You may have noticed that Open the Future has taken on a somewhat different design. You may also have noticed that I haven't been blogging lately. These are not unrelated.

I've been doing quite a bit of public speaking, all over the world -- from Sarajevo to Venice to Shenzhen in the last year alone, along with multiple locations here in the U.S. -- and a good amount of work with the Institute for the Future. I've also been doing occasional commentary pieces for New Scientist magazine.

So I've been active, just not active here. But since this is still the first place people go to learn more about me, it's not a good thing for it to appear to be abandoned. I needed OtF to do a better job of presenting me. Working on this redesign has rekindled a desire to do some blogging again, so it won't be completely static, but it will remain more of a highlight reel than an ongoing conversation. For those of you who will miss that, I'm sorry. I'll still be around, though -- I'm not going away, just doing a course-correction.

Time to get to work.

(This is the full text of a talk I gave at the Institute for the Future on 21 October 2015, as part of the "New Body Language" workshop on wearable/"body area network" technologies for the Technology Horizons program.)

Why do we think about the future?

This may seem an odd setting in which to ask this question. We're all here tonight because we're interested in big changes that seem to be thundering ahead in technology, in politics, in the human experience. But there has to be more than "interest" An organization like the Institute for the Future wouldn't be around for nearly a half-century if it was really just the Institute for Idle Curiosity About Tomorrow.

No. We think about the future because we believe two fundamental things: 1), that the future matters; and 2), that we still have a say in the future we get. The shape of tomorrow arises from the choices we make today. Or, to twist that around, we can make better decisions now if we consider the different ways in which those decisions could play out. The scenarios I will present tonight are examples of one tool we can use to undertake that consideration of consequences. Scenarios are stories that offer us a lens through which we might see our lives in a new world.

We're not accustomed to thinking about longer-term futures. We evolved to reach quick, reasonably accurate conclusions about near-term risks and outcomes -- is there a saber-toothed tiger in that cave? Will that plant poison me? There's even some evidence that the part of the brain that lights up when we think about the future is the same part active in ballistics, that is, hitting a moving target with something. So when Wayne Gretzky talked about skating to where the puck will be, he was actually offering up a bit of futurist wisdom.

One important rule for thinking about the future is remembering that what we may imagine as a massively disruptive, distant horizon is an everyday, boring present for those who live there. They aren't entirely different people in an alien environment, they're us, a generation from now. They've gone through -- we've gone through -- all of the upheaval and have adapted. Their lives then may not be the same as our lives now, but they are the descendants of our lives.

It's because of this clarity of connection that I believe it to be important to think about the future in generational terms, not just as a count of years. If, as LP Hartley claims, "the past is a foreign country," so too is the future -- but it's a foreign country that we'll never quite get to. Our vision of the future is a destination, but our lived experience of it is as a journey. We walk an unbroken pathway from today to tomorrow.

Continue reading "A World in Which" »

Reading the continued, ongoing arguments about gun regulations ("reasonable" or otherwise) is frustrating. Not only for the usual reasons (absolutist positions, inability to recognize multi-causal phenomena, relentless hostility towards different opinions, etc.), but because of how incredibly irrelevant it is becoming. 3D-printable firearms are already here, and becoming increasingly reliable. Every gun control law in the world is obsolete.

With a 3D printer costing a thousand dollars or less, it's possible to produce a usable firearm. The first generation of these printed guns had a tendency to blow up when used, but the newer models can work just fine. Single-shot, magazine-fed, automatic or semi-automatic, there's now a variety of weapon designs available, ready to be downloaded and printed out.

Controlling this won't ever be easy, and is currently impossible. The design files are digital and easily spread around the Internet. 3D printers are general purpose systems, meaning that they can ostensibly be instructed to print out anything possible (given their size and material resource limits). Printers may be programmed to recognize a specific 3D gun file, but aren't smart enough to identify any random file that will produce a weapon. Open sourced 3D printer designs would make it possible to avoid the use of devices programmed with ORM ("object rights management") restrictions. You're not going to arm a militia with one of these, at least not quickly, but it wouldn't be hard to print out a small arsenal for person enjoyment.

Again, this is stuff that's happening now. It's not easy, quick, or cheap at the moment, but it's heading that direction. I'd be surprised if we didn't see someone killed with a 3D printed weapon by the end of the decade. Continuing to fight over gun control laws is painfully close to the music industry continuing to demand "home taping" restrictions and taxes on cassette tapes, even as MP3 files proliferated.

One final caveat: A 3D-printable firearm still needs ammunition, and bullets will be hard to 3D print for awhile yet. It may be another decade or more before it's possible to easily print bullets. If we really want to continue the debate and hostility, we may have a few years left.

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