Ask me anything
Recent Responses
-
-
I'd say I'm much more optimistic, and that was before the Occupy movement (following on from Tahir Sq and the Indignado movement and so on) sprang up. Part of that is through maturing my worldview, to step back from the purely technological and look at the political, economic, cultural, legal and moral aspects.
These changes are happening in part because people are more educated, and connected to each other. Propaganda is just another meme. History is interchangeable with conspiracy theory once you realise that there is no objective position. More and more people are "waking up", then turning around and illumating their friends. I don't think anybody expected Enlightment to go viral.
I really don't think the so-called 'global over-population problem' is a bad thing. It means this is the greatest sum of human mind that has ever existed. That a connected humanity is the greatest supercomputer we've never dreamed off. And now we're adding an increasingly autonomous robot ecology as part of Next Nature.
Likewise, the majority of people are in urban environments now. Which is the native habitat of the civilized human. With everyone in cities, and more people interconnected globally the ability to adapt and upgrade infracture and tools only increases.. which, grey goo disasters aside, can let the land and sea outside the cities' domain revert (back to Next Nature). And slowly the climate can stablize again.
I don't see challenges anymore, I see opportunities. Humanity's gonna make it through this dark period and what comes out the other side might way be a whole new species (or two).
None of which I'd ever have said four years ago.
~ m1k3y -
Keep a month's worth of food on hand. Get a good first-aid kit, and learn how to use it. Being physically fit won't hurt either, and also some self-defense skills won't..
Become a node, not the end of a tree. We're talking solar panels and rain water tanks. We're talking having bikes, and a hybrid car. In short, we're talking a gradual detachment from the status-quo, as it existed prior to the GFC.
If you're really brave run simulations. Take a weekend and pretend the Grid is dead. Test, learn, adapt.
Last, and most of all... know your neighbourhood, meet your neighbours. Learn where the nearest fresh water supply is, that sort of thing
Neil Strauss's book Emergency is a nice general introduction to this sort of thinking.
~ m1k3y -
Nothing leaps out as a fave, so I'd have to say Bane in the new Batman and the GI Joe sequel (the first one is pure mech&HUD pr0n, and I only expect the sequel to have *moar*. And third.. um? GOOD QUESTION WOLVEN! Instead, let me list the the great transhuman films of 2011: Hanna, Limitless, Captain America, In Time and you could say Thor too.
~ m1k3y -
open source artificical general intelligence - mixed into EVERYTHING. specifically the Open Cog project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCog). I saw Ben Goertzl speak at the local Singularity Summit, and I was very impressed.
~m1k3y -
Unquestionably the weather is only get to be more extreme, with peak heavyweather lying somewhere far over the horizon of 2012.
What genuinely frightens me is the interaction with man-made/created disasters. What happens if Japan gets another tsnuami, because that whole reactor zone is t.ro.u.b.l.i.n.g. Or a Cat-6 hurricane tears up the containment cap on the Mexican Gulf oil spill?
Or, more likey, some horrible new disaster we never thought could happen occurs, some corner case not in the manual: say, North Korea mistaking the radar signature of the forced migration of birds (due to flooding of their usual seasonal habitat) for a stealth attack from South Korea/US/Japan. A young, paranoid ruler at the hlem? (Hell, they were worried enough about the immediate succession, remember.)
And something the whole globe is mostly unprepared for still, massive solar storms. Go read about the last one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859#Carrington_Super_Flare, then imagine it happeneing tomorrow with all our unshielded infrastructure.
Nature's back, and she's pissed.
~m1k3y -
When the sea of change becomes a tsunami, when infrastructure collapse piles on instituational collapse, piles on social change... people will be treadying water, looking for a narrative to explain just how they came to be almost drowning. SF theory then becomes srs bsnss. Especially when the alternative is nationalistic resurgence or exceptionalist denialism.
Would it be that surprising if strange, new (techno) religions flower when more happens in the first month of 2012 than all of 2011. Just trying explaining this year to your 2010-pastSelf.
The present will be a tiny blip of time. Now may last 10minutes.
The result of a 100years of SF'nal thinking will help give shape to the chaos, and that will make all the difference. Its memes will turn victims into survivors. (It was always a resuce operation.) -
The states will still exist, but UK faces further instabiliy and likely overreactions from polices. Nights of riots will return, for longer. Obama will look even worse by then, and will probably be forced out by Hildawg for re-election. For the populations, things will get ever more political, but in wildier directions. We'll see more insane versions of Tea Party and other nationalistic manifestatians. Tactical, flash occupies, increasingly surreal, and permanent encampments as they ally with friendly pre-existing institutions (say, liberal churchs for instance).
Equal parts new instabilities in old areas, and fresh, unanticipated cohesions at the edge of the new and the old.
~m1k3y -
detach, or at least insulate, yourself from the mainstream status-quo such as it existed before the beginning of the GFC.
time rich, money poor; you mightn't have a (full-time) job, but you will have time to pool resources with fellow travellers, scrap together equipment. start a neighbour market garden on vacant or adandoned land. swap equipment, get maximum benefit from the resources of the group using (something like) http://neighborgoods.net/. and above all else - LEARN/STUDY/PLAY.
the further you live into the future, the more valuable you'll be as a guide to those that follow you. (don't buy a jetback, build a peer2peer jetpack factory)
~m1k3y -
Hardware and software being used, adapted, created by the independant citizens of the Ocuppy movement. Such as this new SNS http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/occupy-facebook/all/1. Definitely the emergant Drone Culture; kinect hacked quadcoptors vs predators. And DIY BioGen, something interesting should surely come from there.
Surprise trend.. even more apocalyptic cults and new strange techno-religions flowering.
~m1k3y -
In the final seconds, when all seems lost, they will unwittingly perform a ninth level, interlocking power move summoning the transcendant object from beyond spacetime: BARBELITH.
-
I consider myself a neo-pythagorian. Its a path through the future, but not for all.
-
Grinding.be was spawned as a real-world spin-off from Warren Ellis's Doktor Sleepless comic.
We're all pretty obsessed with the Future. I can't speak for the others, but I mostly post whatever I think fits as I wander the internets on a regular basis.
Posts take between 5mins (photos) to 8hours (big rants).
~m1k3y
-
Team Grinding’s Bio
SOL 4
We prepare for existantial disaster relief and ontological rescue operations.
