Institute For The Future

On the cover of the Rolling Stone

Well, almost certainly not the cover, but I did an e-mail interview tonight with a journalist who's writing an article for RS about blogging the future. I thought I'd share the full interview here, since there are actually a few substantive ideas, and only a tiny slice of it will ever get into print-- and even that article is likely to compete for mind-share with a Cuervo tequila ad and an article about K-Fed's tax troubles....

 

When did the Future Now site launch?

The site went live in September 2003. Future Now was intended to serve as a kind of "outboard brain," or better yet, an EKG of the group brain-- a way for the public to see what we're doing, and get a sense of how futurists think.

Also, when you do research, you find all kinds of cool stuff that doesn't make it into your published work, or cool things that you don't need right now but think might be good for some other project. A blog seemed like a good, informal place to publish the former, and play around with the latter. It still seems that way.

It's been a group blog since the beginning, and currently has about half a dozen reasonably active contributors.

The word “futurist” has different meanings for different people. How would you define it within the context of the IFTF?

The term is weird. To most of the public, futurists are one step removed from palm readers, carnival barkers, or conspiracy nuts: we're the ones who talk about personal jet packs, our new insect overlords, or how we're all going to become cyborgs and live forever. They're entertaining from time to time; they're wrong all the time.

Around the Institute, being a futurist is most emphatically NOT about predicting the future. And even though we're in the heart of Silicon Valley, we're not just about the future of technology or new markets. If traditional futurists are mainly about gear, we're mainly about people: we're Web 2.0 to their Web 1.0.

Put another way, we don't ask "What will the future be?" (e.g., what will the market be for handheld music players in 2009?), but rather "What will the future be LIKE?" (e.g., how will growing up with the ability to always access every song you've ever listened to change the way you relate to music?).

Asking "what will the future be like?" forces you to look at the factors that will shape the future, the opportunities and dangers we'll all face, and most important, what parts of the future can be changed. Being a futurist isn't about just spotting trends to predicting what will happen to people; it's about helping people understand what futures are possible, what future they want, and how to get there.

How does the content/focus of Future Now differ from some of the other futurist sites?

I think we're often more informal in our tone. We have big formal publications where we get really serious, so Future Now can be more conversational and speculative.

At the same time, we try to draw out the bigger meaning or implications of current events. We're more about trends than data-points, no matter how blinky or shiny those points are.

What emerging technologies will be of particular interest in the coming year?

The biggest story is that the rules defining how technologies emerge are changing. The old world in which companies push new technologies to consumers is giving way to one in which users adopt, share, mash up, and remix software, hardware, and content. The future is no longer determined by 20 geniuses in some lab, but by 20 million people-- 14 million of whom live in China or India-- with cell phones and broadband connections.

Having said that, though, here are five technologies or big trends I'll be paying attention to:

Open source mobile telephony. My one really geek thing. Cell phone companies today are where Internet companies were circa 1988: in love with "walled gardens" in which they can dictate content, services, and hardware. The rise of the Web-- the open, wild, interoperable Internet-- in the 1990s blew the AOL-Compuserve world into bits; and I think history is going to repeat itself in mobile phones. We won't all be carrying Linux phones by December, but proof-of-concept devices will be working well enough to let us ponder a future in which mobile devices are as open and flexible as personal computers.

Tagging. Remember those old 70s nature shows where the zoologists would put those big radio collars on tigers? Today, you can put much more sophisticated devices on fish; a couple more turns of Moore's Law, and Monarch butterflies will be carrying tiny black boxes. This will let us get incredibly detailed information about animal behavior and environments-- just in time to help us save them from global warming. And scientists regularly prototype the future: thanks to the ARPANet, they had e-mail, instant messaging, social software, and Spacewar in the early 1970s.

The End of Cyberspace. [What can I say? I had to get in a plug for the concept.] We used to think that electronic information lived in a Better Place called cyberspace, and that we'd all live there too one day. No longer. Idealistic-- or apocalyptic-- visions of a digital world that's separate from, and superior to, the "real world" are fading away, replaced by a world in which bits and atoms mix it up, to the benefit of both.

Google Earth. This is the thin edge of a very important wedge: the growing popularity of services and data that connect digital information to physical locations, and present it in eye-popping, mind-opening interfaces. It used to be that you got information by looking at a computer screen on your desk; increasingly, you're going to get it out in the world.

The personal jet pack. Definitely coming this year. Trust me.

 

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