LongNow
It's often said that capitalism is so deadly to the life-support system of the Earth because it "thinks" only about profit (everything else is relegated to "externalities," which literally do not count), but not well understood and perhaps equally troublesome is that business thinks mostly in terms of the quarterly report. To do anything intelligent we clearly need a longer time horizon. The LongNow Foundation set out to do precisely that It hosts an amazing monthly talk (archives), and is building a ten thousand year clock and re-wilding(bringing back extinct species, an idea pioneered and carried out by UCSC folk). Some important founders are Brian Eno (musician), Stewart Brand, and computer scientist Danny Hillis (who built a computer out of TinkerToys(image).
A new book on thinking inspired by the clock by Brand..
Samples of LongNow talks:
Most talks are available for free in audio. Selected video is in ForaTV as well as YouTube.
Craig Childs Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth.
Richard Kurin American History in 101 Objects
Stewart Brand Reviving Extinct Species.
Jesse Ausubel Nature is Rebounding: Land- and Ocean-sparing through Concentrating Human Activities January 13, 02015.
Mark Lynas The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene (audio only, see Rockstrom TEDtalk). Geo-engineering.
The Creator Economy Paul Saffo teaches forecasting at Stanford and Singularity University, former head of The Institute for the Future. He argues the "new economy” anticipated in the late 01990s is arriving late and in utterly unexpected ways. Social media, maker culture, the proliferation of sensors, and even the 02008 market crash are merely local phenomena in a much larger shift. What unfolds in the next few years will determine the shape of the global economy for the next half-century and will force a profound rethink of economic theory. March 31, 02015.
Kevin Kelly Technium Unbound. The Technium may best be considered a new organism with which we are symbiotic, as we are symbiotic with the aggregate of Earth’s life, sometimes called “Gaia.” There are pace differences, with Gaia slow, humanity faster, and the Technium really fast. They are not replacing each other but building on each other, and the meta-organism of their combining is so far nameless. KK is a cybernetic/systems thinker November 12, 02014.
Brian Eno's book list:
Seeing Like a State by James C Scott
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams
Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel
Keeping Together in Time by William McNeill
Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich
Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al
The Face of Battle by John Keegan
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
The Notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci
The Confidence Trap by David Runciman
The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein, "is the first in the Knowledge Trilogy that also includes The Creators and The Seekers. The book, subtitled A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, is the history of human discovery. Discovery in all its many forms are present - exploration, scientific, medical, mathematical and the more theoretical ones such as time, evolution, plate tectonics and relativity. He praises the inventive, human mind and its eternal quest to discover the universe and our place in it."
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Hrdy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) by Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe by Marjorie Blamey & Christopher Grey Wilson
Printing and the Mind of Man by John Carter & Percy Muir
Peter the Great: His Life and World by Richard Massie
Big History tells the history of the world in eight thresholds, a jump to a higher level of complexity, with unexpected emergent properties, from which there is no going back). It final chapter 13 encourages us to imagine what the next jump will be. This is the secret of Elon Musk, who has made huge contributions as a designer and entrepreneur because he imagined what was inevitable and caught the wave to that early: electric cars, private sector spaceflight and solar energy.
Try it! Tell us what you think. Are there trends that are converging? Diverging?
How Can History Help Us in the Future? Howard Zinn reflects on his People's History of the United States (good talk, though he answers the question obliquely, e.g., use of the Good War to justify later ones). see Counter-History.
Technology
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era" James Barrat, video interview). singularity interview (video).
"The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies" by Erik Brynjolfsson; Andrew McAfee (video interview).
"The New School": How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself" by Glenn Reynolds video interview.
The key to growth? Race with the machines debates with economist Robert Gordon on the future of work. 3/14. TEDtalk.
Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs? 6/12 Robots and algorithms are getting good at jobs like building cars, writing articles, translating — jobs that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say: We ain't seen nothing yet. But then he steps back to look at big history, and comes up with a surprising and even thrilling view of what comes next. (TEDtalk video).
Jaron Lanier:Who Owns the Future? [http://www.bloomberg.com/video/-who-owns-the-future-charlie-rose-03-20-Lf5l5iiCQ125SbNoJ3SI8Q.html (6 min. video interview).
Economics
BookTV example "Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA" (video panel discussion includes Richard Wolf (influence of Marx(video) See also Economics.
