Future Salon

Security Future Salon Webcast

We had some problems with the RSVP so we don't have exact numbers (as if you ever all RSVPed :-), but my gut feeling is that we will have a packed room tonight again. Come early.

The alternative for everyone not in the Bay Area is our Webcast. As promised the link on the Wiki page: rtsp://207.105.30.90/salon.sdp there is a chat too.

What will we talk about tonight 31st of March?

Here an excerpt from John Robb's Fast Company article: Power to the People. 

Al Qaeda's attack on Madrid, for example, was funded by the sale of the drug Ecstasy. And Moisés Naím, in his new book, Illicit, details how globalization has fostered the development of a huge criminal economy that boasts a technologically leveraged global supply chain (like Wal-Mart's) and can handle everything from human trafficking (Eastern Europe) to illicit drugs (Asia and South America), pirated goods (Southeast Asia), arms (Central Asia), and money laundering (everywhere). Naím puts the value of that economy at between $2 trillion and $3 trillion a year. He says it is expanding at seven times the rate of legitimate world trade. 

...

Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks--evolving out of the time-share aircraft companies such as Warren Buffett's NetJets--will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next.

The rich bastards are getting away again ;-)

There is no one at the moment who has thought deeper about these issues including the influence of Accelerating Change on these scenarios than John Robb. It is going to be very interesting.

Security Analyst John Robb at the Future Salon

Please read the latest John's latest assessment of the situation in Iraq: The Window of Controlled Chaos Slams Shut:

Back in 2004, I wrote a brief on how the US, unable to contain the growth of Iraq's open source insurgency, was planning to use loyalist paramilitaries (the Latin American solution) to contain it (this is analysis I repeated a year later in the New York Times)

Because of his experience having been in the first Gulf war and his technology background, John has a very unique perspective to security and where it is going in an age of accelerating change.

Later in the comments, which are worth reading too, he promises:

I'm going to spend some time working on the scenario and will post an expanded version.

This expanded vision will probably be part of his presentation this Friday at the Future Salon. Don't miss it.

Security Future Salon

Friday 31st of March I am very happy that John Robb will present his view on something that is dear to all of us: Future of Security: 

at the Future Salon to lead us through the future of something that is dear to everyone's mind: Securety.

Topic:  Brittle Security.

Our global security system is failing. We are at the start of a global war between non-state groups and nation-states. Unfortunately, due to radical new forms of warfare and the interconnectedness of globalization, these non-state groups are winning the conflict. From Nigeria to Thailand, violent groups schooled in new technologies, fueled by transnational crime, and intent on systems disruption are emerging. Their impact is real. They have already driven the price of oil to current $60 a barrel and have come within a whisker of driving it to well over $100 a barrel. In Iraq, these same groups are about to morally and financially chasten the world's only superpower. This is just the start. It gets worse from here on out.

Fortunately, new security solutions are available in the form of decentralized, organic security systems. How these new systems will work is up to you. There's nobody coming to your rescue.

Berkeley Cybersalon: Elitism and High Qualtiy Media

I know you are wondering about the next Future Salon, after all the third Friday of the month is just around the corner. Well, John Robb who writes the excellent Global Guerrillas blog and had his article Security: Power to the People in Fast Company will be on the West Coast on Friday the 31st of March and we will have him speak at the Future Salon that night. (More details to come soon.)

But don't despair, this Sunday there is going to be a really interesting Cybersalon in Berkeley, which I termed: Elitism and High Quality Media.

Here is what Sylvia Paull wrote:

Bloggers and podcasters are suspicious of “elitist” big media and
view the “democratizing” force of digital technology positively. In
contrast, many traditional journalists regard most blogs, wikis and
podcasts as amateurish and narcissistic. We wonder if expertise is,
by definition, elitist. And we ask if expertise and elitism might
indeed be necessary features of a high-quality media.
A Cybersalon panel of experts – including NY Times technology
reporter and author John Markoff, BlogHer cofounders and bloggers
Jory des Jardins and Lisa Stone, and blogger/podcaster/digital
reporter Steve Gillmor -- takes a critical look at the concepts of
expertise and elitism in the dynamic Web 2.0 world.

The theme is double interesting if you look at this weeks news about the sale of Knight Ridder and the apparent lack of interest of the buyer in The Mercury News, too big. Wow, elitism is tough to hold up in the unemployment line. 

BERKELEY CYBERSALON
5-7 p.m., Sunday, March 19, 2006
Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Scientific American published in 2002 already 15 Answers when discussing evolution with a creationist, although all to often creationists are not open to convincing arguments.

For them it comes down to faith. In their eyes you do your little dance knocking one of their argument after the other out of the ballpark, but it doesn't matter. They smile and look down at you thinking: Poor little lost soul, if only he had the insight/faith that I have.

What they don't realize is, that the beauty of evolution does not exclude spirituality or faith.

These 15 arguments are not really for the die hard creationists, but for the people on the fence, that are just forming their opinion may be in the midst of creationists. It's a refreshing reality check:

Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.

Amen.

Electric Sheep in New York

One of us Future Saloners: Spot Draves (You once set a foot into a Future Salon and you are one of us :-) and of course this is California, so you can never leave)

Spot has done a lot more. In June 2004 he presented his Art at the Future Salon. He also beautified the Accelerating Change Technight at SAP with his computer creations.

Little background for the people that don't know about his art:

Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms. Each clip of animation has a genetic code, and the collective voting of users determines its fitness.

The voting is proof that the intelligent design proponents are right. Just look at these beautiful results, you need a guiding intelligence aka voting behind it to get to them. God does not play dice. ;-)

Seeing the results of a million hours of computer rendering, you really want to jump into them and ride the lines, fly through the the fractals and take a closer and closer look from all sides. It would totally change your perspective on beauty and life.

Finally the New York Art Scene is able to discover Spot and his Sheep too at the Art Expo. If you are in New York go there today or tomorrow.