I was the sole appointed semi-live blogger (which means I'm officially brain-dead today ;-)) at the Accelerating Change conference this weekend: a conference on the accelerating technological future. (Organizing my smattering of notes into something with less typos and a bit more capitalization; I suspect they'll be trickling in to published status through Tuesday afternoon. Follow along at the Future Salon Blog or via Technorati's ac2005 tag).
The next AC conference theme is centered around the theme: the local in a global context and globalization. And for those sticking around to the very last drop of the closing remarks free copies of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat were handed out as fodder to forward our thinking on the theme. I myself tend to agree with Atlantic Monthly: the world is spiky. (I should mention I love this global theme; much more up my alley than this year's theme of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Intelligence.)
Lisa Haneberg asks last week, How Worldly Are You? Sometimes I think this is a different way of saying how open-minded are you? How much do you allow ideas foreign to you to be absorbed as possibilities rather than resisted outright? How curious are we about what we don't know and understand? How experimental and observant are we about how the unfamiliar ticks? How do we tap into our childlike wonder about the world?
I think worldliness fuses with future shaping. As Acceleration Studies Foundation president and founder John Smart opened: "Rather than future-shock, we're about future-shaping."
There are days that I feel like a conspicuous outcast among the technology elite. I don't live, eat, breath tech anymore. And I don't abide in the foregone conclusion that the brain is the seat of intelligence (but that would be another post). Yet there is a worldiness here that's not readily apparent in the artificial intelligence seeped schedule.
At the conference, I spot a friend who's moved to a small East Coast state. She sounds miserable. I hear in what she says that there is no wild-eyed wonder there. Things are conformingly known, finished, crisply defined. Strangely enough in my very last conversation at the conference before I bolted (I wish it was to catch up on sleep; this conference runs past midnight), she casually mentions at the end of our chat a Ken Wilber book that spawned the thesis for my More Space book essay. "You read Wilber?" I ask surprised. "Sure," she says, "lots of folks are reading about meaning and happiness studies like Seligman's work. Maybe it's like porn - people are reading but not talking about it."
Sunday morning I'm speaking to a scientist that studies proteins. He gave me an abbreviated tour of his career. How he decided he didn't want to be a mediocre scientist or mediocre professor when he was in college. He started pouring over biographies of the great scientists like Einstein. He delved into a study to understand where creative ideas come from. And while on that journey when he was at Cornell he stumbled upon a bookstore, a treasure trove of the wisdom traditions, where the proprieter hosted weekly discussions on philosophy, Sufism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and more. It's not your average conference when a scientist recommends you read The Cosmic Consciousness, by Richard Burke. We spoke about Ramana Maharshi in depth. He wasn't simply reciting information he'd read in a musty book. It was experiential knowledge he acquired through meditation.
At lunch I have an interesting conversation with a few folks, mostly science fiction writers, on faith, suffering, happiness, the tsunami and Katrina. One author, an affirmed atheist, says his wife was a "person of faith" until the tsunami. The last straw broke; she couldn't fathom the why behind God's plan as she witnessed a man speaking on TV about losing his 9 children and wife. I told him about Buddhist views he was unaware of that form the worldview of people that live in many of those tsunami-struck countries. We spoke intently about worldviews of happiness and suffering -- nearly missing the cafeteria's call that our orders had been ready eons ago.
Unfortunately I didn't catch the name of the man that spoke in place of Sister Denise Lawrence on behalf of Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual Organization (SF meditation center). We had a lengthy chat after his panel where he spoke on meditation and raja yoga. He immigrated from India and worked in information technlogy before his recent position at Brahma Kumaris. He told me when he never realized how suffused in spirituality he was in his family life growing up in India until he came to U.S. and noticed "something" was missing that he'd just taken for granted. At least two folks in front of me asked him if he was familiar with the work of Ken Wilber. Wilber is intensely worldly; integrating Western psychology and Eastern philosophies. Another man introduces himself to find about about a meditation center in his hometown; he says his grandmother is Japanese so he has an in-depth personal appreciation for Zen Buddhism.
Thomas Malone, an MIT professor and author of The Future of Work, admits to being tempted to move to the Bay Area noting that locals are "lucky to be here"; a place more receptive to his vision of the new organization. The Bay Area is about "wild-eyed forward thinkingness."
I was sitting next to Jeff Clavier, whom I first briefly met at BlogHer, and noted his post on a San Jose Mercury News story: "Merc: Silicon Valley losing its appeal? Me: Nope." He says: "Every week I meet young entrepreneurs who have relocated from other parts of the country to launch their company here." That's because the Bay Area is worldly. (BTW, Jeff has an excellent write-up of Blake Ross of Firefox talk, which I unfortunately couldn't clone myself to attend.)
Shun-Jie Ji, editor of the Journal of Futures Studies, spoke and represented Tamkang University in Taiwan (their English site is under reconstruction). Tamkung University has the distinction of being the only university in world that requires future studies as undergraduate student. Student elect from one of five Future Studies courses ranging from the future of politics, society, technology, environment, and uh, I missed the last focus area. What really caught my eye was when he announced their upcoming futurist conference November 5-7 where spiritual and humanist themes are integral to the conference titled: Global Soul, Global Mind, and Global Action.
And Dr. Daniel Amen's talk on the future of pyschiatry was a popular keynote. The Amen Clinics use brain imaging scans measuring blood flow and brain activity to determine if your brain is "healthy" augmenting and assisting in drug therapy and talk psychotherapy. He says: "[Brain] imaging opens the mind to other treatments - medical, nutritional, supplemental, psychotherapeutic elements." Thus he's prescribed acupuncture, biofeedback and even recommends the meditative video game, Journey to the Wild Divine.
In a closing session, George Gilder pretty much sums up the philosophy of the worldly future shapers when he disagreed with another panelist on the current U.S. patent system: "The word patent comes from Latin. Same [root] as latent meaning "what is hidden". Wealth is created by learning, not keeping hidden."
One of my personal favorite sessions was Joi Ito's on The Open Network. The next day in the conference he says we ought to have 1/2 the attendees be international. Yes! Snippets from his must-read disruptive business models talk below:
I would call ourselves The Creative Class - I've been kicked around by Richard Florida by my interpretation.
There is more similarity between the creative class across countries - like with Brazil - than within the same country [to non-creative class]. There is a huge gap between the old school guys and new school guys. File sharing is a new behavior. Old school: Instead of trying to make a business out of it, they [instinctly] want to kill it. You don't try to force a behavior change - you watch for behavior changes [like kids agog over Napster or furiously SMS text messaging] and then create a product for it...
It's now more about relationships between artists and fans.
Thomas Malone had hands-down my favorite slide:
HOW CAN YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO?
"...'What can I actually do?' The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting; we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance needed for this work cannot be found in science or technology...but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind." - E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
Bonus: For readers of this blog, I also recommend reading these two sessions' notes (more sessions coming too): Shrinking the Planet (includes Microsoft IPTV and Scott Rafer), Annotating the Planet (with Jon Udell). Favorite quote from Jon: "We're turning the world into a wiki -- if it's wrong, go log in and correct it yourself."
p.s. I'll be using a new Web 2.0 service just out of alpha to help with my fundraising on the tsunami anniversary tour. A lot of folks are misunderstanding intent. It's about worldliness. What can people halfway around the world that have quite different worldviews, religions, cultures and that have withstood a major disaster share and teach us about resiliency, about collaboration, about rebuilding lives, about life.
It's not about collecting disaster stories like, "And then I held onto the palm tree for dear life." Nope. Not at all. There are a lot of lessons these folks have digested in the last year. Let's listen, share them and get them out.
Like I said: "I'm going back to Asia to report on the tsunami anniversary. I think the resiliency and graciousness under distress I personally witnessed bodes well as traits for fulfilling Asia's economic promise."
I was there, I wish we'd met and said hello.
Posted by: Niti Bhan | Sep 19, 2005 at 08:23 PM
I'm still not personally satisfied with "put our own inner house in order" as the ultimate solution, as suggested in your professed "hands-down" favorite slide. But I just came across a very interesting article on E.F. Schumacher ( http://www.godspy.com/issues/The-Education-and-Catholic-Conversion-of-E-F-Schumacher-by-Joseph-Pearce.cfm ), the author being quoted in that slide, and wanted to share it. Looks like Small is Beautiful is yet another title to add to the reading list...
Posted by: Kevin D. Keck | Oct 15, 2005 at 10:21 PM