FUTURETRONIUM®,
The Revolution III!
by Andres Agostini
Version 300.0 ─ January/09/2011
(Forthcoming versions, as well as other resources, will be announced via www.twitter.com/Futuretronium ─Until indicated otherwise via www.twitter.com/Futuretronium , The Futuretronium Book will be an ongoing initiative and periodically upgraded, refined and extended.)
(This Proprietary Book may be reproduced for noncommercial purposes if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice. Please recall that “if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice.”)
#1 FUTURETRONIUM®, AND THE ADMINISTRATION AND APPLICATION OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WITHOUT INNUENDOS AND IN CRESCENDO AS FLUID POINTS OF INFLECTIONS ASCERTAIN THAT THE MORROW IS A THING OF THE PAST.
#2 FUTURETRONIUM®, SUBSEQUENTLY, THERE IS NOW AND HERE AVAILABLE THE UNABRIDGED, AUTHORITATIVE ELICITATION AND ELUCIDATION OF ACTIONABLE KNOWLEDGE FROM AND FOR THE INCESSANTLY ARRHYTHMIC, ABRUPT, ANTAGONISTIC, MORDANT, CAUSTIC, AND ANARCHISTIC FUTURE, AS WELL AS THE CONTENTIOUS INTERRELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUCH FUTURE AND THE PRESENT.
#3 FUTURETRONIUM®, A RADICAL YET RIGOROUS STRONG-SENSE AND CRITICO-CREATIVE «FUTURES THINKING», SYSTEMS APPROACH TO QUINTESSENTIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE COMPLEXITIES, SUBTLETIES, AND INTRICACIES, AS WELL AS THE OPPORTUNITIES TO BE EXPLOITED OUT OF THE DRIVING FORCES INSTILLING AND INFLICTING PERPETUAL CHANGE INTO TWENTIETH-ONE CENTURY .
By (c) Copyright 2011 by Andres Agostini — All Rights Reserved ―
What doesn’t get understood in this age becomes a major liability. To this end Henry Kissinger’s quotation is timely. Ensuing: “An ignored issue is an invitation to a problem.” [12]
Forget what you know and just believe in what you see and sense. It’s time for you to explore, conceive, develop, discover and institute your own Futures — exploiting the UPSIDES and DOWNSIDES of the surreptitiously covert and ignored ones — unless you will make yourself enslaved by circumstances beyond your control, regardless of your “powers.” Kindly please, if you’d like, make your choices wisely and by you and for yourself!
The undersigned is in no way attempting to be either a seer, or a soothsayer, diviner, foreteller, or prophet, who can foretell the future. In managing corporate and operational risks of many diverse natures, one needs not only to identify and recognize hazards but to anticipate, very early on, future and advanced disruption potential, doing so in the tradition of rigorous futures studies coupled with other disciplines. In the last analysis and very seriously stated, the view here offers a lucrative and a useful learning and a practical tool that requires from practitioners much better preparedness before systemic volatility, universal uncertainty and ubiquitous change and ambiguity.
The objective is the understanding the complex and subtle nature and progression of many explosive driving forces that shape and re-shape the known and unknown world. Futurists speak, out of brief synthesis, about trends and tendencies and propensities of some of said driving forces. These driving forces are not only mega, diverse dynamos that output change but also challenges, opportunities and benefits for those who are prepared and paying incessantly great detailed attention.
These driving forces, incidentally, expel: (1) Open-ended changes, (2) Preemptive changes, and (3) “All-out war-waging” (that is, boundaryless) changes.
You manage risks to increase your benefits and opportunities and to augment the resiliency and adaptability of the sustainability of said benefits and opportunities. In Transformative and Integrative Risk Management (below), managing risks ─ not to bring about illusions of meaning ─ are nothing else than the optimum management of the upsides and downsides embedded in the driving forces.
Subsequently, the material in this book ranges over many disciplines, as well as the work of many outstanding scientists.
Furthermore, present driving forces (science, technology, society, politics and economy) are churning insurmountable amounts of unprecedented change with increasing energy and scope. Accordingly, the present material is communicated with marked emphasis indeed. Emphasis will be reiterated. The undersigned does not and will not dare to oversimplify and/or underestimate the consequences and sequels of these gargantuan driving forces.
TO OFFER GREATER INSIGHT QUICKLY, LET’ SEE A PRIMER ON TECHNOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. ENSUING:
Dr. Michio Kaku, Ph.D. indicates: “ .... By the end of the twentieth century, science had reached the end of an era, unlocking the secrets of the atom, unraveling the molecule of life, and creating the electronic computer. With these three fundamental discoveries, triggered by the quantum revolution, the DNA revolution, and the computer revolution, the basic laws of matter, life, and computation were, in the main, finally solved .... That epic phase of science is now drawing to a close; one era is ending and another is only beginning .... The next era of science promises to be an even deeper, more thoroughgoing, more penetrating one than the last .... Clearly, we are on the threshold of yet another revolution. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING EVERY TEN YEARS [AS PER THE 1998 STANDARDS]. In the past decade, more scientific knowledge has been created than in all of human history. COMPUTER POWER IS DOUBLING EVERY EIGHTEEN MONTHS. THE INTERNET IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR. THE NUMBER OF DNA SEQUENCES WE CAN ANALYZE IS DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS. Almost daily, the headlines herald new advances in computers, telecommunications, biotechnology, and space exploration. In the wake of this technological upheaval, entire industries and lifestyles are being overturned, only to give rise to entirely new ones. But these rapid, bewildering changes are not just quantitative. They mark the birth pangs of a new era .... FROM NOW TO THE YEAR 2020, SCIENTISTS FORESEE AN EXPLOSION IN SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY SUCH AS THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE. IN TWO KEY TECHNOLOGIES, COMPUTER POWER AND THE DNA SEQUENCING, WE WILL SEE ENTIRE INDUSTRIES RISE AND FALL ON THE BASIS OF BREATHTAKING SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES. SINCE THE 1950S, THE POWER OF OUR COMPUTERS HAS ADVANCED BY A FACTOR OF ROUGHLY TEN BILLION. IN FACT, BECAUSE BOTH COMPUTER POWER AND DNA SEQUENCING DOUBLE ROUGHLY EVERY TWO YEARS, ONE CAN COMPUTE THE ROUGH TIME FRAME OVER WHICH MANY SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGHS WILL TAKE PLACE .... BY 2020, MICROPROCESSORS WILL LIKELY BE AS A CHEAP AND PLENTIFUL AS SCRAP PAPER, SCATTERED BY THE MILLIONS INTO ENVIRONMENT, ALLOWING US TO PLACE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS EVERYWHERE. THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING AROUND US, INCLUDING THE NATURE OF COMMERCE, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, AND THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE, WORK, PLAY, AND LIVE.” [171]
How does innovation growth behave “today”?
Ray Kurzweil notes, “Because of the explosive nature of exponential growth, the twenty-first century will be equivalent to twenty thousand years of progress at today’s rate of progress; about one thousand times greater than the 20th century.”
President John F. Kennedy’s speech on September 12, 1962 at Rice University: “Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation’s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.” [80]
Sometimes, How is a scientific truth achieved through generations?
Max Planck (1858 – 1947): “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar.” [187]
To further set the stage for this material, the textbook “Einstein in the Boardroom” by Suzanne S. Harrison and Patrick H. Sullivan Sr. may offer some lucid ideas on the “current” state of affairs when they claim:
“Humans have been adding to their total knowledge steadily over the centuries, and the amount of knowledge we create is multiplying at an incredible rate. Beginning with the amount of knowledge in the known world at the time of Christ, studies have estimated that the first doubling of that knowledge took place about 1700 A.D. The second doubling occurred around the year 1900. It is estimated today that the world's knowledge base will double again by 2010 and again after that by 2013.” [37]
Are we realizing that everything we do create knowledge, regardless of how we use it or not?
H.G. Wells (Herbert George Wells ─ 21 September 1866 -1946): “An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearinghouse for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, clarified and compared.” [188]
There are many serious publications, from 2003 to this date, speaking of the entirety of scientific knowledge doubling every five (5) years and sooner. How, then, can one undertake such a gargantuan challenge, through the “Society of Knowledge” (that also embraces the “infotech economy”), unless it is through the stewardship of the most rigorous and advanced scientific method? [129]
Human knowledge capability will continue to double every year. “Human knowledge capability” is the quantity of available knowledge multiplied by the power of technology to process that knowledge. This capability will increase by two to the power of 100, the equivalent of a thousand billion billion, in the twenty-first century. — James Martin, “The 17 Great Challenges of the Twenty-First Century,” Jan-Feb 2007, p. 24 [The Futurist Magazine’s Top-10 Forecast for 2010]
Is there any technological breakthrough is green energy?
Ray Kurzweil: “[THERE IS A] DOUBLING EVERY TWO YEARS [REGARDING THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT OF] SOLAR ENERGY BY APPLYING NANOTECHNOLOGY TO SOLAR PANELS.” [177]
Is genetics and genomic making landmark progression to solve complicated challenges?
Ray Kurzweil: “...NANO-GENETIC SEQUENCING DATA … IS DOUBLING EVERY YEAR.” [177]
What has become of novel knowledge content manufacturing as of now?
Ray Kurzweil: “KNOWLEDGE IS DOUBLING BY EVERY FOURTEEN MONTHS.” [177]
Is Moore's Law beginning to run out of steam?
Ray Kurzweil: “MORE THAN THE DOUBLING OF COMPUTATIONAL POWER [IS TAKING PLACE] EVERY YEAR.” [177]
Subsequently, given the immense level of complexity progression and density, there is one axiom we will need to live by (that is, if we wish to be successful in prevailing) that indicates: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” (By Albert Einstein) [153]
China mulls $1.5 trillion strategic industries boost? How far can China go to pervasively cutting-edge science and technology while the West, seemingly and allegedly, does not get its act together? What does a prominent news agency have to report on it?
Reuters (Dec 03, 2010): “China is considering investments of up to $1.5 trillion over five years in seven strategic industries, sources said, a plan aimed at accelerating the country's transition from the world's supplier of cheap goods to a leading purveyor of high-value technologies .... Analysts expressed skepticism at the sheer amount of money ─ it equates to about 5 percent of China's gross domestic product on an annual basis ─ but said that the eye-popping headline figure was an indication of the government's determination to catalyze a structural shift in the economy .... THE TARGETED SECTORS INCLUDE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, BIOTECHNOLOGY, NEW-GENERATION INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, HIGH-END EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING, ADVANCED MATERIALS, ALTERNATIVE-FUEL CARS AND ENERGY-SAVING AND ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY TECHNOLOGIES .... Beijing has said before that it wants to promote the sectors, a policy that it hopes will make the country less dependent on low-end, dirty manufacturing. The value-added output of the seven strategic industries together account for about 2 percent of GDP now. The government has said it wants them to generate 8 percent of GDP in 2015 and 15 percent by 2020.” [176] N.B.: When concerned about career choices and jobs market, as well as selecting professional and investment choices, do keep in mind: “ .... THE TARGETED SECTORS INCLUDE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, BIOTECHNOLOGY, NEW-GENERATION INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, HIGH-END EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING, ADVANCED MATERIALS, ALTERNATIVE-FUEL CARS AND ENERGY-SAVING AND ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY TECHNOLOGIES .... ”
How does Futuretronium argue about the linkage between our thoughts, the Multiverse and the forthcoming advent of the Singularity?
“Bart Simpson: ‘Dad, What is the mind? Is it just a system of impulses or something tangible? [Thinking better my question, Dad, Is the mind a projection of Computronium instilled into our brain? If so, Will my mind supersede above and beyond by the Strong Artificial Intelligence devices embedded in the transbiologicals’ and robots’ own quantum CPUs?]’…” [187]
Zillion impossible science facts turned into rampant realities?
Dr. Michio Kaku, Ph.D. points out: “As a physicist, I have learned that the ‘impossible’ is often a relative term .... IN MY OWN SHORT LIFETIME I HAVE SEEN THE SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE BECOME ESTABLISHED SCIENTIFIC FACT OVER AND OVER AGAIN. So is it impossible to think we might one day be able to teleport ourselves from one place to another, or build a spaceship that will one day take us light-years to the stars? .... If we were to somehow encounter a civilization a million years more advanced than ours, would their everyday technology appear to be ‘magic’ to us? .... Just because something is ‘impossible’ today, will it remain impossible centuries or millions of years into the future? .... Given the remarkable advances in science in the past century, especially the creation of the quantum theory and general relativity, it is now possible to give rough estimates of when, if ever, some of these fantastic technologies may be realized. With the coming of even more advanced theories, such as string theory, even concepts bordering on science fiction, such as time travel and parallel universes, are now becoming re-evaluated by physicists. Think back 150 years to those technological advances that were declared ‘impossible’ by scientists at the time and that have now become part of our everyday lives. Jules Verne wrote a novel in 1863, Paris in the Twentieth Century, which was locked away and forgotten for over a century until it was accidentally discovered by his great-grandson and published for the first time in 1994. In it Verne predicted what Paris might look like in the year 1960. His novel was filled with technology that was clearly considered impossible in the nineteenth century, including fax machines, a world-wide communications network, glass skyscrapers, gas-powered automobiles, and high-speed elevated trains … Not surprisingly, Verne could make such stunningly accurate predictions because he was immersed in the world of science, picking the brains of scientists around him. A deep appreciation for the fundamentals of science allowed him to make such startling predictions .... IRONICALLY, THE SERIOUS STUDY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE HAS FREQUENTLY OPENED UP RICH AND ENTIRELY UNEXPECTED DOMAINS OF SCIENCE. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a ‘perpetual motion machine’ led physicists to conclude that such a machine was impossible, forcing them to postulate the conservation of energy and the three laws of thermodynamics. Thus the futile search to build perpetual motion machines helped to open up the entirely new field of thermodynamics, which in part laid the foundation of the steam engine, the machine age, and modern industrial society .... We ignore the impossible at our peril. In the 1920s and 1930s Robert Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry, was the subject of intense criticism by those who thought that rockets could never travel in outer space. They sarcastically called his pursuit Goddard’s Folly. In 1921 the editors of the New York Times railed against Dr. Goddard’s work: ‘Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.’ Rockets were impossible, the editors huffed, because there was no air to push against in outer space. Sadly, one head of state did understand the implications of Goddard’s ‘impossible’ rockets ─ Adolph Hitler. During World War II, Germany’s barrage of impossibly advanced V-2 rockets rained death and destruction on London, almost bringing it to its knees .... Time and again we see that the study of the impossible has opened up entirely new vistas, pushing the boundaries of physics and chemistry and forcing scientists to redefine what they mean by ‘impossible.’ As Sir William Osler once said, ‘THE PHILOSOPHIES OF ONE AGE HAVE BECOME THE ABSURDITIES OF THE NEXT, AND THE FOOLISHNESS OF YESTERDAY HAS BECOME THE WISDOM OF TOMORROW.’ .... Many physicists subscribe to the famous dictum of T. H. White, who wrote in The Once and Future King, ‘Anything that is not forbidden, is mandatory!’ In physics we find evidence of this all the time .... For example, cosmologist Stephen Hawking tried to prove that time travel was impossible by finding a new law of physics that would forbid it, which he called the ‘chronology protection conjecture.’ Unfortunately, after many years of hard work he was unable to prove this principle. In fact, to the contrary, physicists have now demonstrated that a law that prevents time travel is beyond our present-day mathematics. Today, because there is no law of physics preventing the existence of time machines, physicists have had to take their possibility very seriously .... Already one ‘impossible’ technology is now proving to be possible: the notion of teleportation (at least at the level of atoms). Even a few years ago physicists would have said that sending or beaming an object from one point to another violated the laws of quantum physics. The writers of the original Star Trek television series, in fact, were so stung by the criticism from physicists that they added ‘Heisenberg compensators’ to explain teleporters in order to address this flaw. Today, because of a recent breakthrough, physicists can teleport atoms across a room or photons under the Danube River.” [174] To read more on this citation, go to Amazon at http://amzn.to/dHGkOW
Fruitfully planting in which tense?
“The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.” ─ Inscription from statuary pedestal at National Archives in Washington
Many forces are not predictable but some others are predictable based on omniscience!
Yogi Berra: “Prediction is very hard, especially when it's about the future.” [171]
Who creates the future and who doesn’t?
Michael Anissimov: “One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create.” [142]
What are the ruthless drivers?
Harold Varmus, NIH Director: “There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century ─ the atom, the computer, and the gene.” [171]
Interacting with the future?
Rainer Maria Rilke: “The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.” [142]
I can offer this perspective as of now (the wonderful continuum) and under my human and humane perspective. I do like a great deal science and technology, but only to the truest service of the global civilization. Given the ubiquitous dynamics shifting through tsunamis, these days I find the term “continuum” beyond ineffectual and mostly ludicrous.
Nonetheless, if you want to “reality-check” these reflections, you will be able, soonest, to have every detailed explanation by, say, an omniscient robot hovering “midair” if you indefinitely postpone your homework and fail to do your own independent research, done for and by you (as of now).
What to consider about gauging the future?
Wired (1994): “The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expansion of cyberspace.” [145]
Horses, dogs and robotic dominance of all?
Samuel Butler (1863 letter): “Who will be man’s successor? To which the answer is: We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man; the conclusion being that machines are, or are becoming, animate.” [142]
Go to any “snail paced” newspapers (online or old-fashioned “offline”) in a developing country and this you’ll find within the daily headlines: Fiction immensely superseded — through many orders of magnitudes (that is, by hyper-geometrical exponential rates) — by realities, that is: the most incontrovertible and yet the most dramatic realities.
People kind of see a part of the waves, but are famously infamously unaware that most pervasive currents underneath are the true dynamos of these swirling changed changes.
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