Topic: The Future

Dr. Douglas Engelbart invented or influenced the mouse, hypertext, multiple windows, bit-mapped screens, shared screen teleconferencing, and outline processing. But his ideas transcend technology and computer science and reach into the humanitarian. In this presentation, he tells how can we construct a collective vision as to where we are headed and where we should best be headed. [Accelerating Change 2004 audio from IT Conversations]

Clay Shirky discusses the lessons he's learned from three years at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program. His students have been creating applications for the mobile phone platform, combining GPS, voice and photo messaging. Clay describes the technology behind these projects, and speculates on the future development of phones and their integration with internet-hosted infrastructure. [O'Reilly Media's Emerging Technology Conference 2005 audio from IT Conversations]

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Stanford Professor Geoffrey Nunberg, probably best known to you for his commentary on NPR's Fresh Air. He speaks about the new words that will and won't make it into the dictionary. The new ones are almost solely driven by technology. [Tech Nation audio from IT Conversations]

Daniel Solove doesn't use the familiar metaphor of "Big Brother" when he discusses privacy; rather he uses Kafka's play "The Trial." He says we're not as much in danger of having our privacy violated by someone with evil intent as we are of having our lives turned upside down from the interactions of unapproachable and faceless corporations and bureaucracies. [Technometria with Phil Windley; audio from IT Conversations]

"Simulation, Agents, and Accelerating Change: Personality Capture and the Linguistic User Interface," presented by John Smart at Accelerating Change 2004: One of the most important accelerating transitions occuring today is the emergence of the Linguistic User Interface or LUI. What will Windows (and the Google Browser) of 2015 look like? It seems clear that it will include sophisticated software simulations of human beings as part of the interface. First-world culture today spends more on video games than movies. These "interactive motion picture" technologies are more compelling and educating, particularly to our youth, the fastest-learning segment of society, than any linear scripts, no matter how professionally produced. [Audio from IT Conversations]

Fro Accelerating Change 2004 comes the Distance Infrastructure Panel: Broadband, Videoconferencing, and Telepresence with presentations by Milton Chen (Visual Communication and Collaboration Software for Afghanistan), Jeremy Bailenson (Collaborative Virtual Environments and Transformed Social Interaction) and Dewayne Hendricks (One Gigabit or Bust Initiative -- A Broadband Vision for California). Audio from IT Conversations.

Moira speaks with futurist and forecaster Mary O'Hara-Devereaux, a forecaster, the CEO of Global Foresight, and author of "Navigating the Badlands: Thriving in the Decade of Radical Transformation." She believes we've entered a period of disruptive innovation, and the next two decades will be a wild ride - she calls them "The Badlands." (Tech Nation podcast on IT Conversations)

"Innovation Managers Panel: IT, Nanotech, and Venture Capital" with Cynthia Breazeale (Intel), Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), and Christine Peterson, Co-Founder and Vice President of the Foresight Institute. [Audio recording from Accelerating Change 2004 on IT Conversations]

"Evaluating Horizons: What Limits Our Ability to Cope With Accelerating Change?" presented by David Brin, who has a triple career as scientist, public speaker, and author. His fifteen novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. [Audio recording of a presentation by David Brin at Accelerating Change 2004 on IT Conversations]

Biomimicry: It's the conscious emulation of life's genius. Janine Benyus is a life sciences writer and author of six books, including her latest -- Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In Biomimicry, she names an emerging science that seeks sustainable solutions by mimicking nature's designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves, agriculture that looks like a prairie, business that runs like a redwood forest). [IT Conversations audio from the Pop!Tech 2004 session on New Naturalism]