Both in language and in cognition in general, mastery comes down to the same two abilities: first, understanding the world by seeking patterns in sensorimotor activity and learning to relate them to a wider context, including your own and other people’s experiences and mind processes; and second, using understanding to support foresight. The big picture is in fact even simpler than that: understanding and foresight are really two sides of the same coin, because they both hinge on knowledge of the causal structure of the world.

- Shimon Edelman, The Happiness OF Pursuit

(h/t Brainpickings)

Why Companies Need Futurists, Not Analysts

Roger Martin, the author of The Design Of Business (on my reading list), makes a great case for futurists:

Fast Company: As we slowly climb out of the recession, everybody’s looking for where the next innovation will come from. Why does our pace of innovation seem to be slowing?

Martin: Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to “prove it.” You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning.

You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning.

Fast Company: Are you saying that the regression analysis jockeys and Six Sigma black belts have got it all wrong?

Martin: Well, yes. With every good thing in life, there’s often a dark shadow. The march of science is good, and corporations are being run more scientifically. But what they analyze is the past. And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored. Corporations are pushing analytical thinking so far that it’s become unproductive. The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers.

The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers.

Fast Company: What’s the alternative?

Martin: New ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called it abductive logic. It’s a logical leap of the mind that you can’t prove from past data.

Fast Company: I can’t see many CEOs being comfortable with that!

Martin: Why not? The scientific method starts with a hypothesis. It’s often what happens in the shower or when an apple hits you on the head. It’s what we call ‘intuitive thinking.’ Its purpose is to know without explicit reasoning.

Fast Company: So, if you’re not getting these Newtonian moments from your management consultants, where are they likely to come from?

Martin: In a knowledge-intensive world, design thinking is critical to overcoming the biggest block: overcoming analytical thinking and fear of intuitive thinking. The design thinker enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, originality and mastery.

When I work with large, well-established, successful companies, I find it is helpful to raise this issue at the outset. You can’t motor into the future by looking in the rear-view mirror.

(h/t socialabacus)

I’ll be doing something innocuous — reading a magazine, playing a game, something with a relatively low (but not zero) cognitive threshold, so that my brain is working but not focused — and a phrase will pop into my head. It’ll be novel (to me), typically a combination of terms that don’t usually go together, yet seemingly something meaningful. I’ll hop onto whatever digital device I have handy to see if someone else is already talking about the topic, to see if it’s already a real thing. Often it is, and I can return to whatever I was doing. But sometimes, it’s not — it’s a combination of terms that hasn’t before been seen by the mighty eye of Google.

“Forensic Futurism” was today’s term. And aside from a few pages including the two terms in an alphabetical listing, it’s a term without a pre-existing presence. So the rest of my afternoon was spent trying to figure out what the hell forensic futurism might be, and why it sounded like it should mean something useful and/or important.

- Jamais Cascio, Forensic Futurism

Jamais wants to analyze failed forecasts that we make, and determine what premises or other factors led to the mistaken outcomes.

Military technology: Magic bullets | The Economist

The US military is now using a rifle that reads like a science fiction novel: each bullet has a computer chip that calculates trajectory and then blows up when it is near its target, killing the enemy with shrapnel:

via The Economist

The XM25, as the new gun is known, weighs about 6kg (13lb) and fires a 25mm round. The trick is that instead of having to be aimed directly at the target, this round need only be aimed at a place in proximity to it. Once there, it explodes—just like Shrapnel’s original artillery shells—and the fragments kill the enemy. It knows when to explode because of a timed fuse. In Shrapnel’s shells this fuse was made of gunpowder. In the XM25 it is a small computer inside the bullet that monitors details of the projectile’s flight.

A handful of XM25s are now being tested in Afghanistan by the Americans. So far, they have been used on more than 200 occasions. Most of these fights ended quickly, and in America’s favour, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Shawn Lucas, who is in charge of the weapon’s field-testing programme. Indeed, the programme has been so successful that the army has ordered 36 more of the new rifles.

A new equaliser

Each rifle bullet is programmed, before it is fired, by a second computer in the rifle itself. To determine the distance to the target, the gunman shines a laser rangefinder attached to the rifle at whatever is shielding the enemy. If that enemy is in a ditch, a nearby object—a tree trunk behind or to the side of the ditch, perhaps—will do. Looking through the rifle’s telescopic sight, the gunman then estimates the distance from this object to the target. He presses a button near the trigger to add that value to (or subtract it from) the distance determined by the rangefinder.

When the round is fired, the internal computer counts the number of rotations it makes, to calculate the distance flown. The rifle’s muzzle velocity is 210 metres a second, which is the starting point for the calculation. When the computer calculates that the round has flown the requisite distance, it issues the instruction to detonate. The explosion creates a burst of shrapnel that is lethal within a radius of several metres (exact details are classified). And the whole process takes less than five seconds.

Just how the turn-counting fuse works is an even more closely guarded secret than the lethal radius—though judging by the number of failed attempts to hack into computers that might be expected to hold information about it, many people would dearly like to know. Certainly, the trick is not easy. An alternative design developed in South Korea, which clocks flight time rather than number of rotations, seems plagued by problems. Last year South Korea’s Agency of Defence Development halted production of trial versions of the K-11, as this rifle is called, and announced a redesign, following serious malfunctions.

The XM25, in contrast, appears to work well. It is accurate at ranges of up to 500 metres. That is almost as far as America’s main assault rifle, the M-16, can shoot conventional bullets with accuracy. More pertinently, it is nearly double the range of the AK-47, a rifle of Soviet design that is used by many insurgent groups. And according to Sergeant-Major Bernard McPherson, part of the XM25’s development programme in Virginia, it is receiving rave reviews from soldiers in the field.

We are moving into a world where all designed objects will be connected, and calculating: everything is potentially smart, not just our phones.

Smart coffee mugs, smart toilets, smart money, smart business cards, smart doorknobs.

(via emergentfutures, futureamb)

Announcing Arc: a new magazine about the future from the makers of New Scientist

arcfinity:

February 2012 will see the debut of Arc, a bold new digital publication from the makers of New Scientist.
 
Arc will explore the future through cutting-edge science fiction and forward-looking essays by some of the world’s most celebrated authors – backed up with columns by thinkers and practitioners from the worlds of books, design, gaming, film and more.
 
Arc 1.1 is edited by Simon Ings, author of acclaimed genre-spanning novels The Weight of Numbers and Dead Water. Simon, who made his name with a trio of ground-breaking cyberpunk novels, is a frequent commentator on science, science fiction and all points in between.
 
“Arc is an experiment in how we talk about the future,” Simon explains. “We wanted to get past sterile ‘visions’ and dream up futures that evoke textures and flavours and passions.” The response, he says, has been amazing. “I feel like the dog that caught the car,” he says. “The appetite to be part of this project has been huge. Writers have seized the opportunity to showcase their thoughts, their dreams, their anxieties and their opinions about our future.”
 
For New Scientist editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Arc is an opportunity to explore new territory.  “We’ve known for many years that our readers are fascinated by the future and all the possibilities it raises. But as a magazine of science fact, we can’t indulge that fascination very often,” he explains. “Arc will explore the endless vistas opened up by today’s science and technology. While it’s a very different venture from New Scientist, it will share its unique combination of intelligence, wit and charm.”
 
John MacFarlane, Online Publisher of New Scientist, says “I am thrilled to be involved in the launch of this new title. The combination of superb content and an innovative digital publishing model make for a very exciting project and I am sure a broad range of readers will love Arc.”
 
Arc 1.1 will be available from mid-February 2012 on iPad, Kindle and as a limited print edition.

This sounds interesting. Although science fiction authors might not be the best sources for actually predicting the future, they certain can write about it well.

In my view, futurism (“strategic foresight,” “scenario planning”) is a vaccination for our civilization’s immune system. It strengthens us. By introducing us to different possible futures, we become sensitive to those potential outcomes, and able to recognize their early signs. We can think about how we would respond to different futures, and argue about what would be desirable *before* it happens… if it happens. That “if” is important. Most of the forecast futures *won’t* happen, and even the “real” future won’t look exactly like our scenarios. It will have bits and pieces from multiple forecast futures, and some items that we didn’t catch. We’ll still be surprised by some things.

It turns out that planning for a set of different possible futures is a good way to prepare, even if the real future is different. There’s usually enough overlap, enough “economies of scope” allowing plans and solutions built for one issue to be effective for another. And even when reality takes us by surprise, the very act of thinking about, preparing for different futures gives us a better perspective. We’re more attuned to how seemingly unrelated factors can combine, leading to novel outcomes. We’re sensitive to the power of contingency. Diversity of ideas strengthens us; we’re more flexible and adaptive. We can’t let ourselves get trapped by thinking about just one future.

Jamais Cascio,  The Future is a Virus

Who's the Genius in Our Midst That We're Not Listening To? - Tom Denari

Tom Denari via Advertising Age

Geniuses make themselves evident by having ideas bigger than we can conceive; it seems that they can see the future. Their thinking is highly disciplined, even though their behavior might not be. They appear fearless.

Why don’t we listen?

First, geniuses can be annoying, as pragmatism is not their strong suit. They don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us and aren’t typically bound by the same time and space constrictions. Their pushing and stretching of our belief system can be emotionally draining. Instead of listening, we accuse them of not being aware of current reality. We tell them that they don’t “get it.”

Second, geniuses are hard to keep up with because — while we don’t like to admit it — their vision is often well beyond our own capacity. They make us uncomfortable, because we just don’t see the world the way they do. We respond by becoming defensive and frustrated. We dismiss them as being irrational, frivolous or self-indulgent.

Finally, geniuses get cranky — sometimes even belligerent — when we try to alter their ideas. They have little use for social niceties or making changes for political expediency. Geniuses will say “no” to many of your requests, believing that any impurities will simply dull an idea, forcing it toward mediocrity. To defend our position, we put them off saying, “Let’s test it.”