http://cache.io9.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png http://io9.com/tag/crap futurism http://io9.com/tag/crap futurism Apparently xenophobia is at least part of the reason for a recently-announced budget cut to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy. Science Insider reports: More »
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Roland Emmerich has pushed bad science to its limit before, most notably with the amazing 2012. But for his upcoming movie Singularity, he's actually enlisting the help of Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, to help him revise the script. On the one hand, this means the movie will accurately reflect Kurzweil's theories about a magical transformation in which everything becomes awesome thanks to A.I. and other breakthroughs. On the other hand... will the result actually be more unrealistic than 2012? More »
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In a 1954 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, the magazine ran a wonderfully rosy piece titled "FLYING SAUCERS FOR EVERYBODY!" This short piece detailed how flying saucers would ameliorate arduous commutes in the far-out year of 1965. More »
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There's a curiously wide-eyed article from the New York Times, about some recent science fiction novels that have uncannily come true, which is making the rounds online. Are science fiction novelists really predicting the future after all? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5837403&view=rss&microfeed=true I love David Byrne. The guy is a total geek. He makes great music. He rides bikes. What's not to like? Well, his prognostication abilities, for one. [Gizmodo] More »
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Hearing about unexpected things, people used to say, "How do they think up these things? There must be something in the water…." More »
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Many people in the 20th century assumed that the average citizen of the 21st century would be taller. More »
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Now that Amazon.com is thriving and Borders is using its empty shelves to advertise air guitars, it's hard to imagine anybody thinking Amazon wouldn't succeed. But New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was willing to crawl out on a limb. More »
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Hugo Gernsback is famous for being a science fiction publishing titan, being the namesake of the Hugo Awards, and his no-holds-barred futurism. He was less renowned for his Clockwork Orange-style views on marriage, which are equal parts horrifying and gut-busting. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5772890&view=rss&microfeed=true Futurist and singularitarian Ray Kurzweil recently told PBS' Lauren Feeney that we don't need to worry about peak oil or carbon emissions. That's a relief. He's applied his "law of accelerating returns," developed to describe the way consumer electronics improve exponentially, to the field of solar power. Kurzweil tells Feeney: More »
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It's a common theme in scifi that robots will be encumbered with menial tasks, but Duval Guillaume's Alfa Romeo machine's saddled with a deplorable gig. The remote-controlled sign trails consumers throughout a Belgian mall, begging them to buy a car. More »
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Getting ready to upload your consciousness into a brain-emulating computer in a decade or two? You'll be waiting a lot longer than that. Princeton computer science researcher Timothy B. Lee doesn't think we'll ever upload our brains. Here's why. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5739473&view=rss&microfeed=true Now that e-book readers no longer suck as much as they once did, all sorts of people are prophesying the death of the physical book. Nicholas Negroponte told the Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, that paper books were already dead, and people just don't realize it. "It's happening. It not happening in 10 years. It's happening in 5 years," he added. But over at Crunchgear, Devin Coldeway explains why it may take a whole lot longer than that. And of course, physical books won't ever really die, they'll just experience the same transformation that's already hit magazines — they'll become luxury items. Coldeway's whole essay is worth checking out. [Crunchgear] More »
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Gary Shteyngart, author of the hit novel Super Sad True Love Story, tells the L.A. Times he wanted to set his novel after the collapse of the United States. But the disaster scenarios he came up with kept coming true. More »
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No, sorry, you're not stoned enough to watch the trailer for Turning Into Gods, the new Singularity documentary. You won't be able to appreciate lines like, "In order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind." More »
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Want to market your awesome new theory of the future, but can't come up with a buzzword? This spiffy chart can help. [via Russell Davies (no not the Doctor Who one)] More »
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In 1910, the New York Tribune published this photo composite of what a "future American" might look like. Time magazine repeated the experiment in 1993 with a computer-generated blend of faces. Could either be right? More »
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The real question about Apple's new multitouch pseudo-computer, dubbed the iPad, is not whether it sucks or rocks. What all of us really want to know is whether it will change the future. The answer? Yes, but badly. More »
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You want to be a futurist, but you're afraid of being wrong. Don't worry. I've brought together ideas that will help you succeed without having to be right. All you have to do is follow the simple principles below. More »
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We can't wait until our brains are hardwired into cybernests, so we can fully appreciate the hilariousness of SpaceCollective's guide to skepticism about the Singularity. My fave part: This illustration, explaining how "extreme shit going down" leads to The Future. More »
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Are you enjoying your "smellyvision?" Does your implanted microchip adjust every building's temperature when you enter? Or how's your portable quantum generator working out? These are just a few of the craziest predictions for 2010, made in 1999 and 2000. More »
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"But in the end, making lots of accurate predictions isn't necessarily the job of the futurist. It's more the act of stimulating creative thought about the future that, in turn, influences how we act today. More »
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Did Nicolas Cage really predict the future in his schlocktastic thriller Knowing? That seems to be what tech startup Global Findability is hinting, in their infringement lawsuit against the film. Apparently Cage's method of locating future disasters is already patented. More »
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If you could have a personal robot that did just one thing, what would it be? That's what futurist Mike Treder asked the readers of his blog, and the top answers revealed what we secretly (or not so secretly) suspected. More »
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Why is John Tierney so skeptical, and yet so gullible? The New York Times' science columnist is one of the most vocal global-warming doubters in the media, but when it comes to Ray Kurzweil's Singularity and geo-hacking, he's suddenly wide-eyed. More »
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It's become a cliche to say that our world is changing faster and faster, as we hurtle towards an ultra-advanced future. But it's not true, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman told Worldcon. Actually, change is slowing down. More »
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The future is over! It's no longer possible to write about the future, because the Singularity will definitely happen in twenty years. We'll have artificial intelligence, and the meaning of humanity will be transformed. Is this idea hindering science fiction? More »
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The United States is always collapsing in science fiction. The U.S. implodes, explodes, or just declines. But a team of professional futurists sees only four scenarios that could end the U.S.A. — and they've got a chart to prove it. More »
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When the Singularity arrives in 2045, Ray Kurzweil will finally be infallible. Until, then, however the famous futurist's meat brain has made some ludicrously inaccurate predictions, as Newsweek magazine pointed out recently. Kurzweil has sent an angry letter to the magazine, to try and clear his name. More »
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Putting an expiration date on the future is risky. Take the Terminator franchise: The all-important "Judgment Day" — originally set in the "near future" of 1997 — has been pushed back twice already. Here's a timeline of future scenarios past their sell-by dates - and a few that will curdle soon. More »
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We're much closer than you think to the reality of a "mindclone" — a computer with the mental capacity of the human mind — says the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies' Martine Rothblatt. We're "close enough to feel the bits and bytes of cyberbreath on our cheeks." Ooh, spooky. More »
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Multi-culturalism isn't just for aliens and dinosaur-people: it benefits mutants too, as the Mutant Ninja Turtles discover when they visit 2105, and blend in with the multi-species population. It's all thanks to the pan-galactic U.N. More »
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Back in 1981, this newscast showed us an amazing new technology: Newspapers online! The newscaster chuckles that it can't really compete with print. And the editors say they'll never make money on it. More »
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A Russian social scientist is making waves with his prediction, floated since 1998, that the United States will split into a set of independent republics by 2010. Are we finally going to see Ecotopia? More »
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Stop sorting your paper and plastic into recycling bins, urges economics professor Art Caden. Instead of trying to save the planet, we should be preparing for its inevitable demise, and building our own Battlestar. More »
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How can you predict future technologies? You can't, according to five great science fiction authors quoted in the new CIO Magazine. But at least you can predict what types of problems will crop up. More »
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Want a good (but bitter) laugh? Read "Manufacturing In 2020," a new report by management consulting firm Capgemini. Apparently, trends from two years ago will continue unabated into the Roaring Twenties. More »
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