together – were planted with GM crops, but this mainly covered only three big foods – maize, oilseed rape and soya – most of which went to animal feed.

Desert greening

Much of the world is arid, with its only nearby water being the sea. So could a technology be found to green coastal deserts in places such as Chile, California, Peru and the Middle East using salt water?

Charlie Paton, a British inventor, has a vision of vast "seawater greenhouses" to grow food and generate power. The idea is simple: in the natural water cycle, seawater is heated by the sun, evaporates, cools to form clouds, and returns to earth as refreshing rain. It is more or less the same in Paton's structures. Here, hot desert air going into a greenhouse is first cooled and then humidified by seawater. This humid air nourishes crops growing inside and then passes through an evaporator. When it meets a series of tubes containing cool seawater, fresh water condenses and is then collected. And because the greenhouses produce more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants, some of it can be released into the local environment to grow other plants. [also see Sahara Forest]

Insects

Locusts, grasshoppers, spiders, wasps, worms, ants and beetles are not on most European or US menus but at least 1,400 species are eaten across Africa, Latin America and Asia. Now, with rising food prices and worldwide land shortages, it could be just a matter of time before insect farms set up in Britain.

Not only are many bugs rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol and high in calcium and iron, but insect farms need little space. Environmentally, they beat conventional farms, too. The creatures are far better at converting plant biomass into edible meat than even our fastest growing livestock, they emit fewer greenhouse gases and they can thrive on paper, algae and the industrial wastes that would normally be thrown away._Guardian

It is also worth revisiting the topic of "Aeroponics," a form of agriculture that requires no soil at all, can be built up in 3 dimensions, and is very thrifty with water. Aeroponics could be used on seasteads -- using "seawater greenhouse" techniques, on space stations and lunar outposts using recycled water, in polar colonies on Antarctica -- even on submarines or undersea habitats.

H/T NextBigFuture

Brian Wang Live Blogs Techonomy from Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe
Brian Wang of NextBigFuture is currently blogging the Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe. The conference brings together some exceptional visionaries, researchers, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists in an attempt to frame a new vision for the future.

Brian live-blogged the conference all day yesterday, when speakers discussed re-inventing intelligence, re-inventing the economy, and re-inventing infrastructure, and is presumably up and ready to take in today's feast for the mind. On Friday, Bill Gates presents the closing talk: "Reinventing Capitalism: How to jumpstart what the marketplace can’t". It looks to Al Fin as if Techonomy is about generalities and quasi-Platonic idealism.

This weeks events at Lake Tahoe will prime Brian's liveblogging skills in preparation for next weeks Singularity Summit in San Francisco. The Singularity Summit focuses on artificial general intelligence as a trigger for "the singularity" as the takeoff point to an infinite future.

You will probably find more practical singularitarians -- who are willing to get their hands dirty in implementing the subject matter -- than techonomists and similar abstract, clean-handed futurists at parallel gatherings. But even singularitarians can become stuck on the head of a pin with millions of angels, and find it difficult to get back into the real world.

It is not unusual for wealthy and gifted men and women to feel an obligation to the masses of those less fortunate than themselves. Such meetings as the Techonomy Conference allow them to mingle and discuss their latest ideas for saving the world and redefining humanity. But how much good actually comes from such gatherings and forums? Did most of the participants, for example, back the disastrous Obama Pelosi regime that is currently on a destructive rampage through national and international economies and relations?

Practical competencies and realistic perspectives can often be difficult to find among those whose wealth and/or postion isolates them from the mundane life or death concerns of most persons. Given that isolation, how can their ideas improve the existences of the masses of people whom they profess to care about?

The most good that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists could do is to bring about new and useful enterprises and industries at all scales of the economy, and to stop financing the very people and organisations which are destroying the future of humankind. We need more distributed productive enterprise and less parasitic bureaucratic infrastructure.

It is important to dissect our institutions and cultures in order to find ways we might improve our existences and futures. But between the present and the abundant future, lie a number of deadly obstacles that must be confronted. It is not clear that the participants of most of these organisations are concerned about these obstacles -- which are far more dangerous to the future of humans than the phantoms of climate catastrophe or peak energy.

When very wealthy, gifted, and powerful people pour their assets (and the assets of society) down rat-holes, most onlookers will not give it a second thought -- such waste is most common. But it would be better for mankind if such wealthy, gifted, and powerful people turned away from monolithic bureaucratic centers of redistribution, and put their excess assets into well-conceived, interlocking, scalable, future-oriented, profit-making enterprises which create opportunities for individuals.

Gerald Celente's 2010 US Predictions

Gerald Celente's Predictions:

Survivalism Goes Mainstream

Budgets will shrink at all scales from states to households

Backlash against immigration

More terrorist attacks likely

Anti-China backlash -- "Buy Local" movement

Continuing Economic collapse

A new movement toward "yankee ingenuity"  innovation

Collapse of cable and satellite TV in favour of online entertainments and news

Rising importance of spirit - lifting diversions -- including art, beauty, style, and class

These predictions are taken from the Trends Research Institute Journal website

Celente's point about diversions is important. People often turn to spiritual aspects of life during economic downturns. Religion, poetry, art, literature -- may well thrive during depressions. Prostitution, drug addiction, gambling, and addiction to games and sports may also increase.

His reference to "down-sizing" of budgets at all scales is likewise pertinent. It will not hurt most Americans to consume at thriftier levels. Particularly if they pay more attention to -- and make sure they get more enjoyment from -- the things they are consuming.

Survivalism as a mainstream pursuit can be seen as either a diversion, a means of enabling more sustainable consumption, or as a reflection of any of Celente's main predictions above. There is considerable overlap between the "thrift movement" and the "survival movement", etc.

Celente has been predicting "total economic collapse" for quite some time, as a video search could easily demonstrate. And over time, US government debt has risen as a proportion of GDP -- an ominous sign, beyond a certain point. Under the current US government, debt has already mushroomed far beyond anything seen before. And the Obama - Pelosi government is just getting started -- not that an opposition government would do much to reverse the course that Obama has already set in stone.

Al Fin Futurists consider Celente's predictions to be modest and a bit too cautious. But I suppose to get the really juicy predictions in a timely manner, one would need to subscribe to the newsletter . . .

Boycott Al Fin Blog For The Month of July!

Image SourceYes, you read the title correctly. Al Fin is recommending that you not read any Al Fin postings in July. Instead, you should devote a bit of time each day to read the master's thesis by David J. Tamm entitled "The Reinvigoration of the West through Outer Space Development." You can download a PDF version of the thesis.

Tamm's thesis takes a rather clear look at many of the underlying reasons for the current stagnation and malaise that dominates modern western culture. In fact, you can be excused for thinking that Al Fin himself wrote large sections of the thesis, so many of Tamm's ideas parallel Fin's thoughts so closely.

The long term survival of the human race is uncertain, given recent demographic trends. The transcendence from earth-bound humans into a space-faring race of wise and intelligent creatures is even less probable. For humans to grow from their current quasi monkeyhood into truly sapient creatures, they need to meet and overcome huge challenges.

But modern western culture is more about avoiding challenges and embracing the stagnant quagmire of mediocrity. The current US government wants to turn the US into a comfortable retirement home much like Europe. A world run by government bureaucracy, where CYA and groupthink replace all innovative and creative thought. A heaven for leftists and Obama zombies.

What use do mediocre government bureaucrats have for outer space? It's just too hard, too expensive, too dangerous. Let's just create and expand more social programs instead! Governments thrive on malaise and dependency. Primitive level humans accept such a master-slave relationship all too easily.

What is the alternative? Read Tamm's thesis and find out.

High Above the Bloody Streets Below

Welcome to the future, where city streets are war zones between drug gangs and sectarian militias. A world whose cities are like Beirut of the 1980s, where the sounds of firefights, car bombs, and bloody martyrdom greet one's ears more commonly than sounds of birds singing or children playing.Having been financially and morally depleted by the Obama administration of the early 2000s, the United States had long since lost its ability to keep trade routes safe, or to ride herd on trans-national criminal organisations and religious terrorist groups. At street level, it has become a free-for-all, worldwide. People of means began looking for higher ground.

The world's elites decided to create cities in the sky, in an attempt to escape the cheapness of human life on the streets below. By paying "protection fees" to street-level gangs and militias, the sky-cities' street level foundations and ground access were protected, for the most part. The last sky city to be brought down by the gangs was in Singapore of 2049. Subsequent brutal reprisals against the streets of Singapore by the triad owners of the felled Sky City left most of the island freehold uninhabitable to this day.
The rise of China as world hegemon in the early 2020s paved the way for expansion of third world corruption to Europe, North America, and Oceania -- regions formerly supportive of property rights and rule of law. Finally, as China itself fragmented into warring factions in the late 2020s, the entire world became a place without law. The teeming masses of the third world discovered that the developed world lacked the will to defend its borders. Soon there was no distinction between third world and first world.

Crime lords and militia leaders have no use for space launches, so every year another irreplaceable satellite falls flaming back to Earth. During the 2030s, nuclear arsenals finally fell into the hands of the gangs, and a few short nuclear wars quickly thinned the ranks of would-be nuclear terrorists and warriors. Several warheads turned out to be duds, and a few thousand self-styled nuclear submariners took residence in Davy Jones' locker. They lacked the competence to safely pilot the aging sea monsters -- particularly the Russian death traps.

As the skies of the world once again grow dingy with coal and wood smoke, all pretense of protecting the water and air of the planet are abandoned. Any species that cannot fend for themselves will suffer the fate of the dodo. Rain forests are slashed and burned, and huge pit mines gouge the surface of every continent and large island. This is the rapidly poisoning world that the many leftist environmental movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries made possible, through their quasi-terrorist tactics against the world of law -- a world that was quickly shrinking under their noses. It took only an Obama presidency and the lack of any credible opposition for the "Greens" to finish off human economic freedoms and any chance for a clean prosperity that might carry men to the stars.

And so the wealthy few -- many of them crime lords themselves -- huddle in the uncertain safety of the sky cities. Listening to the bombs and gunfire far below. Forgetting how close the world had come to climbing out of the primitivity of lower human nature -- but now mired in the stinking, choking future of perpetual sectarian and criminal warfare.

H/T Inhabitat and Time

Promise of Early Retirement: from J Storrs Hall

When Josh Hall talks about early retirement, he is referring to the retirement of all humans from work. Why should all humans retire? Because cheap human-equivalent machines will do all the work humans once did, for the price of kilowatt hours of electricity -- pennies. Josh is a very bright man, a creative man who is able to dream great dreams, and also crunch the numbers: a rare combination. Here is what he says about the retirement of the race:

If you have a human-level AI based on computer technology, the cost to do what it can do will begin to decline at Moore’s Law rates. Even if an AI costs a million dollars in, say, 2020, it’ll be a thousand in 2030 and one dollar in 2040 (give or take a decade). Why hire a human when you can buy the equivalent for a dollar? To put it as simply as possible, you aren’t going to be able to make a living by working. You’re going to need to have some capital. Everybody’s going to need some capital.

...One way or the other, the human race is going to take an early retirement in the next few decades. I find this a much better way of thinking about what’s coming up than “singularity”. The term “singularity” was specifically created to reflect a notion that there was an event horizon associated with advancing AI. But whether or not this is true of the far future, some distinct profiles of the near future are clearly visible. And from what we can see of it, it is going to make a huge difference what we do now.

So, I think, we need a better term than “singularity” to describe what’s coming up. It should reflect the fact that there are indeed some things we can tell about what will be happening. It should, if possible, reflect the fact that this will be a major liberating event for the human race — no longer need we spend our lives in forced drudgery, since we have built machines to do the necessary work. But it should also reflect the fact that we need to be planning for it. _JSHall

Josh is trying to explain how things will change in the near future. It is an optimistic vision, overall, which fits well with "The Europe Syndrome" described by Charles Murray. Thousands of extropians, transhumanists, and singularitarians have described similar technological "quasi-utopias" for well over 50 years. It is a vision suited for lulling the masses to sleep.

Machines have certainly removed much drudgery from the lives of women and men. Our dozens of energy slaves have given us more leisure, income, and choices than pre-industrial humans possessed. It is only natural to extrapolate this trend into the future, to the expectation of early retirement for the race of men. Natural, but wrong.

Western culture no longer speaks for the entire world -- if it ever did. The economic and demographic problems of the west are show stoppers for the "inevitable march of the singularity." But the greater underlying problem for the western world besides the fact that its people are dying without replacement, and its over-consumptive lifestyle is destroying the wealth of future generations -- is the spiritual vacuity. NOT IN A RELIGIOUS SENSE. Religion does not truly signify, once one probes the depths of the human brain, and understands what human spirituality actually is. The human spirit is what makes humans strive against insurmountable obstacles, and prevail.

While western man may have lost his "soul" in a poker game, or used it as collateral for a loan spent on mere consumption, the rest of the world -- most of the world -- has not done the same. Most of the world is still driven to strive, to reproduce, to survive at all costs. To that end, ancient myths of religion and spirit are called upon to guide and motivate the masses to follow traditional paths.

Affluence has stopped the population growth of western populations. But affluence is not a sure thing. Not for the west, and certainly not for the rest. Differential birth rates of east and west, north and south, favour the ever-burgeoning masses of third world people and the traditional tribal peoples of myth and Islam.

Westerners are certainly dying off -- the victims of their own affluence and lack of depth. At the same time, a few scientists and engineers working within mainly western research institutions and corporate labs are creating incredible new technologies that would certainly change any world into which they were introduced.

Third worlders are not dying off, and are instead procreating at 1.5, 2, 3, 4 times replacement, depending upon the country. Population IQ is inversely proportional to fertility rates, roughly speaking. But even low IQ people can watch satellite TV and covet the powerful toys and energy slaves that the rich westerners possess.

These toys and slaves do not maintain, repair, and manufacture themselves -- not yet. But what happens when the small cadres of scientists and engineers, working within institutions inside the dying lands, create the machines that Josh Hall talks about above? Machines that can create, maintain, repair, and improve upon other machines without the help of moderately intelligent and skilled humans? At that point, even after the west dies off, some parts of the low IQ third world can still have high tech societies. And within the sea of low IQ societies, we find islands of higher IQ sub-populations that can step in to profit from the high tech : low IQ dynamic.

Of course, in the style of a true Idiocracy, such inherited toys, slaves, and intelligent mind surrogates will be largely neglected, frittered, fought over, and intentionally destroyed as "evil." Human nature does not disappear, and history does not end -- regardless of how many Fukuyamas or other well intentioned intellectuals proclaim it. Instead, the Fukuyamas meet the end predicted by JM Keynes, "in the long run ..."

Predicting the future is much harder than most people understand. Everything you think you know . . . . just ain't so.

The Next Economy & Sharpening the old Noggin

Innovation Economics Next

View more presentations from ingenesist. (tags: innovation economics)

In order to comprehend and take part in the next economy, most of us will need to take active steps to sharpen and/or preserve our mental acumen. Here is a list of 6 ways from SciAm:

METHOD 1: EXERCISE
Mice that run on wheels increase the number of neurons in their hippocampus and perform better on tests of learning and memory. Studies of humans have revealed that exercise can improve the brain’s executive functions (planning, organizing, multitasking, and more). Exercise is also well known for its mood-boosting effects, and people who exercise are less likely to get dementia as they age....

A variety of mechanisms might be responsible for this brain boost. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain, which also increases the delivery of oxygen, fuel and nutrients to those hard-working neurons. Research has shown that exercise can increase levels of a substance called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which encourages growth, communication and survival of neurons....

METHOD 2: DIET
The brain needs fuel just as the body does. So what will really boost your brainpower, and what will make you lose your mind?...The brain is mostly fat—all those cell membranes and myelin coverings require fatty acids—so it is important to eat certain fats, particularly omega-3 fats, which are found in fish, nuts and seeds. Alzheimer’s disease, depression, schizophrenia and other disorders may be associated with low levels of omega-3 fatty acids.

Fruits and vegetables also appear to be brain superfoods. Produce is high in substances called antioxidants, which counteract atoms that can damage brain cells. Researchers have found that high-antioxidant diets keep learning and memory sharp in aging rats and even reduce the brain damage caused by strokes. That’s food for thought....

METHOD 3: STIMULANTS
Stimulants are substances that rev up the nervous system, increasing heart rate, blood pressure, energy, breathing and more. Caffeine is probably the most famous of the group. (It is actually the most widely used “drug” in the world.) By activating the central nervous system, caffeine boosts arousal and alertness.....One study showed that the equivalent of two cups of coffee can boost short-term memory and reaction time. Functional MRI scans taken during the study also revealed that volunteers who had been given caffeine had increased activity in the brain regions involving attention. In addition, research suggests caffeine can protect against age-related memory decline in older women.

METHOD 4: VIDEO GAMES
.....Surgeons who spend at least a few hours a week playing video games make one-third fewer errors in the operating room than nongaming doctors do. Indeed, research has shown that video games can improve mental dexterity, while boosting hand-eye coordination, depth perception and pattern recognition. Gamers also have better attention spans and information-processing skills than the average Joe has. When nongamers agree to spend a week playing video games (in the name of science, of course), their ­visual-perception skills improve.....

Video games activate the brain’s reward circuits but do so much more in men than in women, according to a new study. Researchers hooked men and women up to functional MRI machines while the participants played a video game designed for the study. Both groups performed well, but the men showed more activity in the limbic system, which is associated with reward processing. What is more, the men showed greater connectivity between the structures that make up the reward circuit, and the better this connection was in a particular player, the better he performed. There was no such correlation in women. Men are more than twice as likely as women are to say they feel addicted to video games.

METHOD 5: MUSIC
Music can...activate your brain’s reward centers and depress activity in the amygdala, reducing fear and other negative emotions.

....music does seem to possess some good vibrations. It can treat anxiety and insomnia, lower blood pressure, soothe patients with dementia, and help premature babies to gain weight and leave the hospital sooner.

Music training can bolster the brain. The motor cortex, cerebellum and corpus callosum (which connects the brain’s two sides) are all bigger in musicians than in nonmusicians. And string players have more of their sensory cortices devoted to their fingers than do those who don’t play the instruments..... some studies have indeed shown that music lessons can improve the spatial abilities of young kids.

METHOD 6: MEDITATION
Meditation, or the turning of the mind inward for contemplation and relaxation, seems to help all types of conditions—anxiety disorders, sure, but it can also reduce pain and treat high blood pressure, asthma, insomnia, diabetes, depression and even skin conditions.

...Researchers are now illuminating the actual brain changes caused by meditation by sticking meditators into brain-imaging machines. For one, although the brain’s cells typically fire at all different times, during meditation they fire in synchrony. Expert meditators also show spikes of brain activity in the left prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that has generally been associated with positive emotions. And those who had the most activity in this area during meditation also had big boosts in immune system functioning.

Meditation can increase the thickness of the cerebral cortex, particularly in regions associated with attention and sensation. (The growth does not seem to result from the cortex growing new neurons, though—it appears that the neurons already there make more connections, the number of support cells increases, and blood vessels in that area get bigger.) _Sciam

There you have it. A glimpse into the future, and a few of the things you will need to do to be able to take advantage of it.

H/T Zenpundit

Irrational Exhuberance? Perhaps a Little

The current economic contretemps is a forceful reminder against blind extrapolation of present trends. Those who remember other recent discontinuities such as the 9/11 attacks and the dot.com crisis -- among others -- should remember not to fall too quickly for "gee whiz!" futuristic monomania.

Eventually, after we sweep up the messes made by Pelosi, Obama, Putin, and others, humans may be back on track for some type of singularity, or choice-expanding discontinuity.

Don't expect mind uploading or human-level machine intelligence for a number of decades. When mind uploading becomes possible, don't be surprised if the destination architecture has nothing in common with what we currently think of as computers.

Expect to be surprised, in both good and bad ways. Prepare for both. That way you can move as quickly over the bad as possible, to savour the good.

H/T Open Culture

What Will Change Everything?

At Edge.org the question is asked of several dozen scientists, thinkers, and authors -- "What Will Change Everything?"

Kevin Kelly thinks "A New Kind of Mind" will change everything. Ed Regis thinks it will be "Molecular Manufacturing." Juan Enriquez sees humanity evolving into a new species of hominid. Stuart Kauffman foresees "An Open Universe," with a Buckminster Fuller-esque "doing more with less" world of dizzyingly evolving complexity. Philosopher Marcelo Gleiser believes humans will master death. Nick Bostrom anticipates the coming of "Superintelligence." Chris Anderson of the TED Conference expects to see a revolution in education from enhanced web technologies. Gregory Paul sees the coming of the CYBORG. Freeman Dyson thinks we will be able to communicate thoughts and feelings directly from brain to brain...... And several dozen more, many of them more startling than any of the above. Check them out.

It would not take much to change everything. But for the change to be desirable, western civilisation needs to survive a few decades longer. The west is the driver of advanced science and technology, as well as the matrix for most sophisticated thought and futuristic ideas. Something better should emerge, if given time to incubate.

World's Most Dangerous Un-Conference 15 Nov 08

On the 15th and 16th of November, 2008, Convergence 08 will be held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. What is convergence? It is the coming together of a number of disruptive technologies in a synergistic re-working of the world as we know it.The list of featured speakers is impressive, and the potential for seminal interaction between participants should be very high. Here is more:

"A host of technologies that seemed like daring science fiction just a few years ago are racing toward practical application with breathtaking speed. Convergence08 is a unique opportunity to look into the coming NBIC future, examine its implications, and prepare for the vast surprises in store for us all."

Both days feature debates on controversial NBIC topics including Synthetic Biology, Longevity, and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Barney Pell, founder of Powerset and search strategist and evangelist at Microsoft, stated, "At this event we aim to use the power of collective intelligence to see farther along the convergence trajectories; each of the NBIC technologies is transformative on its own, and there's a strong interplay among them."

Headliners include:

* Dr. Bruce Ames, biochemistry professor at UC Berkeley, founder of Juvenon
* Dr. Gregory Benford, physics professor at UC Irvine, founder of Genescient
* Denise Caruso, executive director of Hybrid Vigor Institute
* Dr. Aubrey de Grey, CSO and chair of Methuselah Foundation
* Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of Novamente, director of research at Singularity Institute
* Terry Grossman, MD, co-author, Fantastic Voyage
* Andrew Hessel, consulting biologist and author
* Dr. Chris Heward, president of Kronos Science Laboratories
* Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research at Google
* Dr. Steve Omohundro, founder and president of Self-Aware Systems
* Dr. Barney Pell, founder of Powerset, search strategist and evangelist at Microsoft _NantoechnologyNow

Here is a partial list of topics to be discussed:

* Neurotechnology
* Artificial general intelligence
* Synthetic biology
* Human enhancement
* Space tourism
* Social software
* Prediction markets
* Nanotechnology
* Smart drugs

* Bioethics
* Cleantech
* NBIC startup tips
* Reputation systems
* Life extension / anti-aging
* Accelerating change
* Biotechnology
* Open source everything
* Sousveillance / privacy _C08

It is important not to allow the economic downturn to jaundice your viewpoint of the future. Fewer resources will be devoted to many promising areas of science and technology, for a few years. But much vital work will continue. Even should the worst occur, and Obamanation be brought into existence, ways of routing around the corruption and mismanagement will be devised to allow the most important pivotal discoveries to be made.

While tens and hundreds of billions of dollars will be squandered on politically correct science such as faux climate catastrophe, and abundant resources diverted to political friends and cronies of elected officials, intelligent people are working behind the scenes to allow vital functions to survive. And while the minds of most children are twisted and warped in government schools and universities - cum - indoctrination centers, a large enough trickle of young minds bypass the waste mainstream to feed into the unseen competent core--the ones who get things done, fend off unmentionable catastrophes, and prod human development toward a better future.

Trillion Dollar Enterprises

Image Source

They are talking about trillion dollar companies over at exciting, brand-new community blog Future Blogger.

The 10 Most Likely $1,000,000,000,000 Industries

1. Artificial Intelligence: Any system that can outsmart the smartest businessman stands a great chance to accumulate enormous value for its owner. Ray Kurzweil has already devised an evolutionary program that does very well at picking stocks. Dick Pelletier points out that this is already a $21 billion industry . With Google, Microsoft and myriad promising start-ups converging on a viable AI, would you bet against this industry?

2. Space Mining: For the for time in history, space is about to open wide to private enterprises. The first company to figure out how to cheaply bring back large quantities of rare metals like uranium, platinum and gold will cash in. But there will be plenty of competition angling to carve up market share and the corresponding asteroids.

3. Human Genetics: Recent stem cell breakthroughs are turning the unimaginable into reality. We’re already selecting embryos for favorable characteristics. Organ cloning looks like a not-too-far-off reality. Barring complications, regulation, and an ethical backlash, the twin prospects of life extension and genetic enhancement will surely get the credits flowing.

4. Non-Human Genetics: We’ve already made glow-in-the-dark goldfish, grown ears from the backs of mice, and possibly created the first ever artificial life form. What custom creatures, designer pets and efficient new beasts of burden are just around the corner?

5. Super-Massive Solar Farms: As efficient solar cells continue to drop in price, somebody’s bound to put them to good use in a big way. The question is, will large industrial solar farms located in desolate, sunny areas pay off big, or will a decentralized model involving millions of private residents win the day. In both cases a central company that combines manufacturing and maintenance would stand to make a great deal of cashola. Of course, the Japanese national effort to install solar cells in space and then beam back the energy could trump both approaches.

6. Robotics: IRobot’s Roombas are storming the living rooms of the world. Farms and factories increasingly rely on industrial robotics. Honda’s robot can identify and navigate stairs with ease. Toyota envisions itself as a robotics rather than a car company in the future. The right robots at the right price could make their owners and manufacturers a great deal of money.

7. New-Fangled, Profitable Social Networks: MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have attained multi-billion dollar valuations despite the fact that they are difficult to monetize. At some point, somebody’s going to figure out how to rally together a group of people into a super-company or mini-nation, as Philip Rosedale of Second Life labels it, that can more deliberately generate enormous value. Widening bandwidth, advances in processing power, the proliferation of video capture, new content processing models, advanced advertising models, and breakthrough semantic applications are just some of the near-term advances that could significantly increase the value of social networks and their parent companies.

8. Mirror Worlds: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and numerous others are all busily working on Earth platforms that represent major efficiencies for diverse fields like transportation, real estate, and city planning. As these digital environments get richer, more real-time and merge with social networks, related content and business applications could cause their value to skyrocket.

9. Reliable Traffic Control Networks: As robots, self-driving cars, and short-range aerial vehicles proliferate, they’re going to need a kick-ass and ultra-reliable traffic regulation system to help them , and us, co-exist. Such systems will be critical to unlocking the the economic promise of these technologies and will therefore fetch large sums from the companies, cities and nations that require it.

10. Nano-Fabrication: It’s already possible to print human tissue and carbon nanotubes. The company that produces a reasonably priced molecular assembler will enable the alchemist’s dream of: a machine that can spit out a variety of matter in different shapes and sizes.___FutureBlogger

That is a fascinating list of potential trillion dollar fields. Space mining and space-based energy are bound to hit the $Trillion mark fairly quickly, once seriously engaged. We should make the distinction between $Trillion companies, and $Trillion industries. The sheer scale of global enterprise means that banking, finance, insurance, energy,and investment industries are already over the $Trillion mark, among others.

$Trillion companies are another story. The first $Trillion company may very well be a hum-drum retailer, banking/insurance/financial conglomerate, or industrial supplier based in China or India--where growing markets are already huge and due to grow much more.

But the first "mega-$Trillion" company is likely to be the first one to break into the "open-ended revolutionary" areas of human endeavour. Out of the top ten list above, provided by Vis, "Artificial Intelligence", "Nanofabrication" and "Space Mining" (or space enterprise, including space-based energy) have the explosive potential to take off in a blinding fashion. Those are areas where "all bets are off" once they hit the payload.

Once such an industry is truly launched, it may not take long for $Trillion level companies are the norm, and $Billion level companies are seen as mere $Million level companies are seen today--small business.

Some readers may be puzzled at the contrast between the optimism of this posting, and the pessimism of the previous posts. The answer is simple. Anyone who wants to truly see the future, has to be able to contemplate multiple visions, and play them against each other.

The top ten list above contains entries that may be seen as a bit flippant at best, and naive at worst. It should not be judged too harshly, since projecting the future necessarily involves a type of "brainstorming" or "braindumping." You put the ideas out there and see what happens. Hopefully, the feedback you get will be mainly constructive.

Committee Futurism--Can It Go From Entertainment to Useful Prediction?

Via Brian Wang, the Nano Tomorrows 8 scenario vision of the near future of nanotechnology, open source replicators, and cheap molecular assembly is available at nanowerk. I recommend reading the scenarios and spending some time considering the many bifurcations and permutations that are possible--starting today. The list of participants is impressive, and in a different format these participants may have produced much different (and perhaps more realistic) scenarios.

The economic, security, military, and environmental implications of molecular manufacturing are extreme. Unfortunately, conflicting definitions of nanotechnology and blurry distinctions between significantly different fields have complicated the effort to understand those differences and to develop sensible, effective policy for each.

The risks of today's nanoscale technologies cannot be treated the same as the risks of longer-term molecular manufacturing. It is a mistake to put them together in one basket for policy consideration—each is important to address, but they offer different problems and will require far different solutions. As used today, the term nanotechnology usually refers to a broad collection of mostly disconnected fields. Essentially, anything sufficiently small and interesting can be called nanotechnology. Much of it is harmless. For the rest, much of the harm is of familiar and limited quality. Molecular manufacturing, by contrast, will bring unfamiliar risks and new classes of problems.

Desktop nanofactories will use vast arrays of tiny machines to fasten single molecules together quickly and precisely, allowing engineers, designers, and potentially anyone else to make powerful products at the touch of a button. Although such a contraption has been envisioned in some detail for almost two decades, and although the basic concept goes back to 1959, when the physicist Richard Feynman first articulated it, it’s only in recent years that technology has advanced to the point where we can begin to see the practical steps that might bring it into reality.

nanowerk

Begin at Scenario 1, and move through the links, and decide for yourself whether in this case, "committee-futurism" is lighting the way, or merely obscuring the way.

Scenario 7, describing the breakup of the modern Chinese Empire--leading to regional nuclear wars--is one of the more realistic scenarios. Still, by neglecting China's long history of warlordism--by being stuck too long in the concept of the nation-state--the scenario ends where it should be just beginning.

The dominance of contemporary nation-states is unlikely to persist in the presence of ubiquitous molecular manufacturing. Other forms of social, economic, and military organisation will come together in the wake.

Of course, a scenario is only as good as the prognosticators behind it. As impressive as the list of participants is, if an influential project member is too lacking in useful real world experience to have realistic internal models of national, international, and trans-national determining characteristics, the resulting predictions will appear hopelessly naive. Each participant has his own pet project--his own quasi-ideological mind infant. Such blind spots, combined with personal ignorance, can steer a prognosticator spectacularly wrong--as in the final scenario. That is what happens when the quest for "social justice" is confused with hardheaded technological prognostics.

The scenarios deal tantalizingly with actions of non-state actors, but too often focus narrowly, yet still out of focus, on stereotyped concepts of nation-states. It is the interaction of non-state actors with evolving nation-states that will be salient. Neither component is approached realistically or vibrantly enough.

The take-home message from these scenarios, is that they are more than trivial entertainment. Most of the predictions are certainly wrong (like most predictions of the future)--sometimes amazingly wrong--but they are useful for stimulating ideas. Congratulations to the participants for taking part in a necessary and exciting project.

How Many Times Can You Fall in Love at One Sitting?

Women can recreate themselves in many ways. Using hair, makeup, clothing, and natural/artificial mood changes, women can seem to be many persons in one. But what if they could actually change their facial forms, like the women in the art video? How would that change the nature of romance and marriage? It is coming. The only question is, which will come first--real women morphing themselves, or realistic morphing robo-femmes?

Hat tip Racial Reality Blog

Futurism: Thomas Frey vs. The Idiocracy

Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute, has inspired leaders of government and industry with his revolutionary vision of the future.

ET: What technologies do you think would be with us in the future?

Thomas: 1. Binary power is the concept where two otherwise harmless beams of energy will intersect at some point in space, creating a source of power.

To better explain binary power, think in terms of two invisible beams intersecting in a room and the point at which they intersect as a glowing point of light. Binary power will eventually replace all light bulbs. And lest you think it can only be used for intense forms of power, it will also be used to create ‘points’ of sound, eliminating the need for speakers and headphones.

2. Proof has to be demonstrated on two very fundamental levels before there is reason to think that time travel is truly possible. The first is to be able to communicate across time, and the second is to be able to view things across time. If we cannot first communicate across time, or view real life images of another time, how can we possibly imagine sending people across time?

So the ‘viewing things across time’ technology that I think most promising is – viewing the past. Think in terms of setting up sensors around a room and being able to replay images of past events, as much as 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

3. Disassembling matter. Imagine a technology capable of breaking all of the molecular bonds in any given material. As an example, place a rock on a table, focus a beam on the rock and visualise all the molecules in the rock separating and falling in a pile onto the table.

....Thomas: In the past, computer programming has been focused around architecting the flow of electrons. In the future, nanotechnology will be focused around architecting the flow of matter.

Laboratories in the future will be akin to thought factories where the outputs will be visualisations with several million permutations. Inventions will happen so quickly that few people will understand the line between what is real and what is still only imagined.

What would the PC of tomorrow be like? Will the PC even be around or is it just going to be 'ubiquitous' computing in the full sense of the word—every object being a computer, the whole environment being the user interface, etc?

Thomas: Our goal will be to make the interface between information and our brains as seamless and as invisible as possible. Presently, the PC is a rather clunky way of making that connection.

PCs will go away within the next 10 years and a variety of devices will be created to take their place. But we eventually would not want to be bothered by physical devices.

I like to think in terms of information swarms – invisible particles that hover around us, communicating with our minds whenever we desire to ‘plug in’. While much of the information swarm will communicate directly with our minds, we will also have visual interfaces that float in space in a way that is only viewable by us.


....In my mind, patents are only useful when they move the state of the art forward. Too much of what is going on today is nothing more than corporate gamesmanship.
As an example, a typical cell phone will touch on as many as 200-300 patents. If every patent required a $5 royalty, our cell phones would cost a fortune. Many of our emerging technologies will not be able to make it to market because of too many demands on the revenue streams. Once the patents expire, the products become affordable.

ET: On a lighter note, by when do we expect the DaVinci Institute to have its branch on Mars (read: migration to other planets)?

Thomas: Travelling to Mars will be measured in decades, but colonising other planets will likely begin close to a century from now. The first human colony on another planet will be called – Colony 42, because 42 is the meaning of life.

Source

Contrast Frey's visions here and at previous posts, with the mainstream idiocratic view of "futuristic scenarios:"

To be honest, we didn't find the positive scenarios to be all that interesting. So we decided to consider: what if it all went wrong - even horribly wrong?

One possible future we envisioned was "gridlock". The left-right split of today's politics gave way to a deeply divisive standoff between "naturals" and "enhanceds". Enhanceds used all the tools of science to make life better, with intelligence-enhancing drugs and genetic screening of embryos for positive or negative traits (such as a predisposition to cancer). Naturals, a novel alliance of science sceptics from the old left and religious fundamentalists from the right, rejected enhanceds' "meddling" with nature

The worst world we envisioned we called "No Glue", where the financial, political and even social bonds of society all came apart. We considered a rapid evolution of virtual worlds that completely outpaced the ability of governments and international institutions to cope. Financial markets moved quickly into these virtual worlds because they were a much more efficient way of doing business than in the past. Virtual currencies became the medium of exchange. As nations declined and virtual worlds rose, offline social bonds frayed and people lost trust in each other. War and terrorism declined but the world was plunged into constant low-level conflict.

The latter view of "the future" clearly exposes the lack of "grist" contained in the imaginations of mainstream thinkers. These products of conventional educational brain-binding could not possibly dream up a possible future, in their wildest imagination. Because, frankly, their imaginations are hardly wild at all. This is the problem with modern journalists and academics. No grist. No imagination. They are laying the perfect groundwork for the coming Idiocracy.


The fly in the ointment for the architects of the Idiocracy, is that contrary-minded thinkers have access to advanced technology of communication, computation, and correlation. With modern communication, entire new fields of study can arise and thrive overnight, just as entire new fields of commercially viable enterprise arise virtually overnight.

This is extremely bad news for those who wish to control all sources of instability in a society. Bad news for dictators, bad news for religious control freaks, bad news for ideologues and politically correct thought police.

Stay tuned to the undertow.

Fascinating Nanotechnology Video

Hat tip to JW Bats at Our Technological Future

This video is a good intro to "state-of-the-art" nanotechnology research, for people who have read Engines of Creation, and wonder where we are right now.

Although we are not yet ready for molecular assemblers, nano-scale engineering research is making important discoveries.

The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part II

The title of this post comes from a book by SF author Robert Heinlein. It details the quest of a private businessman to conquer cis-lunar space, for profit and the spirit of mankind.

Something similar is happening with internet tycoon Elon Musk, and his private company SpaceX. Musk is betting the farm that he can build a better launch vehicle--one that can compete with the tax-supported dinosaurs from the US, Europe, Russia, and other large governments.

Five years ago, Musk was just another lucky young Internet lion starting a commercial space company. But he was more audacious than his peers — he wouldn't be satisfied with a quick, touristy trip to the edge of Earth's atmosphere, like the X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne. That rocket, and the passenger version that will make up Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic fleet, goes just over 60 miles high. And still it took the aeronautical genius of Burt Rutan and $20 million from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to get SpaceShipOne up and down. Musk wants to fly resupply missions — with astronauts! — to the International Space Station, at 250 miles up in low Earth orbit.

...But first he's got to get the thing off the ground. At the dawn of the space age, between 1957 and 1966, the US sent 429 rockets into orbit; a quarter of them failed. Musk is 36 years old and has spent a fortune to build the world's first privately funded, orbit-capable vehicle to take passengers into space. And now it's sitting on its launchpad, going nowhere. Worse, it's already failed once.

....Before he founded SpaceX in 2002, Musk created two Internet companies: Zip2, which he sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash, and PayPal, which went public shortly before being sold to eBay. Musk, the largest shareholder, was 30 years old, crazy rich, and "tired of the Internet."

Sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway in 2001, mulling the problems of the world, Musk started wondering about NASA's plans to send people to Mars. Which, he discovered when he finally reached a computer, didn't exist. Musk was horrified. A native of South Africa, he had earned physics and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and dropped out of a graduate program in physics at Stanford. He had always been interested in space, convinced that humans were destined to be a multiplanet species. But where were the Columbuses and da Gamas of the 21st century?

...The list of companies that have tried and failed to go orbital is long enough to have spawned a hackneyed joke: What's the fastest way to become a commercial space millionaire? Start as a commercial space billionaire. "Moore's law does not apply to rockets," says John Pike, a space analyst at GlobalSecurity.org. "Humanity has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on space exploration in the past half century, and the numbers have not changed: about $10,000 per pound to put something in low Earth orbit. Elon Musk is asserting that his future is going to be remarkably different, and that's a tall claim."

So how will Musk charge half that? "I thought it would be hard, and it's harder than I thought," he admits. "But I want to make rockets 100 times, if not 1,000 times, better. The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets."

Source

Musk has the right attitude to make it work. In many ways, he seems like one of the heroes from a Heinlein or Ayn Rand novel. And he is spending his own money to try to reach his goal, unlike most of the space evangelists on the stump.

The internet, telecom, computer hardware/software, and consumer electronics have all launched billionaires and mega-millionaires into the financial stratosphere. Clearly, for many of these free spirits, the next big springboard to even greater things is outer space--and the potential to become the world's first trillionaire, even after adjusting for inflation.

Society for Creative Apocalyptology--Apply Here to Register Your Chapter

The editorial board here at Al Fin has come to a momentous decision: we have decided to organise the founding of the worldwide Society for Creative Apocalytpology (SCA). It will be modeled after another SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism.

While the Society for Creative Anachronism is organised for recreation and historical re-enactment, the Society for Creative Apocalyptology will be organised for recreation and education. Education with the aim of creating a core of competence within each participating community--competence for meeting the various challenges of the apocalypse.

Apocalyptology is the study of the end of the world, better known as doomsday or the apocalypse. Many people are amateur apocalyptologists without being aware of it. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction happens to be very popular with the reading and movie-going public. It is a short step from watching The Matrix, Aeon Flux, Jericho, or Terminator, and actually taking a serious interest in developing useful skills that could save your life, or the lives of your loved ones.

The Society for Creative Apocalyptology would not be your typical "community organising" political scam. Besides being fun and entertaining education, the SCA might actually save the lives of large numbers of people living in communities lucky enough to possess an active chapter.

We are currently in the process of collecting ideas for how the SCA will be structured. Soon, we will announce the launching of a new web headquarters of the SCA where future plans will be announced. Stay tuned.


It is the intention of the SCA to remain nonpolitical and nonreligious. By focusing upon the core competencies and skills needed by communities who lose their lifelines to the larger economic and emergency systems of their regions and nations, the SCA attempts to assure that a kernel of competency will exist within all participating communities. In a true major disaster that severs the ties of a community from its regional and national lifelines, several problems have to be addressed simultaneously.

It was clear from observing New Orleans and Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that the local city and state governments were caught completely unprepared. If not for the US military assets who responded almost immediately, the people of New Orleans and southern Louisiana would have suffered far worse than they did.

There are many conceivable disasters and catastrophes that would not allow free-loading and corrupt local governments to abdicate their responsibilities in that way, without suffering far worse penalties than the government crooks of Louisiana suffered.

Do not completely trust your governments at any level, with the safety and well-being of yourself and your loved ones in a disaster, catastrophe, or worse. Be prepared.

Private Space Tourism by 2009?

Billionaire high school dropout Richard Branson is claiming that his company, Virgin Galactic, plans to begin taking tourists to space in 2009. Maverick aerospace designer Burt Rutan is playing it closer to the vest.

"You have a billionaire funding a rebel inventor. Putting those two together makes perfect sense," said space enthusiast Peter Diamandis, founder of the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, who has known both men for nearly a decade.

Aviation history has other odd couples: The wealthy Harry Guggenheim financed the early rocket work of the loner Robert Goddard; international arms dealer Charles Flint helped the Wright brothers sell their airplanes outside the United States; telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell enlisted Glenn Curtiss, a brash motorcycle manufacturer, to help build a practical plane.

Now it's Branson, the adventuring chairman of the multibillion-dollar Virgin Group of companies, who is investing at least $200 million for a fleet of suborbital passenger spaceships being designed by Rutan. Rutan heads the obliquely named Scaled Composites LLC, the kind of techie operation where a new milling machine is announced on its Web site with an exclamation point.

Source

Read the entire story. Branson wants to sell his new service, but Rutan wants to keep his innovations under wraps for as long as possible. Paul Allen is in there somewhere, as well. The smarter billionaires seem to be attracted to space like a moth to the flame. Branson, Allen, Bigelow, Bezos, and more have put their money where their fancies lie--the future.



Notice how the journalist who wrote the news story tries to downplay the technical accomplishments that are necessary to make space more accessible to private citizens. It is as if journalists believe science and technology are a form of magic, that anyone with enough money simply goes to the magic store to buy.

That is the real story in the US and the west. A continuing adolescent slacker mindset that persists well into middle age for most university graduates with careers in education or the media. And that is decadence, my friends, in a human world whose only sustainable future is tech-based. Of course the world would do fine without humans, but most of us would like to stick around. Given that inclination, we had better learn sci/tech like we learned to read or do arithmetic. Scratch that! Most students in government schools are not really learning to read or do arithmetic.

Ministry of Defence Predicts Bleak Future

A new UK Ministry of Defence report predicts technological and demographic changes leading to a bleak future.

The global population is likely to grow to 8.5bn in 2035, with less developed countries accounting for 98% of that. Some 87% of people under the age of 25 live in the developing world. Demographic trends, which will exacerbate economic and social tensions, have serious implications for the environment - including the provision of clean water and other resources - and for international relations. The population of sub-Saharan Africa will increase over the period by 81%, and that of Middle Eastern countries by 132%.

....A "terrorist coalition", the report says, including a wide range of reactionary and revolutionary rejectionists such as ultra-nationalists, religious groupings and even extreme environmentalists, might conduct a global campaign of greater intensity".

Source

There is a lot more in the report, which is interesting, in spite of being predictably unimaginative and distorted by committee-think. In reality, the demographic and terror challenges will be far worse than predicted by the bureaucratic report. This is particularly true in the UK, where a militant and growing anti-British community of muslim immigrants is allowed to freely propagate insurrectionist attitudes--apparently with the blessing of government. Any attempts by citizens to point out the potential dangers of violent Balkanization of the UK is officially condemned as "hate speech."

Technology advances will certainly facilitate group violence, and increase the potential for extreme damage by small groups. At the same time technology will facilitate a better life, and more options for education, entertainment, and work. It is extremely important for people to pay close attention to the possibilities as they develop.

Da Vinci Institute: Blueprint to Supercharge Learning--No More School

Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute--a futurist think tank--has presented his long-awaited report on the future of education.

...The notion that education can take place only in a classroom is similar to the notion that purchasing a product can only take place when you see it on a store shelf. Removing the classroom constraints to learning is similar to removing the shelf space constraints to the marketplace.

....While many different learning methodologies will be experimented with, one that holds considerable promise is confidence-based learning. Some experiments in this area have demonstrated a significant reduction in learning time.

....Confidence-based learning is designed to ensure that learning actually takes place and mastery of a topic is achieved. It is much more than simply delivering information to students. It ensures learning by assessing precisely what people know and what they don’t know without guesswork and doubt skewing the results. It then works to rapidly remediate a learner’s gaps in knowledge and confidence.

....We have speculated that if confidence-based learning is somehow designed into the courseware-builder that the speed of learning can be increased dramatically, by as much as 50% or more.

....Every profession, personal skill, or area of learning has logical points where experts in that field would consider the necessary learning to be sufficiently complete. But every profession or skill is different. As an example, the courses necessary to become a master cigar maker are vastly different than the courses need to become a C+ programmer or airline pilot or registered nurse. Most professions and skills will use a combination of courses completed and a certification exam to validate student proficiency.

....Before a child can tap into a system with courseware as described above, a certain number of skills must first be in place – ability to read, follow directions, and respond to questions. However, once basic motor skills have been mastered, it is conceivable that very young children can begin this type of learning with the aid of some future design of the early childhood workstation.

Since age is not a good way to determine a child’s capabilities, new systems will need to be created to assess the overall readiness of a young student to participate.


We are on the verge of radical shifts in our education systems, and not everyone will be happy to see them develop. Teacher unions and other people dependent upon the existing education system will provide much of the early resistance.

Because of the many facets of the architecture outlined above, the system will not be created all at once. It will be phased in, starting with the courseware builder and distribution system, and later followed by the official record keeping system and various groups providing inputs. Adoption will be spotty at first.

We see home schoolers and foreign students as being some of the earliest adopters, followed by private schools and charter schools, and later public schools. Initially these courses will be used to supplement traditional classroom-based courses, but will later develop into a complete learning curriculum.

....Many kinds of learning are best achieved through hands-on touch and feeling experiences. Marine biology is best learned through working with marine life in all its many forms. The best way to learn history is to travel to the battlefields, take tours of the castles, walk through the ancient ruins, dress up in the ancient clothing, and sleep overnight in a wigwam or cliff dwelling. The best way to become a plumber is to work with a skilled plumber and perform hands-on work-related tasks to fix real world plumbing problems.

....The pace of change mandates that we produce a faster, smarter, better grade of human being. Current systems are preventing that from happening. Future education systems will be unleashed with the advent of a standardized rapid courseware-builder and a single-point global distribution system.

....As a result of this shift we will begin to see dramatic changes in society. The speed of learning will increase tenfold because of a combination of the following factors:

* Confidence-based learning will significantly increase learning speed and comprehension
* Learning what we want, when we want - shifting away from a prescribed course agenda to one that is hyper-individualized, self-selected, and scheduled whenever a student wishes to take it will dramatically change levels of motivation
* Technology improvements over time will continually improve the speed and comprehension of learning

The speed of learning will increase tenfold, and it is possible that the equivalent of our current K-12 education system will be compressed into as little as one year’s worth of learning.

Read the complete report


Much of this report could have been taken from several Al Fin postings on education. There is no question of the need to transform the education machine from a corrupt and opportunistic money sink to a method of making children, youth, and adults into super-learners. The changing pace of technology and scientific development--not to mention the political and economic turmoil of today--demands a smarter student of all ages.