Word: futurist
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...even as the prophets of this bold new world were making their far-out forecasts, other participants in a conference that marked the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the double helix sounded much more skeptical notes. They warned that as futurist Arthur Clarke once remarked, short-term predictions about technological advances often tend to lag far behind predicted timetables. As an example, composer and visual artist Jaron Lanier cited problems that still plague even our simplest computer programs. "Software is still software," he said, openly questioning its ability to handle increased complexity that all the projected advances would require...
...Jaron Lanier and Raymond Kurzweil; software gurus Bill Joy and John Gage; environmentalists Thomas Lovejoy and Brian Halweil; ethicists Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Institute and Donald Bruce of the Church of Scotland; legal scholar Bartha Knoppers; brain scientist Baroness Susan Greenfield; Lieut. General Paul Van Riper, U.S.M.C. (ret.); futurist Paul Saffo; Whole Earth cataloger Stewart Brand; venture capitalists Christopher Meyer and Steve Jurvetson; and two of my favorite science writers (outside of my own staff, of course), Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Matt Ridley (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters...
Last month TIME convened a five-member Board of Technologists to discuss how evolutionary biology--think of it as Earth's R. and D. department--is influencing the way we build computers, write software and organize companies. One member of our panel, Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, technology futurist and entrepreneur, observes that the human brain has no single "chief executive officer neuron." What gives the brain its power is not one boss but the ability of billions of neurons to conduct trillions of operations instantaneously. In computer lingo, that's called parallel processing, and it is something that today...
...narrator declares in Salman Rushdie’s reading of “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” Uncompromising in its obsession with the free-market sale of humanity and our acceptance of intolerance and division in exchange for universalizing cash, the futurist society Rushdie portrays nonetheless laments “the moral decay of our post-millennial culture.” In place of the fictions, strange fantasies and alien desires that permeate their lives, Rushdie’s characters search for “home” as a tangible reminder...
...constraint but out of greed. Digital distribution dramatically reduces the costs of business for intellectual property companies, because it eliminates the need for companies to move atoms in the physical world in favor of pushing digital bits across the world information grid, in the words of MIT futurist Nicholas Negroponte in his book Being Digital. It’s common knowledge that out of a $16.99 CD price, artists get about a dollar, record labels get $5 to $10 and the rest goes to the retailer. These prices reflect the costs of doing business—artists, who often...