After listening to this cued up exchange, go back to the beginning and watch the whole presentation. #MustWatchETV
Um, wait. Ultimate irony, hypocrisy, or just some technical dumb-assery on my part? Very strange that the embed doesn’t appear to be working; even though the YouTube tools to create embed work as normal. WTF? Cannot Display Embed Above?

“Decrease suffering. Reduce misery. Increase well-being. Build flourishing.” – Martin Seligman

From the video, in 2011: Whopping increase in app creation and downloads: – ONE BILLION apps downloaded worldwide each month – $3 BILLION paid by Apple alone to independent apps developers Surge in use of social media mobile platforms: – 166 PERCENT increase in Facebook Mobile users in the first half of 2011 alone – 103 MILLION wireless tweets were posted each day – ONE BILLION Foursquare check-ins – 26 PHOTOS were made “hipstery” on Instagram every second Ongoing explosion in data traffic: – EIGHT TRILLION texts were sent – up 1.1 trillion from last year – 1800 PERCENT increase in traffic on U.S. networks predicted in just four years Unprecedented competition and choice: – MORE SMARTPHONES purchased than PCs in the United States – MORE WIRELESS SUBSCRIPTIONS than people – TWO BILLION networked mobile devices by 2015 – 4G SERVICES being rolled out by at least six carriers in 2011 alone Massive potential for job creation and economic growth: – 2.4 MILLION American jobs supported by wireless – $27.5 BILLION investment in U.S. mobile networks by wireless carriers – 500,000 JOBS & $400 BILLION to U.S. GDP with additional 500 MHz of additional spectrum

“These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be. Where we can contact our friends, anywhere on earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali, just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it prove worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day, we may have brain surgeons in Edinborough operation on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point, and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute, they will communicate.”

Via @askpang by way of @wa8dzp.

Totally embarrassed by the depiction of exhuberant gleaming youth in this clip, with whom I clearly identified too strongly at far too impressionable an age, some 40 years ago. Wonder how I got "this way?" By believing what Toffler explained and yet still being subjected to the very vestigial technium / techonomy that he describes, herein, a lifetime ago. It was like, "Here's everything that's most broken about the world, go do something to try and help fix it."   Consider this as Exhibit A for the argument that The Singularity Already Happened and Is In The Process of Happening; marking the year 2029 more like the time at which a critical mass of 8 billion humans will look back, defining that new default reality.  

  Toffler: "All of us think about the future, but the futurist devotes more time to thinking about the long term future, not just what’s going to happen next."   "We go around the world talking to people who are, in fact, MAKING the future. So this is not some mystical exercise in Nostradamus style prediction, but an attempt to find out who are the people that are changing, or will be changing our lives in the years and decades ahead."   "It occured to us that when you go to a foriegn culture, you’re bombarded by strange cues, by visual, sound and other inputs that may be different from the ones in your own culture and that are hard to understand and some people get truly disoriented, and upset,  and sociologist and anthropologists call it culture shock."   "What happens, if a new environment comes to you, where you are, and comes to you rapidly? So that you don’t understand IT’S inputs, and it’s CUES? And the answer to use was, if you can have culture shock by relocating to another location in space; you could have Future Shock by, in effect, relocating in time. A future comes toward you, that you don’t understand."   "You also hear people than ever complaining about being time harrassed, time squeezed, time over-worked, too many hours, and I think everybody feels this pressure. You’re under pressure usually to make more and more decisions in shorter and shorter intervals of time."   "And guess what? There’s a limit beyond which we don’t make good decisions. If we push ourselves to decide quickly about things that are terribly complex, the chance are, we’ll make some serious mistakes; and we do. The hope was, computers will solve this problem."   "The computer does simplify decision making, but it complexifies everything else, so you have to make more complex decisions, anyway. The computer as a source of complexity, as well as a machine for dealing with complexity has not yet been fully understood."   "Technology and Social Change are all interrelated. The industrial revolution changed, not just the technologies of production, it meant that people stopped being peasants, they became urban industrial people. Totally different value systems, totally different forms of social organization, new institutions. They invented department stores. They invented post offices. Social inventions, not just technological inventions."   Ed. Note: don’t miss "the miracle of HIGH SPEED wire communication is commonplace today, lift a telephone receiver and the world is at your fingertips." at 5:48. LOL!   "It’s the civilization that gave rise to the world that most of us watching this were born into. The world of mass production, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass entertainment, mass recreation, and in some countries, Weapons of Mass Destruction." (Hipster Hints: he’s not talking about Iran or Iraq, homies.)   "In that kind of a world, conformity is idealized; you are supposed to be like everyone else; and that is because it is economically advantageous for that system to produce people who are prepared to spend their lives doing work on the predicate; basically unthinking work, on assembly lines; or in offices built to operate like assembly lines. That product of the industrial revolution is not just an economy, it’s a way of life." Oh, we’re sooo much smarter now, right? :-)   LOLCATSROTFLXPALADOCIOUS!

Photographic SwarmBots. Swarming Cambots. Tomato, Tomahto. Potato, Potahto. Break out the #tinfoil hat or welcome the Transparent Society? Exhibit A US accused of making insect spy robots Tom Leonard in New York Oct 10, 2007.

Exhibit B Robotic Aerial Vehicle Captures Dramatic Footage of Fukushima Reactors April 20, 2011. Erico Guizzo.

“Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, is using a T-Hawk, a remote operated flying machine created by U.S. firm Honeywell, to get a closer view of the severely damaged reactors. The T-Hawk, known as a micro air vehicle, or MAV, uses a ducted-fan propulsion system that allows it to hover in place like a helicopter and fly into tight spaces where other aircraft can’t go.” Exhibit C X Prize Team to Send Swarm of Spiders to the Moon May 13, 2009.

Exhibit D Tiny flying machines inspired by nature will revolutionize surveillance work July 28, 2011.

“Incorporating micro-cameras, these revolutionary insect-size vehicles will be suitable for many different purposes ranging from helping in emergency situations considered too dangerous for people to enter, to covert military surveillance missions.” Exhibit E Spherical Flying Machine Developed by Japan Ministry Of Defense #DigInfo Oct 23, 2011. DigInfo TV

Of course, endless beneficial commercial applications could include services like Alta Shot‘s High Altitude Real Estate Photography, Land Surveys, disaster response and rescue, etc.

TEDxUCLA – Jimmy Lizama – My Message is Bicycle

A biophilosopher is: “Someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives” (Jonas Salk, Wikipedia). Rediscovering Jonas Salk Jonas Salk, a quintessential Long Now scholar, half a century ago correctly extrapolated trends that we’re only now experiencing, particularly along the lines of realizations about world population trends, mid to long term: He went into more detail … including his feeling that a sharp rise and an expected leveling off in the human population would take place and eventually bring a change in human attitudes: “I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature…. People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important…. In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were antideath, antidisease”, he says. “In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of prolife and prohealth. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes we’re observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It’s much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.” It’s encouraging to be reminded of the unquestionably rational and noble genesis of such ideas, having learned about such analogies as they pertain to economic systems in the context of human circulatory systems.

Wow? Could it really be possible? Finally, organizations are understanding that THINKING is actually one of most valuable activities in existence? Yes, yes, yes, execution is everything; but as we’ve written for years, without the best IDEAS to execute upon, what have you got? Nothing! It takes both. Of course, anyone who has tried to implement technological or organizational change knows that human behavior and culture are the biggest blockades, by far. People will gnaw your fingers down to knuckles if you dare to ruffle their comfortable, however dysfunctional or redundant, routines. Maybe for the skeptic, “Think Friday” is also partly a genius way to tell middle muddle managers, bean counters, and HR #DefaultReality #StatusQuo control freaks that “we’re not really giving them time off …” — which isn’t a bad thing either, seeing as a 4 Day Work Week and guaranteed Basic Income are two immediate policy measures that could soak up the surplus Human Attention in our society and provide it the stable base required to take pure innovation to incredible new levels.

For those searching for how to adopt basic income, or how to pragmatically implement an immediate basic income guarantee, in 2008, two states, Oklahoma and West Virginia, looked into the feasibility of requiring a four-day work week in two legislative sessions. As the stock market executed it’s current head fake higher, enthusiasm may have waned. The reality of today’s labor situation should reanimate this interest, to say the least.

Research for yourself! U.S. Basic Income Guarantee has a rich 50+ year history. We can #EndPoverty with a global Basic Income Earth Network. Follow @BasicIncome, for more information on sustainable solutions to entrenched economic injustice. All these worlds are yours.

And possibly, the movement could spark the turning point of our lifetimes. The only thing preventing a major cultural breakthrough is the meanspirited recalcitrance of a brutal default reality, living in demented denial of the abundance we’ve created. Today, we live today in the techno-utopia envisioned by America’s founders over two centuries ago. We did it. We have arrived. The question remains, as a species, can we adapt to our own ultimate emancipation?

President Obama’s speech on jobs. Click on over to see the gist of GOP responses.

“A wise man knows that he has only one enemy – himself.” – Ben Hecht And from Sunil Bali: Last week, Warren Buffet, the world’s third richest man celebrated his 80th birthday. Buffet was asked to give just one piece of advice to those aspiring to achieve wealth and happiness. His reply was, “The one piece of advice I can give you is, do what turns you on. Do something that if you had all the money in the world, you’d still be doing it. You’ve got to have a reason to jump out of bed in the morning.”

CNN can only turn a blind eye for so long. Thousands of New Yorkers protesting against budget cuts on the streets of the Big Apple. They marched to Wall Street demanding the government tax the rich instead of cutting social programs. Are we witnessing in Wisconsin and New York the beginings of a domestic democratic domino effect in sync with the one flipping the script across the middle east?