This past week, from July 12th to the 15th, a global Technology, Entertainment and Design conference was held in Oxford, England to consider the future, including the roles of politics, the environment and social issues in shaping 21st century life.
Among the more than 300 participating scientists, technologists, thinkers, designers, musicians and playwrights were Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and Nokia director of design strategy Marko Ahtisaari.
From the fairly sparse reports (mostly from the BBC), this conference seems to represent the usual confusion of which futurism is heir to. There seem to be a lot of technologists plugging their products (as well as plugging them in, except for the wireless of course) and authors flogging their books. Every expert ignores the field of every other expert. And one biotechnologist extols the complexity of life while proposing to apply reductionist techniques to create more artificially.
Asked about the digital media future, one expert predicted “fifty years of chaos.” With these folks, who could predict anything else?
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6 days ago
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