Saturday, January 3, 2009

What will change everything

One of the best things about blogging, besides being able to anonymously vent, my five minutes of partisan hate over some transparently ideological Harper press release, at 5:00 am in morning is the weekends.

On the weekends you have time to search for something else to blog about and you end up searching through articles and websites and every now and then you find something like this.

The Edge World Question Center
The Edge Foundation, Inc., was established in 1988 as an outgrowth of a group known as The Reality Club. Its informal membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world. The mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society
Each year the Edge asks their members, artisans, scientists, thinkers and the like, to respond to a question and this year’s question is:


What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

Some of the presenters you will recognize, some you will not, but they also include interesting bios. Here’s an example from Brian Eno, a musician and producer entitled:
The end of optimism


Human development thus far has been fuelled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better. But suppose the feeling changes ... Humans fragment into tighter, more selfish bands ... Long term projects are abandoned–their payoffs are too remote. Global projects are abandoned–not enough trust to make them work. Resources that are already scarce will be rapidly exhausted as everybody tries to grab the last precious bits ... Survivalism rules. Might will be right.

Well they are not all positive prophesies.

Happy reading.



JAWL

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