“Mid-Singular”
Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster. In 1994 Pesce co-invented VRML, a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. Pesce has written five books, including VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace and The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, which used toys such as Furby and PlayStation to explore our interactive future.
As an educator, Pesce founded graduate programs in interactive media at both the University of Southern California’s world-famous Cinema School and the Australian Film, Radio and Television School. Pesce currently holds an appointment as Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney’s Digital Cultures Program.
For the last seven years, Pesce has been a panelist and judge on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s hit series The New Inventors, celebrating Australia’s newest inventions and inventors. A highly-regarded speaker, Pesce entertains and informs audiences on the future of technology, media, government, health care, and education, and is a regular guest on host James Valentine’s ABC 702 radio program. Pesce’s articles about technology and culture are regularly published in NETT magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC’s The Drum, and ABC’s Technology & Games.
In 2006, Pesce founded FutureSt, a Sydney consultancy dedicated to helping clients negotiate the challenges presented by our ‘hyperconnected’ future, and currently serves as an advisor both to the groundbreaking social influence analytics firm PeopleBrowsr, the game-changing mesh network for mobiles, Serval, and ClassMate, a web service that helps teachers to share and profit from their lesson plans. In addition to his commercial efforts, Pesce has been designing and coding Plexus, a Web2.0 address book and social networking tool.
– Book: The Next Billion Seconds — http://thenextbillionseconds.com/
– Summit Talk: “Mid-Singular” — what does it mean?
– What does it mean to be a futurist?
– Is futurism a workable profession?
– In a consumer society, the pedigree of prediction is selected for short term (i.e. decisions about marketing and products that can be consumed near term). What is are the similarities and differences between A) a futurists role in forecasting 2 or 3 year time horizons for instance for main stream businesses, and B) forecasting 10 to 25 year effects of technology on society?
– What methodologies do you employ to make more useful forecasts than one would if relying on general intuition, common sense or rules of thumb?
– Are there any ideas that you held close to your heart about the future that subsequent research has overturned?
– What specific progress in thinking about the future have you made over the past five years?
– What is wrong and or missing from the discussions that policy makers are having about the future?
– What is wrong with the way the average layman makes predictions about the future?
– Little brothers and sisters, and the participatory panopticon
– Social systems in the future
References:
http://markpesce.com/
http://thenextbillionseconds.com