The future is female

Now here comes a welcome report - finally, a well-respected researcher and thinker - the futurist Ian Pearson (who is a futurologist for British Telecom) predicts that 'The future is female' in saying that culture is shifting from an information economy towards a 'care economy' that is more suited to feminine traits and capacities:

We have had the industrial age, we have had the information economy. But now for something different: "the care economy", predicts BT's Ian Pearson. And, says Mr Pearson assuredly, women - not men - are best suited for this shift.

After years of so called soft skills - such as communication - being sidelined, they will now play centre-stage. "People will have to focus on being people, using their emotional skills," asserts Mr Pearson - with male confidence.

And, he insists, women are instinctively good at this.

Well, not that this is new, yet the public acknowledgment will help...

Back to the Real World

Back from the travels, into the 'real world' of technics, machines, and white noise... reminding that:

Whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them.

Chuang tzu

And I sit back to begin more research reading - I open this page:

Nanotech, biotech, artificial intelligence, smart cards, embedded chips, smart dust, fragmentation of humans into consumer, patient, voter, worker roles for sorting by government and corporation: all of these together spell the end of the human in ways we can't entirely grasp, much less control. Are we human? Are we bionic free agents? Are we cogs in the machine?

What do you want?
What do you love?

Do you love? Welcome to the Machine

An interesting report just in is that the BBC plan 'A to Z'-of-mankind Web site that they say will be a definitive guide to mankind:

The Dictionary of Man (www.dictionaryofman.com) and an eight-part television series aim to document every human society currently existing, the BBC said on its Web site. Geldof said the Web site would create the largest living record of DVDs, books, films, photographs, art, and documented and personal accounts from people in every group in society.

"This will be an A-to-Z of mankind," Geldof said during the launch of the project this week. "It will catalog the world we live in now, the people who share this planet, the way we live and the way we adapt to face common and different challenges."

The Web site will also include social networking technology so that individuals can trace their clan, tribe or family.

Ah, it seems all is well then... and we'll be documented before the end... a toast!

The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think - But is it all Good?

Some news just coming out on various 'future' scenarios, here in the UK and in the US.

In the UK:'Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future' is a piece from the Guardian that discusses a new 90 page MoD report that tries to picture the next 30 years and the "future strategic context" likely to face Britain's armed forces. It includes an "analysis of the key risks and shocks" by Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre. For example it predicts the following:

Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups...

...By 2035, an implantable "information chip" could be wired directly to the brain. A growing pervasiveness of information communications technology will enable states, terrorists or criminals, to mobilise "flashmobs", challenging security forces to match this potential agility coupled with an ability to concentrate forces quickly in a small area.

Now, something from the US. Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think" is the title of a report [PDF] published this month by Representative Jim Saxton (R-NJ), Ranking Member of the Joint Economic Committee, United States Congress. What is surprising is that perhaps for the first time high-ranking political figures are discussing the implications of the 'Singularity', once dismissed as science-fiction. Some extracts state:

Dramatic breakthroughs will occur in diverse areas such as medicine, communications, computing, energy, and robotics. These changes will generate large amounts of wealth and force wrenching changes in existing markets and institutions...

...If technology continues to advance at exponential rates, what happens after 2020? Technology is likely to continue, but at this stage some observers forecast a period at which scientific advances aggressively assume their own momentum and accelerate at unprecedented levels, enabling products that today seem like science fiction. Beyond the Singularity, human society is incomparably different from what it is today. Several assumptions seem to drive predictions of a Singularity. The first is that continued material demands and competitive pressures will continue to drive technology forward. Second, at some point artificial intelligence advances to a point where computers enhance and accelerate scientific discovery and technological change. In other words, intelligent machines start to produce discoveries that are too complex for humans. Finally, there is an assumption that solutions to most of today’s problems including material scarcity, human health, and environmental degradation can be solved by technology, if not by us, then by the computers we eventually develop.

The pdf of the military report can be downloaded here

Some information here to digest... as ever, the focus I stress is upon a future we wish for ourselves and that means we maintain, sustain, and expand positive spiritual mindfulness. Let's remember that technology can be an aide to human evolution, yet the main catalyst is the consciousness that manifests through the individual...through our thoughts and deeds...

I shall be away for the next 12 days...wandering like a troubadour, or hobbling like a hobo... Blessings

THE ALLIES OF HUMANITY

In recent years there has been a move towards 'Disclosure' of the interaction between non-terrestrial intelligences and people on earth. There are now organisations established to develop the politics - or 'Exopolitics' - of this liaison and the implications in managing such affairs. I would suggest looking at two of these organisations:

Exopolitics.com and Exopolitics.org

Another organisation worth looking into is the The Society for The Greater Community Way of Knowledge:

This organisation is the channel for the Allies of Humanity books, the first of which can be downloaded as pdf from here - I quote:

THE ALLIES OF HUMANITY is being presented to prepare people for a whole new reality that is largely hidden and unrecognized in the world today. It provides a new perspective that empowers people to face the greatest challenge and opportunity that we as a race have ever encountered. The Allies' material contains a number of critical if not alarming statements about the growing intervention and integration of extraterrestrials into the human race and about the aliens' activities and hidden agenda. Instead of providing "hard" evidence about the reality of alien visitation to our world, which is already well documented in many other fine books and research journals on the subject, the Allies material, as it is known, addresses the dramatic and far-reaching implications of this phenomenon.

The source of this information describe themselves as physical beings from other worlds who have gathered in our solar system near the earth for the purpose of observing the communications and activities of those alien races who are here in our world interfering in human affairs. The source refer to themselves as the "Allies of Humanity." The Allies' stated purpose is to alert us to the risks of emerging into a Greater Community of intelligent life and to assist us in successfully crossing this great threshold in such a way that human freedom and self-determination can be preserved.

A 10-Point Summary of the Allies Message is available as pdf here

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Stop Future Disasters

Here is a great example of both learning about the future and having fun at the same time!

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction group has teamed up with the UK game design studio Playerthree to create the Flash-based “Stop Disasters” game. The goal of the game is to reduce the harmful results of catastrophic natural events — the disaster that gets stopped isn’t the event itself, but its impact on human life.

And here's h ow it works:

The player chooses what kind of disaster is to be faced (earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, wildfire or flood), then has a limited amount of time to prepare for the inevitable. The player can build new buildings, retrofit or demolish old ones, install appropriate defensive infrastructure (such as mangroves along tsunami-prone shorelines or firebreaks around water towers), institute preparedness training, install sirens and evacuation signs, and so forth — all with a limited budget, and with ancillary goals that must be met for success, such as building schools and hospitals for community development, or bringing in hotels for local economic support.

Once the money is spent (or the time runs out), the preordained disaster strikes, and the player gets to see whether his or her choices were the right ones. At the easy level, there’s generally enough money to protect the small map and limited population; at the harder levels, the player must make difficult choices about who and what to save.

Its like playing SimCity yet you can be involved from a few minutes to 25 minutes... and for all ages, believe me!

Again, the link: “Stop Disasters” game

Military Mind Scanning

They never stop, do they? The future is increasingly going to be fought in the area of neurotechnology.

Consciousness is the ultimate 'high ground' from which to gain control over human behaviour and evolution; it is the realm where the changes are really occuring. And now the U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking. In this article in Wired called 'Pentagon Preps Mind Fields for Smarter War Stations' it writes that:

Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets easier by tapping their unconscious reactions. It's all part of a broader Darpa effort to radically boost the performance of American troops.

"Computers today, you have to learn how they work," says Navy Commander Dylan Schmorrow, who served as Darpa's first program manager for this Augmented Cognition project. He now works for the Office of Naval Research. "We want the computer to learn you, adapt to you."

Go to the article link above to read more...

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