Future Timelines: The Wiki
- 2035 - A research group in Wales create bacteria in the lab that form crystals which resonate with radio frequency.
- 2041 - The same group demonstrates that they can modify a percentage of the glia in a mouse brain to resonate with RF, opening up the possibility for biological radio receivers. These glia are dubbed “radiocytes”
- 2043 - Examining data, the researchers find proof that the mice can respond to RF as a sensory stimulus.
- 2047 - Transgenic mice pass genes for creating radiocytes on to offspring.
- 2059 - Researchers in India announce that they have a “grammar” of radio signals that mouse brains interpret as information. At the same time they show that these signals are only perceived by the areas of the brain nearest the radio receivers.
- 2060 - Radio transmitters are implanted in some of the mice. Within 1 week, the implanted mice are communicating with each other using the grammar discovered by the Indian team.
- 2112 - The first humans to be born with radiocytes enter school.
- 2128 - The Wiki, a human exomemory, is born when a radiocytotic teenager discovers how to store and encode knowledge in an external repository.
- 2131 - Radiocytotic people connected to the Wiki begin spontaneously sleeping only 3 hours a night. It is found that the presence of unlimited external storage radically improves the brain’s ability to reorganize and consolidate, reducing the need for sleep.
- 2201 - 98% of humanity alive has either been born with radiocytes or has had them implanted through stem cell therapy. Electronic devices can be controlled by a thought. Experience, perception, and emotion can now be encoded in The Wiki as humanity refines its new abilities. No-one remembers what it’s like to not have the sum-total of humanity’s knowledge on hand.
(via futurnow)
Source: future-timelines
Edge.org asked 191 famous thinkers "What is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?” Daniel Dennett's choice:
“I was told some years ago that the reason why some species of sea turtles migrate all the way across the South Atlantic to lay their eggs on the east coast of South America after mating on the west coast of Africa is that when the behavior started, Gondwanaland was just beginning to break apart (that would be between 130 and 110 million years ago), and these turtles were just swimming across the narrow strait to lay their eggs. Each year the swim was a little longer—maybe an inch or so—but who could notice that? Eventually they were crossing the ocean to lay their eggs, having no idea, of course, why they would do such an extravagant thing.
What is delicious about this example is that it vividly illustrates several important evolutionary themes: the staggering power over millions of years of change so gradual it is essentially unnoticeable, the cluelessness of much animal behavior, even when it is adaptive, and of course the eye-opening perspective that evolution by natural selection can offer to the imagination of the curious naturalist.”
Via The Atlantic
(via emergentfutures)
Source: climateadaptation
Plenty More Fish In The Sea? | Information is Beautiful
A visualization of the state of Atlantic fish stocks.
Commissioned by The Pew Charitable Trusts as part of European Fish Week
Popularly eaten fish include: bluefin tuna, brill, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, turbot, whiting.
(via emergentfutures)
Source: informationisbeautiful.net
Facebook has a bright future,” as long as it can stay “human and open,” contends Gerd Leonhard, founder of Green Futurist and author of The Future of Content. “Facebook is infrastructure now, like a highway, or water.” He predicts Facebook will rival Google in terms of revenues within three years, and already rivals Google for importance. The main challenge Facebook will face is user fatigue, as it adds more and more services and forms of content.
Can business have a conscience?
Why We Aren’t as Ethical as We Think We Are: A Temporal Explanation
People commonly predict that they will behave more ethically in the future than they actually do. When evaluating past (un)ethical behavior, they also believe they behaved more ethically than they actually did. These misperceptions, both of prediction and of recollection, have important ramifications for the distinction between how ethical we think we are and how ethical we really are, as well as understanding how such misperceptions are perpetuated over time. This paper draws on recent research in psychology and decision-making to gain insight into these forces. It also provides recommendations for reducing them. Key concepts include:
All individuals have an innate tendency to engage in self-deception around their own ethical behavior.
Organizations worried about ethics violations should pay attention to understanding these psychological processes at the individual level rather than focus solely on the creation of formal training programs and education around ethics codes.
Source: hbswk.hbs.edu
The biggest questions we need to ask are sometimes the hardest ones to answer. This is a video for the Centre of Integrated Human Studies, a transdisciplinary research centre at the University of Western Australia where I am completing my Masters.
Designed to be placed any any location, prefabricated. (via The Futuro House: The iconic investment property!)
Source: beachandbay.com.au
