Future Current

Paul Saffo is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. He teaches at Stanford University and is a Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Media X research network. He was the founding chairman of the Samsung Science Board and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation. At the Convergence unconference in November, he delivered a keynote presentation on the differences between forecasting and advocating for potential future outcomes.

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Ronald Bailey and Jerome C. Glenn at Transvision 2007

Jerome C. Glenn is the Director of The Millennium Project on global futures research of the World Federation of United Nations Associations and the Executive Director of the American Council for the United Nations University. He is the co-author with Ted Gordon of the annual State of the Future of the Millennium Project for the past ten years. His presentation at Transvision 2007 was entitled “Global Challenges in Transition to the Conscious-Technology Age.”

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The anthropic principle tells us we should not be surprised to find that the laws of physics allow for life to exist, because here we are. In the same respect, for cryonics patients who are reanimated, there are a number of advanced technologies they should not be surprised to find in existence when they awake. J. Storrs Hall offered some predictions of what one could we expect to discover in such a historical context in his 2006 Alcor Conference presentation “A Door Into Summer.”

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Photo courtesy of Renee Blodgett

Peter Thiel is the founder and president of Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund managing $2 billion in assets and which has returned 240% since its inception in October 2002. In 2005, Clarium was honored by both MarHedge and Absolute Return as the global macro fund of the year. At the 2007 Singularity Summit hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he observed that over the past three decades, financial markets experienced the largest and most violent series of booms and busts in history. Nothing in the orthodox literature predicted the market gyrations of the recent past. One distinct possibility is that the epochal shift the market senses but cannot identify is the arrival of the singularity as the transformational technological event of our time.

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Brian Wang is a member of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology‘s Global Implications and Policy Task Force and a scientific advisory board member of the Lifeboat Foundation. At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference, he gave a presentation called “Converging Technology.” The talk presented proposals for using previously unrelated technologies together for mining the ocean’s $720 trillion in uranium, while further examples of converging technology proposed for revolutionizing space capabilities at lower cost while reducing risk.

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James Van Ehr is the founder and chairman of Zyvex Performance Materials, Zyvex Instruments, Zyvex Labs and Zyvex Asia. He founded the Texas Nanotechnology Initiative and the Feynman Grand Prize in nanotechnology and his $3.5 million grant established at the University of Texas at Dallas NanoTech Institute. He has also endowed the James Van Ehr Distinguished Chair of Science and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas held by the late Nobel Laureate Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid.  At CRN’s conference on the Future of Nano and Bio, he spoke to the challenges and opportunities attending the commercialization of nanotechnology.

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Brian Wang is a long-time futurist listed as a Big Thinker on the Kurzweil AI website. A member of the CRN Task Force and an advisor to the Nanoethics Group and the Lifeboat Foundation, he has a column on the Nanotechnology Now website and his own blog Advanced Nanotechnolgy. He has a degree in computer science and an MBA and has worked in the IT industry for twenty years. He created and ran his own professional computer consulting company with offices in Canada and the U.S. and clients in the U.S. and Europe. For the last eleven years he has lived in the Bay Area, where he has been in touch with the technological changes in computer science and nanotechnology. His talk at the CRN Future of Nano & Bio Conference was entitled “Economics in a New Era.”

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SIAI Interview Series – Jamais Cascio

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SIAI Interview Series – Peter Thiel

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Verdant’s Michael Ekstract and Reason’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey at TV07

Ronald Bailey is the award-winning science correspondent for Reason, the libertarian monthly named one of “The 50 Best Magazines” three out of the past four years by the Chicago Tribune. Established in 1968 and a four-time finalist for National Magazine Awards, Reason has a print circulation of 40,000 and won the 2005 Western Publications Association “MAGGIE” Award for best political magazine. Reason Online, the magazine’s Web edition, draws 2.4 million visits per month, and the staff weblog Hit & Run has been named by Playboy, Washingtonian, and others as one of the best political blogs.

He is the author of the new book Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus), and his work appears in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004. In April, 2006, Bailey was shortlisted by the editors of Nature Biotechnology as one of the 22 personalities who have made the most significant contributions to biotechnology in the area of society and ethics in the last 10 years. At Transvision 2007, he presented a talk entitled “Envisioning a Post-Scarcity Economy.”

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