Long Now

Neal Stephenson: ANATHEM Book Launch Event

At an event hosted by the Long Now Foundation, science fiction author Neal Stephenson reads from his latest novel Anathem.

Daniel Suarez: Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality

The viral success story of the year is a techno-thriller called Daemon. Software developer Suarez printed the book himself after being turned down by mainstream publishers. Blog raves, Amazon raves, and brief item in Wired magazine turned the book deservedly into a runaway hit. In this presentation, his first on the subject, Suarez spells out the ideas behind Daemon and its forthcoming sequel, Freedom™: "'Bots' are simple software programs designed to automate tasks - such as finding, retr...

Edward Burtynsky: The 10,000-year Gallery

Burtynsky's massively informative photographs change minds and influence policy. They are also exquisite art. Their historical value will grow with time. Other art has similar reach. There should be a gallery that collects, displays, and sifts such works over centuries and millennia, and develops ways to preserve them. That is exactly Burtynsky's plan--- a 10,000-year Gallery to accompany the 10,000-year Clock. His presentation will explore and demonstrate the idea. Edward Burtynsky is an Office...

Paul Ehrlich: The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment

Everything living evolves, but humans evolve culturally as well as biologically, and that puts us in a peculiar relation to the rest of life, with a peculiar responsibility. If we can understand how cultural evolution works, we'll have a better handle on how to manage our responsibilities. The question that Ehrlich has been exploring lately is whether cultural evolution really does show patterns that would yield predictive theory. He now has data from Polynesian canoes that indicate the answer i...

Iqbal Quadir: Technology Empowers the Poorest

Quadir is the now-legendary founder of GrameenPhone, which transformed his home country of Bangladesh in the 1990s and led the way for the cellphone revolution throughout the developing world. Currently Quadir heads the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT and is building Emergence BioEnergy Inc., a project to develop local electricity for the rural poor, using such devices as a fuel cell that runs on anaerobic bacteria. Linking new technology with the boundless resourceful...

Niall Ferguson, Peter Schwartz: Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress

Distinguished historian Ferguson and renowned futurist Schwartz disagree profoundly on the nature of human progress. Both use scenarios (called "counterfactual history" by Ferguson) to analyze how events play out. Ferguson wrote The War of the World (2006), a history of the violence that defined the 20th Century. Schwartz wrote The Art of the Long View (1991), the standard text on scenario planning, and The Long Boom (1999), on global prosperity in the 21st century. Both speakers regard history ...

Craig Venter: Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention

With his current series of breakthroughs in synthetic biology Craig Venter and his team are not so much creating life as joining life. Reverse-engineering evolution's long-refined tricks and subtleties at the molecular level is building humanity's most powerful toolkit yet. Through shotgun-sequencing whole microbial populations ("metagenomics"), the domain of the organisms that rule the world is at last opening up. Genome synthesis will lead to major advances in biomedicine and in adjusting civi...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought

Skeptical empiricist Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has bracing things to say about the future. It is inevitable that we will be massively blindsided by events, because our understanding is misled by an array of beguiling illusions about reality. Some lessons: Events are not predictable, but consequences are, so focus on preparedness. Pay attention to elders, because they've experienced more Black Swans. Check Wikipedia's bio of Taleb for more on the...

Paul Saffo: Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting

"Some would argue that forecasting is a dangerous exercise in futility, but they are mistaken. In fact, effective forecasting is not merely possible, but remarkably easy; all it takes is simple shift in perspective and a few common-sense heuristics." The most quoted futurist alive, Paul Saffo specializes in the history and future of technology. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review he spelled out the secrets of his trade, which he will expand on in this talk. Saffo is a member of th...

Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito: At the Edge of Art

Art is humanity's long-term unconscious memory.  Artists work by creative misuse, and thanks to the Internet there have never been so many tools for so many artists (and multitudes who don't know they're artists) to creatively misuse.  Take a cruise through how strange and meaningful it is getting with the authors of At the Edge of Art .

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Enduring Principles for Changing Times

Principles are fundamental and moral, and they abide. Professor Kanter from the Harvard Business School, author of renowned leadership and strategy books such as The Change Masters and When Giants Learn to Dance, has a new book titled America the Principled. In it and in this talk, she "offers a positive agenda for the nation, focussed on innovation and education, a new workplace social contract, values-based corporate conduct, competent government, positive international relations through citiz...

Juan Enriquez: Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge

Enriquez has a world-class collection of historic maps made at the very point of discovery. He will deploy them for the first time in one of his dazzling presentations, to examine how we image and imagine what we are exploring, and thus image and imagine exploration itself. Enriquez is author of As the Future Catches You and The United States of America, and CEO and Chair of Biotechonomy, a life sciences research and investment firm.

Rip Anderson, Gwyneth Cravens: Power to Save the World

The best introduction to the current realities and benefits of nuclear power is Gwyneth Cravens' forthcoming book Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. A science journalist and novelist, and long an activist against nuclear, Cravens had her assumptions shaken through friendship with the leading expert on nuclear risk assessment at Sandia National Laboratories, D. Richard Anderson, know as "Rip." Both are professional skeptics. They took their skepticism on the road to travel t...

Alex Wright: Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages

Francis Fukuyama: 'The End of History' Revisited

Frank Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man had profound and lasting impact with its declaration that science and technology, the growing global economy, and liberal democracy are leading history in a quite different direction than Marx and Hegel imagined. In this revisit to those themes, Fukuyama examines conflict with and within Islam, the need for a diffuse form of global governance to deal with problems like climate change, and the deeper implications of biotechnology.

Paul Hawken: The New Great Transformation

"I now believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. This is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye. What binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income,...

Steven Johnson: The Long Zoom

Nobody discovers or imparts an insight with the dexterity of Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and The Ghost Map. In this talk he examines how humanity is transformed by its new scaling capability--- our ability now to examine and relate events at the nanometer and nanosecond scale and then zoom right out to a cosmic scale and time frame. With tools like Google Earth and Will Wright's "Spore" game, we all are learning to zoom with comfort. How does that change ...

Frans Lanting: Life's Journey Through Time

Acclaimed nature photographer Lanting has created the most graphic timeline ever, at its best as a live performance. This is the "long now" in glowing imagery.

Brian Fagan: We Are Not the First to Suffer Through Climate Change

How vulnerable are we to climate change? What does it do to us, exactly? Human experience over the last 15,000 years shows that even slight climate shifts have been one of the major shapers of history and pre-history, though that is overlooked in most history books and in most of the current public discourse about climate change. An experienced television presenter, anthropologist Brian Fagan is the author of The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization.

Vernor Vinge: What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?

Technology acceleration is like what happens approaching the singularity in the center of a black hole--- everything is transformed utterly and unpredictably. That metaphor was invented by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1980s and has entered standard usage as a way of thinking about the near future. In this talk Vinge challenges his own idea, investigating scenarios of "a human-scaled world with long time horizons," and how that might play out over ten or twenty thousand years.

Philip Tetlock: Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs

Why are so many experts so wrong, yet people keep listening to them? Who really is worth listening to about the future? The author of Expert Political Judgement builds on Isaah Berlin's characterization of judgment modes into Hedgehogs (who know one big thing) and Foxes (who know many things). Hedgehogs don't notice and don't care when they're wrong; that's why they're so compelling. Foxes learn.

Philip Rosedale: 'Second Life:' What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING?

Philip Rosedale is the founder of a burgeoning Web phenomenon, the massive multi-player substitute reality called "Second Life." When the scheduled speaker for this month, Francis Fukuyama, was suddenly sidelined by a motorcycle injury, Rosedale sprinted from the bench to take his place at the podium. He'll be improvising; he has a scintillating world to improvise with.

Larry Brilliant, Katherine Fulton, Richard Rockefeller: The Deeper News About the New Philanthropy

New money, new ideas, whole new kinds of programs, and growing global impact characterize the transformations going on in philanthropy these days. Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, is behind the scenes in all of it. She is joined on the stage by a fifth-generation Rockefeller and the head of newest philanthropic enterprise, Google.org.

John Baez: Zooming Out in Time

This graphic extravaganza from mathematical physicist John Baez shows not only humanity's nested time dimensions but how we expand our time perspective to understand and solve crises. Baez's famed online column, "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics," which began in 1993, was an influential pioneer of the blog genre.

Orville Schell: China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?

Orville Schell is author of nine books about China and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. The question facing China now is whether in practice it can live up to its sense of itself as the society with the longest and deepest continuity on earth. In a time of fabulous short-term gains, can it step up to long-term responsibility?

John Rendon: Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short

John Rendon, head of The Rendon Group, is a senior communications consultant to the White House and Department of Defense. His subject in this talk is how to replace tactical, reactive response to terror with long-term strategic initiative.

Brian Eno, Will Wright: Playing with Time

Will Wright, creator of the video games "Sim City," "The Sims," and the forthcoming "Spore," will speak on playing with time.

Chris Anderson, Will Hearst: The Long Time Tail

A new economic principle is the "the long tail," discovered and named by the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson. The former dominance of best-sellers has been augmented by the new dominance of innumerable tiny-sellers, thanks to the Internet. Investor and publisher Will Hearst notes that there is a time dimension as well to the long tail phenomenon, still being discovered.

Jimmy Wales: Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture

Vision is one of the most powerful forms of long-term thinking. Jimmy Wales, founder and president of the all-embracing online encyclopedia Wikipedia, examines how vision drives and defines that project and its strategy--- and how it fits into the even larger world and prospects of "free culture."

Kevin Kelly: The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method.