Future Salon

ACC2003 Discount Offer to Bay Area Futurists

Celebrating the return of the good old Banner Ad.

Now that everybody and his Terrier has Google ads on his Blog I am going retro and introduce my first Banner Ad.

Who said, that you don't get any benefits from frequenting the Bay Area Futurist Weblog.

The people organizing the Accelerating Change Conference [Full discloser, I am actually one of them, although this wasn't my idea] have extended the early bird special: Save $100 (25%) on conference admission until August 4th, for the Accelerating Change Conference 2003, Stanford University, September 12-14.

That is not all: People that frequent the Bay Area Futurist Salon or our web pages get an additional discount of 5% by using the special discount code "ACC2003-BAFuture" (no quotations) when registering. Registration is available at http://www.accelerating.org/acc2003/registration.htm.

The Accelerating Change Conference will be a forum to explore the paradise of resources, as well as the risks and responsibilities, represented by cascading breakthroughs in computational technologies.

Accelerating change is a fact; what to do? Ray Kurzweil, K. Eric Drexler, Steve Jurvetson, Tim O'Reilly, William H. Calvin, Howard Bloom, Robert Wright, and 17 other world-class minds will present to 300 attendees, focusing on the profound risks and opportunities of business and society's accelerating pace of change.

For more information, please check the web page.  

Update: There goes my exclusivity: Cory over at Boing Boing Blog is offering the same discount. And Rebecca picked it up already and is asking: "Am I cool enough to go to this?"  Boing Boing may have more readers, but you are doers, you do sign up using discount code "ACC2003-BAFuture". :-)

Brainwaves will Crush to our Shore at the Futurist Salon on the 15th of August ...

I don't know of a lot of people that are so energized about what they are doing as Zack Lynch. He has an incredible background: He is an evolutionary biologist, enterprise software marketer, and economic geographer, who has worked over the past decade to understand how technology and society coevolve. In this endeavor he has investigated self-organizing behavior of leaf cutter ants at Finca la Selva, taught classes at UCLA's Anderson School of Business on scenario planning, and analyzed sustainable agriculture at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

Inspired by these ventures he wrote a master's thesis on how communication technologies will impact human settlement patterns over the next 100 years. This led him to spend several years as VP of Marketing at enterprise software companies - Maxager and Steelwedge.

He is currently writing a book on Neurotechnology and Society.

The nascent neurotechnology wave (2010-2060) is being accelerated by the development of biochips and brain imaging technologies that make biological analysis inexpensive and pervasive.  Biochips that can perform the basic bio-analysis functions (genomic, proteomic, biosimulation, and microfluidics) at a low cost will transform biological analysis and production in a very similar fashion as the microprocessor did for data.  Nano-imaging techniques will also play a vital role in making the analysis of neuro-molecular level events possible.  When data from advanced biochips and brain imaging are combined they will accelerate the development of neurotechnology, the set of tools that can influence the human central nervous system, especially the brain.  Neurotechnology will be used for therapeutic ends and to enhance human emotional, cognitive and sensory system performance. (check out the rest in the PDF)

If you follow the link you get to his Corante blog, that you should have on your radar screen. It has one of the best signal to noise ratios out there. He will take a break from it for the next couple of weeks to finish his book, but not without having some excellent writers from the field fill in his big boots at his blog.

On the 15th of August he will take a break from the break for our Futurist Salon and talk about "The Neurotechnological Wave".

Get your brain floating on his wave length of truths, interesting thoughts and ideas. 

Friday 15th of August 7pm at:
SAP Labs 
Building D
3410 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 101)
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 280)
(Where some claim to only come for the view :-)

Reminder this Friday Futurist Salon. Theme: Future of Democracy

Here some bonus links for the Futurist Salon tomorrow:

John Abbe suggested sample chapter from Tao of Democracy: Collective Intelligence.
Update 1: John sais right book, but different chapters:
Citizen Deliberative Councils 
The Canadian Experiment 
Citizens Deliberate About Public Issues

Consent and Here's your issue by Doc Searl he also has two bonus links:
Bonus link #1: Mitch Ratcliffe's Political advertising — from the IRS.
Bonus link #2: Britt Blaser's The Greatest Thing. Imaginable.
Comment by Stephen Neitzke to my original invitation who is working on a constitutional renewal project.

If you want to look deeper into where democracy is going and what you can do to guide it into the right direction come to our Futurist Salon this Friday the 25th of July 7pm.

Activist and Videoblogger extraordinaire Lisa Rein will talk about
"The Future of Democracy" -- In meatspace, in our minds and soon, within our bodies.

Update 2 (I forgot to include her excelent links): 
Matrix Reloaded
Aftermath Election Category Of Lisa's Weblog
Ed Felten's Presentation At The Samuelson Clinic's DRM 2003 on
"DRM, Black Boxes and Public Policy"
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Analysis Of The Provisions Of The USA PATRIOT Act That Relate To Online Activities (Oct 31, 2001)
Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow
Salon feature: Ownzored, also by Cory Doctorow.

To support her multimedia presentation we will have it again at:
SAP Labs North America
Building D
3410 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 101)
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 280)
(Sorry, no munchies this time. We will go to a restaurant afterwords.)

Bring news clips of futurist events to share.

Politics is often polarizing people. One of the strength of the Futurist Salon is the dialog and the different viewpoints that we have during and after the talk. This is why I am especially curious how this will play out. See you all there.

Doc Searls at his best. Read the article and do something

Here's your issue.

I can't think of a more important issue for the 2004 election than Saving the Net. That's why I wrote the essay at that link for Linux Journal. An excerpt:

What will it take to revitalize this understanding of property and to cause outrage against the damage done to it by Congress?

I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:

1. a public domain, and therefore
   
2. a natural habitat for markets

In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.

The Internet has proven to be a fine marketplace for all kinds of stuff. Look up any product on a search engine, and you'll see free markets at work all over the place, with power growing on both the supply and the demand sides o every category you can name.

Markets flourish on the Net or with the help of the Net because the Net is free. That's free as in beer, speech, liberty and enterprise. That freedom is guaranteed by the end-to-end nature of the Net, and the NEA principles it engenders: "Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it."

This may sound a bit like communism to conservative sensibilities, unless it is made clear that the Net belongs to that class of things (gravity, the core of the Earth, the stars, atmosphere, ideas) that cannot be owned; and that even thinking about owning it is ludicrous....

Saving the Net and the NEA goods that thrive on the Net should be a paramount concern for technologists everywhere. Those goods include Linux and every idea that's good enough to grow when it passes from one brain to another, gaining value along the way.

Our work is cut out for us. Let's do it.

One job for me, and for anybody else interested in helping out, is finishing the building out of AOTC and GeekPAC. Contact me if you're up for it.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Suspeted Terrorist Button gets you ejected from British Airways

I heard about this one. Thanks John for pointing to it:

Suspected Terrorist. I have for some time contemplated rhetorically creating a Terrorist (or Terrorfied?) Party, to point out some of the contradictions and complexities in the way the word "terrorist" has come to be used. John Gilmore has in a sense beat me to it. Read about his airline adventure while wearing a "Suspected Terrorist" button. Where do i get one of those buttons? [AbbeNormal - Abbe Normal]

Peer-to-Peer Politics - Should Howard Dean be a little bit afraid of the Internet? By Chris Suellentrop.

Good Slate article about where the online movement around Howard Dean may go, even if he is not the chosen one :-)

Like Napster's servers, Dean can be shut down. His online supporters, however, are probably here for the long haul. MoveOn.org was founded to protest the impeachment of President Clinton, but five years later, the online organization has done everything but "move on": It's now trying to serve as a power broker in the Democratic primary.  

Fits nicely to this weeks Futurist Salon theme: Future of Democracy.

Some Pictures of Past Futurists Salons

Troy was so kind to send me some pictures from three of our Salons.

January Futurist Salon

 

 

 

 

 

 

March Futurist Salon with Howard Rheingold

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June Futurist Salon with BJ Fogg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Architecture is politics" EFF founder Mitch Kapor

This is especially true for software architecture. All the more reason to look into the future of democracy. 

Interesting things happened this week. Howard Dean guest blogged at Larry Lessig. Here is a Washington Post article about it.

He is asking the right questions:

As a community that actively discusses these issues, I知 interested in your opinions on how to best bridge the digital divide. The US ranks 11th in the world on broadband penetration. How do we bring broadband to more people in the most cost-effective manner? What role will WiFi play?

If you want to look deeper into where democracy is going and what you can do to guide it into the right direction come to our Futurist Salon this Friday the 25th of July 7pm.

Activist and Videoblogger extraordinaire Lisa Rein will talk about
"The Future of Democracy" -- In meatspace, in our minds and soon, within our bodies.

To support her multimedia presentation we will have it again at:
SAP Labs North America
Building D
3410 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 101)
(Driving directions to building D via Highway 280)
(Sorry, no munchies this time. We will go to a restaurant afterwords.)

Bring news clips of futurist events to share.

Politics is often polarizing people. One of the strength of the Futurist Salon is the dialog and the different viewpoints that we have during and after the talk. This is why I am especially curious how this will play out. See you all there.