Toes First

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11814803041324370422011-12-21T21:24:23.134-05:00Toes First<a href="http://toesfirst.blogspot.com/2007/10/about-ways-of-thinking-about-future.html"><u>about</u></a> ways of thinking about the futureFutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.comBlogger181100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-53650984541851624792011-12-21T19:11:00.005-05:002011-12-21T21:24:23.330-05:00Futurists blogging about thinking

Here are two blogs about thinking, by futurists. Overcoming Bias "is economist Robin Hanson's blog, on honesty, signaling, disagreement, forecasting, and the far future." Less Wrong "is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality." Tying them together, the latter site says,In November 2006, Eliezer Yudkowsky began posting about rationality on Robin Hanson's blog

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-52005212538014687512011-12-03T15:30:00.004-05:002011-12-03T17:20:20.309-05:00The Second-Order-First Fallacy

I admit, that when I think "about ways of thinking about the future," I'm often thinking condescendingly about others' mistakes. This is one of the first I imagined blogging about (taking a deep breath).This example of the "second-order-first" fallacy is probably familiar: cars make it easier to regularly visit people and places that are farther away than you would regularly visit without a car.

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-29409624781150245882008-09-14T05:47:00.003-04:002008-09-14T05:57:42.835-04:00Technology as Dribble Glass

[I wrote this in 1997, after I had read "The Unix Haters Handbook," which at one point compares the "curses" terminal handling library to a dribble glass for the programmer. This is a little bit of a rant, but I still think it's wrong, not just unnecessary, to apologize to a bad design. --Steve]Once in a while I find myself trying to explain to someonethat the fact that they didn't adhere to

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-56372531310136281172008-07-28T20:46:00.006-04:002008-07-28T23:58:57.968-04:00Just Tools

One of the tools people sometimes bring to bear on the future is the idea that technology is, or ought to be, ought to be treated as, or ought to be thought of as, just tools. I want to give a plug for a little sophistication and clarity around this idea-form. Tools are never just tools, but it's good to try to make them as close as possible to that, but that's really hard in more than one

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-55812637764718202222008-05-19T16:37:00.006-04:002008-05-20T14:35:33.302-04:00Time's Conveyor

Today, driving through Concord, I passed a funny-looking house with a sign: Octagon Farm. It reminded me of the huge octagonal barn at Linvilla Orchards, where we used to get corn and other rustic produce in the summers when we were teenagers. I thought I might like to drive back through that area with my siblings and see the place again.That brought back a vague memory of being prisoners in

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-46684672506714730482008-05-15T08:14:00.002-04:002008-05-15T09:20:24.521-04:00Kevin Kelly's Technium

From Kevin Kelly's introduction to the book in progress he's blogging on his site The Technium:For the past year and a half I have been studying the history of technology, the arguments of technology's critics, projections of its future, and the tiny bit of technic philosophy that has been written, all with the aim to answer a simple question: How should I think about new technology when it comes

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-71903577968733264642008-04-20T00:50:00.012-04:002008-04-23T16:47:04.496-04:00Generation Z(ero)

Damn! I forgot to worry about the weather!--a friend looking out the window on the morning of a trip.Worries about the long-term future of the human genome are ironic on a couple levels. In short, DNA will become easy, and then obsolete, in the space of one generation (Z) or two.One version of legacy-worry is C.S. Lewis's notion, expressed in his The Abolition of Man (and correct me if I've

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-87231485414096979252008-04-13T02:18:00.013-04:002008-10-29T00:31:46.337-04:00It's the Spiritual, Stupid!

Half a bee, philosophically,Must ipso facto half not be.But can a bee be said to be, Or not to be... Do you see?"--Monty Python, "Eric the Half-a-Bee""A thousand plastic flowerswon't make a desert bloom."--Fritz PerlsThe topic of my sermon today doesn't exactly fit the "It's the X, Stupid!" prototype but close enough. Also, the term "spiritual" may be a stretch for some; in fact I'm thinking of

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-17490499597904270462008-02-09T02:13:00.000-05:002008-02-09T02:41:20.863-05:00Star Trek vs. The Jetsons

In a previous post I said the 1960s vision of a question-answering typewriter has come true with Google. Then I thought, look at the freakin' format of this blog, it's a display from Star Trek: The Next Generation, fer Roddenberry's sake.A couple of the big items from Star Trek have come true. Mainly the cell phone. Wall-sized flat TVs that double as computer displays. Transporters on a

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-46430266394496640172007-12-30T15:12:00.001-05:002008-02-09T02:39:08.445-05:00Reasonable Radical

Finally I figured out what I really do. I'm a de-mystic.--Richard St. John, Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and RichI love everything technical and obscure. I just hate the fact that it's obscure. I think of the 20th century as the Sheet Metal Age, when everything's true insides were enclosed in tin shells, enameled and chromed, and sculpted to look like what they weren't-- or to look like nothing much,

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-5191281958232248882007-11-09T23:19:00.000-05:002007-11-10T15:19:26.633-05:00Future Imperfect

Thinking about how things change together, not in isolation, and how, when thinking about future changes, one should sight on appropriate landmarks to gain perspective, reminded me of the example in the opening paragraphs of David Friedman's Future Imperfect (note: a twenty-chapter book draft in a single html file!):I recently attended an event where the guest speaker was a cabinet member. In

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-48006262660895888312007-10-29T11:54:00.000-04:002007-10-29T13:33:06.275-04:00Warmup: "We are as gods..."

Stewart Brand famously opened the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog with these words:PURPOSEWe are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory--as via government, big business, formal education, church--has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing--

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-40410967394089735102007-10-28T17:20:00.000-04:002007-10-28T17:21:46.080-04:00Warm-up: 87 Bad Predictions

Just saw this linked to indirectly by BoingBoing: Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-19705015802482077562007-10-21T16:51:00.000-04:002007-10-29T14:26:02.718-04:00about ways of thinking about the future

I follow or take part in lots of discussions of the future, and besides being keen on all the juicy futurific topics themselves, I always find myself noticing the ways people think about the future, and wondering, how should we think about it?For instance (and because I'm self-conscious about this): what do I even mean by "the future?" People are always thinking about the future: tonight's

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-15810836814818321302007-07-30T00:51:00.001-04:002008-05-14T22:08:24.346-04:00Robot Takeover Or Takeunder?

In the previous post I said that the view that writing is an old hybrid AI might have some bearing on whether robots take over, by which I meant, get better and better until they surpass us and become the main stream of civilization and history.One optimistic view is that if AI keeps being designed as extensions to our minds, prostheses, implants or upgrades to our brains, then we, or "we," will

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-87838605639247588312007-06-08T16:31:00.001-04:002007-12-30T18:37:14.748-05:00Before Google there was Grep

I think that Google really is an AI, or at least 1/3 of a hybrid AI whose other two thirds are people and writing.You type a question into a keyboard and so often you get the answer. That was the dream of AI back in the 1960s, and I find it strange that people don't appreciate that we've reached that milestone. People are jaded because they understand how it works. The fact that we thought the

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-28874067200423600942007-06-08T01:33:00.000-04:002007-06-08T01:42:17.740-04:00Infest Wisely

Infest Wisely is a science-fiction movie whose seven episodes are being posted as they are developed. It seems to be about technology that you install within yourself by swallowing things.

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1181480304132437042.post-48866839924505044092007-05-13T19:25:00.000-04:002007-05-13T19:58:00.886-04:00Welcome to the Future, Take your Time

This blog was created to give me a blogger identity so I could comment on another blog. A seemingly needless bother; but then, a dubious motivation. Blogocircular but not fully blogospherical.I've often imagined blogging as a cautious extropian. In extropian terms, not necessarily wanting to hasten the singularity counts as cautious.

FutureNerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17103481765366134475noreply@blogger.com2