Tag Archives: Prediction

Stepping stones to Transhumanism

googleglassThe Consumer Electronics Show (CES2014) currently taking place in Las Vegas is packed full of smart glasses, like Google Glass.

Wearable tech is poised to transform the way we interact with technology. With a pair of smart glasses, you can begin to feel like superman, taking photos and recording videos of anything you see, and with the almost telepathic ability to interact directly with the internet and with your own automated personal assistant.

Don’t doubt that this will happen, just so long as the cost is affordable and the tech works in a convenient way. After all, just a few years ago, how many people would have imagined that we would be carrying smartphones everywhere and that email, Facebook and other social media would be just as important as face to face communication?

Smart glasses are just the latest in a long history of creeping augmentation of our abilities by technology. Observers of technology call this transition “Transhumanism” and predict an inevitable and exponential increase in how this impacts on our lives. Continue reading

A for Andromeda

andromedagalaxyThe endless reaches of space are almost entirely empty, so you might imagine that collisions between stars are extremely rare events. However, because of gravity, matter tends to clump together (which is why space is mostly empty). As a result, collisions between stars and even galaxies happen surprisingly often.

And I have some bad news for you. The Andromeda galaxy, containing 1 trillion stars, is on a collision course with our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and is approaching at a speed of 200 miles per second. Continue reading

Climate change conundrum

globalwarmingEvery other blog I read these days seems to take a stance on global warming, so I thought  I’d make my position clear. Continue reading

The end of the world is nigh (again)

mushroomcloudWhen I was growing up in the 1970s, my friends and I used to play a card game called Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (it was a variation of Snap.) In those Cold War days nearly everybody believed that the world would be destroyed in a nuclear attack. Continue reading

A lightbulb moment

lightbulbI’ve been doing some retail therapy on Amazon recently. Yeah, I bought some bio-degradable bin liners, some low energy light bulbs and a replacement nozzle for my hosepipe. I’m a big spender and nothing gets my juices going more than purchasing essential household items. I was so excited I even shared my purchases on Facebook, as Amazon suggested. Continue reading

Is the world getting better or worse?

glasshalffullAre you a glass half-full or a glass half-empty kind of person? An optimist or a pessimist?

At a personal level, we can choose whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about any situation that confronts us. Optimists tend to make the world a better place, because they believe they can. Pessimists tend not to, because they believe they can’t. But what about the bigger picture? Is the world in general getting better or worse? Continue reading

Preparing for the technology tidal wave

eyeonthefutureTwo million years ago, early humans already knew how to make hand axes out of stone. A million years later they were still making exactly the same kinds of stone axes. Not exactly what you’d call rapid technological advancement.

Fast forward to medieval times and innovations were happening more quickly, but still it was likely that the son of a medieval peasant would do the same job as his father, using the same kinds of tools. Continue reading

What do we want? More uncertainty! When do we want it? Um, not sure …

snowmanIn case you hadn’t noticed, we recently had a lot of snow across much of the UK. The weather forecast stated clearly that heavy snow would fall late on Friday. Then the forecast changed. The snow would begin at 9am precisely on Friday morning. In the event, the snow started to fall on Thursday and so there was already a white blanket covering much of England and Wales when I woke on Friday to hear the weather forecaster state without a hint of irony that “it’s snowing now.” Continue reading

Prediction is easy – especially about the future

At the beginning of 2007, the economist Robert Prechter correctly predicted the global stock market crash that unfolded later that year. Smart guy. The only problem was that he’d been making exactly the same prediction every year for the previous twenty-five years. Hmm. Continue reading