Kim Stanley Robinson gave a talk in which he describes life in the present as a science fiction novel we all collaborate on. This is an excerpt from a pair of talks he gave at the Duke in January. Here is an excerpt:
I think it’s very true that we are living in a science fiction novel that we all collaborate on, and it’s because everything that science fiction was about through its historical named period, the twentieth century, has kind of come true. And also we live in a world that is so intensely structured by science and technology that we can’t get out of it. If we were to get out of it would still be a science fiction move, the retreat to the farm. So it’s hegemonic, you can’t escape it, we’re in that world created by science and technology.
And also there’s this intense sense of futurity, in that if you opened up your newspaper or laptop tomorrow and it said,”They’ve cloned six South Koreans successfully and they’re all named Kim,” you would believe it, there would be no surprise there. Anything could happen. You could say, well, we just got a signal from Alpha Centauri, there are intelligent aliens there, they sent us the code for pi and the Pythagorean theorem. There’s no reason to disbelieve that, either. So we live in this world of anticipation of strangeness, of change, rapidly accelerating change.
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.
As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”
Principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition, Ray has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. The magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States and called him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” His Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. is an umbrella company for at least eight separate enterprises.
Ray‘s writing career rivals his inventions and entrepreneurship. His seminal book, The Singularity is Near, presents the Singularity as an overall exponential (doubling) growth trend in technological development, “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” With his upcoming films, Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near: A True Story about the Future, he is becoming an actor, screenplay writer, and director as well.
On the iPhone, Panelfly revolutionized digital comics with is patent pending narrative navigation engine and offered an unprecedented user experience. Now, without hinderance of the smaller screen, Panelfly will once again change the experience of digital reading forever on the iPad.
With a new library, new store & a new reading experience – Panelfly looks to raise the bar on digital comics and provide users with the functionality and platform needs they’ve been waiting for.
A team of researchers at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) plans to race an autonomous vehicle up the 14,000-foot Pikes Peak without a driver at race speeds, something never done before.
The Audi TTS, nicknamed Shelley, knows exactly where it is on the road by using a differential GPS. Unlike a standard GPS system, Shelley corrects for interference in the atmosphere, showing the car’s position on the Earth with an accuracy of about two centimeters. Shelley measures her speed and acceleration with wheel-speed sensors and an accelerometer, and gets her bearings from gyroscopes, which control equilibrium and direction.
Stephen Years is a high-tech management professional, entrepreneur, and digital artist residing in Fresno, California. His career has spanned the technology world, providing him experience with web applications, social media, software, servers, databases, networking and telecommunications. However, no matter what field Stephen has worked in, he has found his greatest strength lies in his ability to take extremely complex subjects and communicate them to his audience in a succinct and visually compelling manner - thus facilitating understanding and acceptance.
Stephen is the founder and president of 5 Rockets, Inc., a social media and web marketing consulting firm. He has also held positions at Sun Microsystems, KPMG Consulting, and Interval Research Corporation. Additionally, Stephen was one of the founders of JuiceScape, Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up software company that sought to address the problem of growing power costs in the data center through intelligent software systems for server power conservation.
Stephen holds a BA in Art History from UCLA, and a MBA from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.
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The Conversation
This is a presentation that I have used at a number of speaking engagments in order to introduce some of the core concepts of social media.
