There’s a very good article in this month’s IEEE Spectrum about the engineering challenges of replacement parts for devices intended to survive much longer than industrial cycles of obsolescence. The economics of making sure parts are available in a timely and cost effective fashion and task of designing management processes that survive long enough are discussed in depth. From the article:

Obsolescence also isn’t limited to hardware. Obsolete software can be just as problematic, and frequently the two go hand in hand. For example, an obsolescence analysis of a GPS radio for a U.S. Army helicopter found that a hardware change that required revising even a single line of code would result in a $2.5 million expense before the helicopter could be deemed safe for flight.

My favorite example device is the B52 bomber. First produced in 1946, it’s not expected to be phased out till 2017. I guess this is equivalent to 10,000 “internet years”.

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 The great folks over at Predictify have made a special area in their site for Long Bets.  This is a great place to experiment with predictions and even make short bets that may have long term consequences…  Check it out at:

http://longnow.predictify.com/ 

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 Due to the infinite wisdom of the US Legislators and President of 02005 we will again be experiencing “daylight savings” time a few weeks earlier this year.  While I am pretty ambivalent about the daylight savings time concept, I do think the only thing sillier than changing our clocks twice a year, is randomly legislating new times to do so.

As most of us remember, changing time bases and calendrics caused all kinds (of mostly unneeded) fuss around the turn of the last millennium.  And while it seems this new change was important enough to generate lobbying efforts from important cultural institutions such as the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores, and the National Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation Fighting Blindness, I am still pretty confused as to why we are again wreaking havoc on the all pre-programmed EPROMs of the world.  This has been dubbed “The Year 2007 Problem.”

So this month all our pre-programmed digital watches, timed light switches and sprinkler systems will be running an hour off schedule.  Hopefully no life critical medical device will actually go too awry, and we can all settle in and wait for the Y10k mayhem.

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Our friend Scott Beale over at Squidlist has a write up on the winner of the History Channel’s City of the Future contest. The honors go to IwamotoScott Architecture’s Hydro-Net concept netting $10,000 for their win. While a lot of the ideas are pretty interesting the “hydrogen fueled hover cars” part sounds a little like Tomorrow Land to me. I assume everyone will be wearing white rayon uni-suits and lucite shoes as well.

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I’ve Stumbledupon (quite literally) a interesting looking site called Predictify.

Predictify seems to be combining social networking, message board discussion, pay-per-post business models and Wikipedia-style collective wisdom into a harmonious online community of eager questioners and knowledgeable, astute predictors, all united to discuss deterministic questions about the future, share knowledge, and act on the results.

Because mob rule *totally* works on the internet.

With Predictify, registered users can read questions posed by questioners, pose their own questions, predict answers, and repeatedly smack down internet smart-alecks who try to use the site for betting, insider trading, and making off-color predictions about their dorm roommate’s luck with the opposite sex during the upcoming weekend.

Theoretically, predictors also get paid every time their predictions are correct. Questioners can pay a premium based on the number of responses which in turn entitle them to collect value tables for a given question, collect larger data sample sets and keep a running tally of private data if they so desire. The pot is shared out among the predictors who nailed the question most accurately and soonest, according to rank, expertise level, phase of the moon, etc etc.

The site includes live news feeds relevant to the question being discussed. Gimmicks like community points, reputation rankings, and “private prediction environments for you and your friends” trigger that social network addict’s instinct to refresh the page every thirteen seconds.

The truly dedicated Predictify player, if enough time and energy were invested, could find themselves joyously sucked into in an interdisciplinary morass of statistics, arcane behavioral controls, incompatible social networks, philosophical conundra, high level mathematics and a steadfastly erratic human element, which make the site reminiscent of the game Eschaton from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, in that play is aided by the ability to quickly master advanced game theory and do the metaphysical equivalent of pegging small objects with tennis balls with deadly accuracy.

Since this is what we do for fun around here at The Long Now, it sounds like a grand time to me.

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Wired and AP is reporting that Disney’s new “house of the future” will be (re)-opening this May. The original one (prominently sponsored by Monsanto Plastics) that opened in 01954 was closed only a decade later, (see the excellent video above and Part 2 here).

Apparently the new one sponsored by Microsoft, HP, and LifeWare looks more normal but is filled with a lot of digital wizardry to “make your life easier”. I assume this means “Clippy” will be doing my dishes soon.

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A very meta service. Cabinet magazine, a hip paper-based journal of unusual ideas, published a chronology of calendars and timelines in history a few years ago. They updated the list for the web. It’s quite comprehensive, and provides in one chronological sequence the major inventions in the art of chronologies. But it could be made more complete and cooly recursive by adding at the end of their timeline, their own creation as the “first timeline of timelines.”

Example:

1753 Jacques Barbeu-Duborg, the French translator and disciple of Benjamin Franklin, creates his Carte chronologique, a 54-foot timeline of history from Creation contained in an wooden case.

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While contemporary visions of the future aren’t new, past visions of the future are. Indeed “yesterday’s tomorrows” is a new genre with a growing body of material, including several books, such as “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future”.

The heydays of science fiction are 50 years old. That’s a lot of future in the last century. Now that everyone is a futurist, we are creating mounds of future past visions of the future, if you can follow me. The future dates quickly. There’s nothing that says “yesterday” quite like an old portrait of the future.

Someday social scientists will key into the remarkable record of aspirations, assumptions, biases, and gestalt that visions of the future represent for each generation. They’ll no doubt  pour over ancient copies of  The “Usborne Book of the Future”, a great treasure-trove of yesterday’s tomorrows. First published in 1979, it illustrates the forecasted world of the year 2000 “and beyond.”

Tom Morton very generously scanned in the entire book and posted it on the blog Pointless Museum.

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Long Now board member Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View has topped the list of the most important futures works ever, in a worldwide vote by members of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF). Congratulations, Peter!

The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World was first published in 01991, and describes a process for creating and using scenarios to help decision-makers navigate change, as incubated at Royal Dutch/Shell, and nurtured to maturity at Global Business Network (founded in 01987 by Schwartz together with Jay Ogilvy, Lawrence Wilkinson, Napier Collyns and Long Now’s Stewart Brand).

The honouring of Long View as the most important futures work by a group of futures consultants is, it seems to me, testimony to the role it played in popularising and legitimising scenario-based thinking and planning in organisations. Quite a few other books explaining and illustrating the development and use of scenarios have been published both before and since, but Schwartz presented a systematic, accessible, and reproducible approach to using scenarios that has garnered a wide audience and aged well. (Also among the book’s less celebrated impacts was my suggestion for the name of this blog.)

The Association of Professional Futurists announced the poll results last month (January 02007). APF is dedicated to “support[ing] professional futurists by advancing professional excellence, facilitating network and community building, and promoting the unique value proposition of futures work”. Founded in 02002, it has some 200 members worldwide comprising professional futures practitioners in consulting, business, and education sectors.

Other top-voted futures works were Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era (2 vols) by Wendell Bell; the multi-volume Knowledge Base of Futures Studies edited by Richard Slaughter, The Limits to Growth by the late Dana Meadows et al, and the State of the World series by The Worldwatch Institute.

[Disclosure: I’m an APF member, but as part of my ongoing effort to fit in with U.S. culture, didn’t bother to take part in the vote (:]

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One of most needed (but still absent) instruments for long-term thinking is a predictions archive. Stewart Brand and I fist conceived of the Long Bets project as a supplementary agency that would work best as part of a great prediction registry. The registry would include any and all predictions about the future. The ideal archive of predictions would include the thousands if not millions of predictions generated each day as a by-product of our ordinary speculations and inadvertent forecasts, not just those designated as a deliberate prediction. 

Like everything else it touches, the Wikipedia has the power to make hard things easy. I recently discovered Wikipedia  pages for the subject of future years — such as 2020 or 2029 and so on — can serve as a germ of what Fringehog calls a Futurepedia.

As an example there is a fantastic prediction made on the pages of 2010, concerning the pronunciation of the year 2010 and beyond.

According to a recent press release, David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, has predicted that the change of pronunciation to “twenty X” will occur in 2011, as “twenty eleven”, explaining that the way people pronounce years depends on rhythm, rather than logic. Crystal claims that the rhythm or “flow” of “two thousand (and) ten”, beats that of “twenty ten”, but the flow of “twenty eleven” beats “two thousand (and) eleven”. Alternatively, Ian Brookes, editor-in-chief of Chambers Dictionary, suggests the change will occur in 2013. And finally, the UK Times has suggested 2020 as a final timeframe for the change, saying “If people can have “twenty-twenty” vision, then surely they should also live in the year “twenty twenty.”

Some suggest that after the “twenty X” pronunciation for current and future 21st century years has taken hold, future references to early 21st century years will change accordingly from the previous “two thousand (and) X” method; thus, they say, future generations will refer to the date of the 9/11 attacks in the United States as September 11, “twenty oh-one.”

Wikipedia’s entry for the years 2020 include vernacular predictions for that year such as:

* By mid-decade, Alpine glaciers are likely to contain only half their 1970’s volume.

* NASA expects to land another group of astronauts on the moon.

* Voyager 2 is expected to stop transmitting back to Earth in the 2020s.

* Futurist Ray Kurzweil puts 2029 as the year most likely for the Singularity.

These forecasts can be thought of as the official future — what conventional wisdom expects. Even though no one thinks Ray Kurzweil is conventional, I would argue that anything that persists on Wikipedia can be thought of as conventional wisdom by definition.

If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect.

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