Future Salon

PopTech Web Cast

Best Conference I have never been to PopTech is Web audio casting right now via ITConversations. Check it out.

Update: Of course it was/is only an audiocast. If you want to see the action and the people you have to see the Age of Anxiety Future Salon Webcast tonight here: http://mfile.akamai.com/14947/sdp/finnern.com/salon_10_2005.mov
IRC chat as always: Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #futuresalon We will start the show at 7pm.

Tomorrow: Age of Anxiety Future Salon

Sanjay Khanna who will present the New Age of Anxiety tomorrow at the Future Salon just came by my office and showed me some of his slides.

I am really looking forward to his talk and our interaction. It is a theme that has not been looked at enough yet. Where are we going with this ever faster change? Is there a limit to our ability to process that change? What happens when we reached that limit? What is the role of humans in society? ...  These are only a couple of questions that he will touch on. There is a lot of great content and questions. (We should make a two day seminar out of it :-)

Here comes the fear monger quote: "You can't afford to miss this Future Salon!"

Of course you can, but if some refreshments with current and future friends, good talk and mind expanding insights, lots of laughter and attentive audience to your own thoughts sounds like a great way to spend your Friday evening. The Future Salon is for you and swing by.

Details: Future Salon A Brand New Age of Anxiety Friday October 21st 2005

Future Salon has the following structure: 6-7 networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+pm presentation and discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map] As always free and open to the public. Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist. Check the Ride Board for opportunities. Free and open to the public. Please RSVP, so we can get enough food and drinks.

The event will be Webcasted check the New and Improved Age of Anxiety Wiki for the details and we will have an IRC chat too: Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #futuresalon 

Recipe for Destruction Plus Future Salon

Wow, Ray Kurzweil together with Bill Joy have written a commentary in the New York Times: Recipe for Destruction. (Check out the excellent graphic on their site too.)

One of the triggers for my renewed interest in the Future was Bill Joy's April 2000 Wired article: Why the Future doesn't need us. Bill wrote it after a chance conversation with Ray at Lake Tahoe earlier that year.   

Ray and Bill were then often put on the same panel to discuss their outlook, Ray more rosy, Bill a bit gray. It was always interesting to realize how much they actually agree on where it is going.

One of these things was that it is stupid to put the DNA sequence of a virus online. No wonder that they are writing a joined article Recipe for Destruction now that it has been done:

United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database

Just to put it into perspective:

... release of the virus would be far worse than an atomic bomb. Analyses have shown that the detonation of an atomic bomb in an American city could kill as many as one million people. Release of a highly communicable and deadly biological virus could kill tens of millions, with some estimates in the hundreds of millions.

The Spanish Flu killed between 25-50 Million people in 1918. That is about the death toll of the Second World War. Back then there was no civil aviation like ours that has the potential to bring a virus to all corners of the world within a very short period of time.

It's not only the government, it is the editors of Science that are shortsighted:

A Science staff writer, Jocelyn Kaiser, said, "Both the authors and Science's editors acknowledge concerns that terrorists could, in theory, use the information to reconstruct the 1918 flu virus." And yet the journal required that the full genome sequence be made available on the GenBank database as a condition for publishing the paper.

Ray and Bill are pointing in two directions to solve this problem: International agreements by scientific organizations to limit publications and a new Manhattan Project to work on promising new technologies:

like RNA interference, that could be harnessed. We need to put more stones on the defensive side of the scale.

Reason to be concerned? Yes. Adding fire to the new Age of Anxiety? Absolutely. Want to discuss how to best deal with it? Come to the Future Salon this Friday for:

A Brand New Age of Anxiety: Implications and Opportunities.

Presenter is Sanjay Khanna a Canadian writer, researcher and consultant for U.S. and European high-tech companies.

Details: Future Salon A Brand New Age of Anxiety Friday October 21st 2005

Future Salon has the following structure: 6-7 networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+pm presentation and discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304 [map] As always free and open to the public. Improve your commute by sharing it with a fellow Futurist. Check the Ride Board for opportunities. Free and open to the public. Please RSVP, so we can get enough food and drinks.

The event will be Webcasted check the Age of Anxiety Wiki for the details and we will have an IRC chat too: Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #futuresalon 

The Next Five U.S. Disasters & The Future of Disaster Relief

We're not sure that anyone used these exact words, but it cannot be denied that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans, the overriding attitude from the scientific community was "We told you so."

Which made us wonder: What other natural disaster do scientists know are coming that we will all pretend we knew were coming, too? If you answered, "Major California earthquake," you're wrong. Even the illiterate know that California will one day be an uninhabited island visible only from the beaches of Utah.

We wanted to dig deeper....[The story gets more serious and outlines possible scenarios for next five U.S. natural disasters.] - "The Next Five Disasters", The Wave Magazine, Oct 5-18, 2005

Before we get to the list of U.S. disasters waiting to happen, I'd like to point you to the Recovery 2.0 Wiki which is meant to prepare in advance for the next disaster in terms of web & internet & tech infrastructure. Instead of scrambling to get fundraising and disaster relief wikis and people finders up after an event, why not plan ahead?

Maybe even ways to disseminate information quickly as a disaster strikes to save lives (personal experience: even five minutes would have saved many thousands of lives this past Dec 26th). Even if that's simply SMS. For instance (yeah, I know this isn't totally feasible in US), "the Shanghai city government issued a text message to mobile telephones late on Sunday" warning residents of the impending deadly typhoon recently. Ideas? Contribute at recovery2.org. Also keep an eye also on Jeff Jarvis' blog for Recovery 2.0 and Technorati tags recovery2.0 and recovery2.

And we're meeting tonight face-to-face in S.F. 6 p.m.

Ok, the list rolls on...

• Area: Pacific Northwest Event: Mount Rainer awakens
• Area: Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas Event: Downtown tornado cluster
• Area: Eastern seaboard  Event: Mega-Landslide/Tsunami [Since this one wasn't so obvious, I've included a snippet:]

Every seismologist and geologist  is familiar with the mega-landslides that have  taken place on the sides of volcanoes over the past 20 million years...

A mega-landslide off the Canary Islands, which [research geophysicist Dr. Stephen N.] Ward calls "one of the steepest places on earth," would result in a wave that is still more than 100 feet tall when it hits the eastern seaboard of the United States.

• Area: Boulder, Colorado Event: Flash Flood
• Area: Entire U.S. Event: Avian Flu Pandemic

(Source: "The Next Five Disasters", The Wave Magazine, Oct 5-18, 2005, not online as yet, but this should be URL next week for Vol 5, Issue 20)

I'm seeing more and more about this flu in the news. There's fear that if the virus mutates then human-to-human transmission could make this flu pandemic worse than the 1918 outbreak of H1N1, which killed 500,000 Americans and 50 million people worldwide.

Check out the October feature story in National Geographic is: The Next Killer Flu.

"The administration has failed to prepare adequately for a flu pandemic," said Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "The danger of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was ignored until it was too late. We can't make the same mistake with pandemic flu." - "Bird flu preparation goes global", The New York Times, The Associated Press, Reuters, October 6, 2005

Read more about how we're preparing for the possibility of the bird flu and what scientists are doing with genetic studies including combing for the ancient 1918 virus from autopsy tissue and even flying to Alaska to dig up a mass grave buried in permafrost.

tags recovery2.0 recovery2 natural disaster disaster relief

DARPA Quals Underway

Once again robotic vehicles of a dizzying variety have assembled at the California Speedway for the Grand Challenge qualifiers. Only twenty of the 43 semifinalists will be given a spot in the main event on Saturday. For pictures, videos, details on the teams and vehicles, and official status updates, check out the Tracking Website, and in particular the RSS feed which aggregates both official posts and all the team blogs.

Meanwhile, DARPA has announced that the start and finish will both be in Primm, NV, the site of last year's finish line. The opening ceremony will be at 6am, with a press briefing at 5am. As I announced the week before last, I'm coordinating a road trip from San Diego, after the Salon Friday night. Other Bay Area Saloners are planning to join a Stanford caravan directly from Palo Alto to Primm Friday night, and at least one is considering flying into Las Vegas and getting to Primm from there. If you want in on any of these other plans, I suggest using the bafuture mailing list and/or the coordination wiki page.

For those who can't make it down to Primm, a robot fix can also be had this weekend in San Jose, at Robonexus. If you're willing to help man the ASF table for a shift or two, we'll get you an exhibit pass for free. And one full-conference pass will be given to the volunteer who makes the largest committment, allowing him/her to attend the sessions when they are not table-tending. To sign up, email asf_ed@yahoo.com.