Nice media story on the future

I’d like to call out and applaud journalist Chris Parker for pulling together a nice story on the future, published in the Dallas Observer and the Houston Press, featuring excerpts from researchers and futurists in Texas. I am particularly interested because one of my grad students Houston Foresight program is working with me on a project to explore “futurists in the media.” We are gathering data and stories on how futurists are being portrayed. Historically, one might say that the coverage is often less desirable, but we think it would be useful to look at it today (thanks to APF colleague Natalie Ambrose for the inspiration to do this). So, when a journalist produces a balanced, even-handed and interesting story about the future involving futurists, it’s worth noting and applauding!

Here are some excerpts from the story [I note which quotes are mine]:

• It’s not the Jetsons — there’s no flying Buick in the garage — but as the mirror says, things may be closer than they appear. Science is making logarithmic leaps bringing barely imaginable futures closer, more quickly than ever before.  [thanks for just saying that, right? Avoids another lazy “where are the flying cars” story[
• A healthy human lung lives in a bottle at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
• We’ve invaded planets with robot-scooters, peered at the smallest constituents of matter thanks to the Large Hadron Collider, seen the very edge of the visible universe and last year even transmitted a thought from the mind of a researcher in India to the mind of another in France.
• The pace at which you can go from the almost lunatic fringe to the mainstream is a lot faster than it used to be,” says Hines.
• “In the next 20-30 years, we’ll map out every galaxy — except the small ones — in the universe. You’ll be able to go to Google Universe and look at any one of the 300-500 billion galaxies on your iPad.”
• In just the last seven years, the cost to sequence your genome has dipped from $10 million to $1,000.
• “The AI, predictive analytics, big data, all that stuff — it’s hard to imagine a bigger story,” Hines says.
• One way this is manifesting is in the growth of personalized medicine.
• “I’m positive that in the next 15-25 years, immune therapy will be working really, really well.
• “People who think we have too many immigrants may want to think about the implications if we had no immigration,” he says. We could wind up like Japan and Sweden, where “decreasing and very old populations…
• “People envision an autonomous car as being a car in which you take exactly the same trips you take today when really it’s going to change everything,” Stone says. “It’s going to change the value of real estate, where people tend to live, the types of trips people take, the need for parking in urban settings and the value of owning versus sharing cars.
• Advances in brain/machine interfaces have also produced surprising prosthetic functionality.
• Vanston, Hines and Stone were unanimous in their excitement about the mainstreaming of 3-D manufacturing, though the technology is still waiting for the killer app that will take 3-D from its niche status.
• “Crowd-funding has been a powerful amplifier for new start-ups. I’m very bullish about the future.”
• Hines is hopeful we’re almost around the curve on sustainability. “In 15 years we won’t have a trash bin,” he suggests. “We’ll only have a recycling bin. We’ll have the ability to reuse everything — we’ve just been picking at the edges of that.”  Andy Hines