Part of the Tomorrow’s People conference was a series of set-piece lectures by John Harris, professor of philosophy at Manchester University. In his final talk he started with a quote from a philosopher I really respect – Douglas Adams. He used Douglas’s story of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged who became immortal by accident: “To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, [...]
After the Canadian Party
Canadian politics is interesting at the moment. No, really it is. It’s uncertain whether the recently elected minority Conservative Government will last more than a few months and the Liberal Party have just set out to find a new leader as Paul Martin resigned at the weekend. Everything is in flux, so there are lots of debates and scandals for the media to follow, but [...]
Where do you come from?
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds (one of my favourite books of recent years) has an interesting piece in the Guardian about ownership of companies. Following the hoo-ha about foreign ownership of US ports and successive attempts by foreign investors to buy the London Stock Exchange, it’s very topical. I have to admit, I’m with James on this one. I’ve never really seen [...]
Pro-Ams in Time Magazine
The always brilliant Steven Johnson links to a discussion he took part in about the future for Time Magazine called ‘Around the Corner’. One of the ideas that comes up is The Pro-Am Revolution that Charlie and I wrote back in 2004. When they’re talking about the internet Mark Cuban says: “In a world where there are unlimited choices, it makes it harder to gain [...]
Don’t eat marshmallows too quickly
There was a long-term study started at Stanford in the 1960s where the researchers put hungry four year olds in a room with a marshmallow on a table and told them not to eat it. They were told that if they didn’t eat it, when the researcher came back from running an errand they would get two marshmallows. Some of the kids ate the marshmallow [...]
Tomorrow’s People
I’m at a conference in Oxford called Tomorrow’s people: the challenges of technologies for life extension and enhancement. Everybody here has had a copy of the Better Humans? book that James and I edited. Sitting in the main lecture theatre with 200 copies of your work being leafed through by some of the world’s leading thinkers and scientists is a bit scary. You can see [...]
A brief history of an ‘-ism’
Last Thursday I dropped in on the launch of a report I helped put together called Disablist Britain. It was hosted by Scope and DAA and featured the new(ish) Work and Pensions Secretary John Hutton as keynote speaker. BBC News Online covered the launch here. It was strange to see what we’ve helped to pull off. As a tiny part of a network of other [...]
POWER to the people
The POWER inquiry was launched last week and got a heck of a lot of coverage. I went along to the drinks bash having read the executive summary and I’ve now had a chance to read the whole report. It took a while but was worth it. I like their direct style of writing and I certainly like their diagnosis of the problem. The generally [...]
More on ‘Better Humans?’
There’s been more coverage and debate about our Better Humans? book this week. In the Guardian, Dylan Evans called for the creation of new equivalents to the ‘savage reservations’ in ‘Brave New World’, where ‘freed from the oppressive technologies that regulate life in the World State, the inhabitants develop individuality, independent thinking and initiative.’ In the FT (registration required), Richard Tomkins speculated on the drawbacks [...]