The Future According to Microsoft

Did Siri really say the best smartphone out there is the Nokia 900 running on the Windows platform?

The Case for Optimism and Abundance

At TED2012, Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism -- that we'll invent, innovate and create ways to solve the challenges that loom over us.  The last 100 years have been an absolutely incredible time to be alive.

Floating Cities: Future Havens of Happiness?

"The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008 by activist, software engineer and political economic theorist Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, and technology entrepreneur, investor and Philanthropist Peter Thiel.

At The Seasteading Institute, we believe that experiments are the source of all progress: to find something better,you have to try something new. But right now, there is no open space for experimenting with new societies. That’s why we work to enable seasteading communities — floating cities — which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for government. The most successful communities can then inspire change in governments around the world. We’re opening this new frontier because humanity needs better ways to live together to unlock our full potential."

A Day Made of Glass 2

A Day Made of Glass 2 is Corning's expanded vision for the future of glass technologies. A Day Made Of Glass was originally a 5 minute video produced by Corning for an annual investor meeting. It went viral and garnered some 18 million pageviews in YouTube. A Day Made of Glass 2 is kind of a sequel to the original.

The Transparent Factory: Modern Automotive Manufacturing

This impressive video of a state-of-the-art VW car factory in Dresden, Germany was made in 2009.

Abundance: The Future is Brighter than You Think

As a teenager back in the 1970s I read apocryphal books such as The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich which prophesied doom for the human race due to resource scarcity. I must admit I bought into the argument for a while, but as I grew older and it became increasingly evident that the predictions were not going to come true I began to realize that this was more an argument about why people needed to cede individual choice and self-determination over to an enlightened set of intellectuals appointed to make wise choices for society as a whole. Abundance is the exact opposite: the democratization of choice, creativity and intelligence. Thank God we seem to be moving more toward a world of abundance and less toward the apocalypse of Ehrlich and other prophets of doom.



In the upcoming book "Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think" (to be released February 21) space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis (featured in the video above) and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and many other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous two hundred years.

Some factoids from the book's website:

1. A Masai warrior in Africa with a smartphone on Google has access to more information than the President of the United States did just 15 years ago.

2. The number of people living in absolute poverty has fallen since the 1950s has dropped by more than half. At the current rate of decline, it would hit zero around 2035.

3. From the very beginning of time until 2003, humankind created five billion gigabytes of digital information. In 2010, the same amount of information is created every two days; by 2013, every 10 minutes.

4. In 15 years, the average $1000 laptop should be computing at the rate of the human brain.

Amazing YouTube Stats

Uploads to YouTube:

One hour of video every second.

9 months of video every two hours.

A decade of video every day.

A century of video every 10 days.


YouTube Views per day:

4 billion.



Can you imagine the computing power and bandwidth it takes to run YouTube?

Multi-touch Glass Keyboard and Mouse

Jason Gidding’s stunning Multi-Touch Glass Keyboard and mouse has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal of $50,000 for prototype, tooling and pre-production of the device. I hope to see it one day in the near future in my local Wal-mart or Best Buy. It will be refreshing to have a non-Windows or Apple centric keyboard.

TEDx Talk: The Next Big Shift in the Internet

"The next big shift in the Internet is now, and it’s not what you think: Facebook is the new Windows; Google and Windows must be sacrificed. Ten years from now we will interact with the Internet in completely different ways. In this TED talk, Roger McNamee identifies six changes that are already transforming the ways we consume and create content."

The Hidden Infrastructure of the Internet

NASA Adrift: The Last Journey of the Space Shuttle--- But What's Next?

The Flight of Apollo 11


To the casual observer like myself, NASA has been adrift without lofty goals since the end of the Apollo program. NASA aficionados will no doubt disagree with this statement. However, with the end of the space shuttle program everyone is asking the question-- what's next-- and the silence is deafening. Being a government agency, NASA must get its vision and goals from political appointees and politicians who tend to be backward-looking reactionaries rather than forward-looking visionaries. There's much speculation that NASA has run its course and space exploration will now pass into the hands of the private sector-- companies like Virgin Galatic or SpaceX. Will the US squander its lead in space technology? Let me help the politicians out: In this decade NASA should build a permanent space station on the moon in preparation for colonization of the moon.

3D Printing Will Revolutionize and Revive American Manufacturing in the 21st Century

Forbes (Rich Karlgaard) -- "The transformative technology of the 2015-2025 period could be 3D printing. This has the potential to remake the economics of manufacturing from a large-scale industry back to an artisan model of small design shops with access to 3D printers. In other words, making stuff, real stuff, could move from being a capital intensive industry into something that looks more like art and software. This should favor the American skill set of creativity."

Amazing, revolutionary potential here for manufacturing and even for medical applications like organ replacement. According to Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski, because of 3D printing, "The next five years in manufacturing are going to be substantially different than anything we've seen before. With 3D printing, production and complexity become essentially free. 3D printing will make manufacturing localized, customizable and accessible, with no penalty for personalization or complexity. It's entirely possible that the U.S. could see self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining future."



HT: Carpe Diem

Grouch: Is this the beginnings of the Replicator Machines we saw on TV watching Star Trek as kids?