Diigo Bookmarks 05/16/2008 (a.m.)

At The Churchill Club: The Top 10 Tech Trends (Tech Trader Daily – Barron’s Online) – Annotated

An article by Eric Savitz that sums up the panel presentation by Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf, and Tony Perkins on the top 10 tech trends to be aware of. Lots of buzz around mobile phone technology, mobile computing in the manner of what The Economist called Nomads at last (Diigo’d earlier & blogged) “who are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it.”

Speaking of modeling the new urban connected classes on nomads (and Bedouins), another trend identified by the panel was that water is the next peak oil. See Wired Magazine, Peak Water.

Jurvetson talked about how “evolution trumps design,” which seemed to me like he is channeling Janine Benyus and Lynn Margulis. Microbes are drivers of evolutionary biomass viability on Planet Gaia; we’re part of that game; and we will figure out how to engineer matter at the nano level of microbial life to “hack” evolution’s code and make those organisms work for us. Dangerous, but inevitable. (As Margulis and Dorian Sagan point out, however, if Gaia is a living thing and if living things are defined by having the ability to reproduce, then our role on earth may well be to help Gaia reproduce: i.e., create viable biospheres that can be sent away from Earth into space. What better place to fulfil that mandate than to tinker with microbes and evolution?)

tags: trends, technology, futurismo

eGoodman

This is the portal page of Elizabeth Goodman, one of the “explorers” mentioned by Nat Torkington in his O’Reilly Radar article, “Ghandi on Ubicomp.”

tags: egoodman, ubicom, urban_design, ubiquitous

“Gandhi on Ubicomp,” by Nat Torkington – O’Reilly Radar

In one paragraph, Tarkington uses Austin Williams’s critique of “technology-driven products” that don’t solve “more urgent urban problems …such as the loss of social connections between city dwellers” as an example of criticism missing the point (or perhaps putting the cart in front of the horse?). Can’t say I disagree, although Williams (who is technical editor of the Architects’ Journal and director of a forum called Future Cities that “critically explores city issues”) has a point if he is in part reacting to the hype that usually accompanies new technologies.

Torkington’s riposte, on the other hand, is really worth noting: “I think Williams is wrong because he fails to allow for the rate that technology matures.” But then of course, some of the people who hype the technology also focus way too much on its present state and don’t take its rate of development (change) into account. This is why Torkington focuses on what he calls “the explorers,” who one hopes are hype-resistant.

tags: ubicom, ubiquitous, cities, technology