Jim Baen's Universe

What's New in The Future And You

Columns

August 2009

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Ben Bova, a South Korean diplomat, the President of the World Future Society, a former director of the world Transhumanist Association, and a mixed bag of authors, scientists and futurists. By attending two conventions on consecutive weekends I've captured enough material to fill my show for the next three months.

The conventions were LibertyCon in Chattanooga Tennessee, and WorldFuture 2009 in Chicago. The first was a SF&F convention at which Ben Bova was the Guest of Honor, and the second was the handiwork of the World Future Society and was a convention for professional futurists.

In more personal news: on July 8, 2009 I accepted the position of contributing editor of Robot Magazine which is a full-color magazine very similar in style to Popular Science but exclusively about robots (news, reviews, competitions and how to build them from scratch and from kits).

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Recent Guests

Tom Atwood is Editor-in-Chief of Robot Magazine. Robot Magazine covers every aspect of the rapidly exploding field of robots. It has 'how-to' for robot hobbyists, 'what's going on' for robot enthusiasts and 'what's innovative' for tech and engineering professionals. Strong on education, it offers parents, teachers and kids guidance on using and playing with the latest consumer, toy and hobby robots that serve as educational tools and recreational fun. Every issue is full of hundreds of full color photos of robotic fun, gee-whiz and hands-on experience.

Robert Hooker is an Information Technology professional living in London. He has a Bachelors degree in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Chicago and a Masters degree in Sociology from the Open University in Britain. For most of the 1990s Robert worked first as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence at Northwestern University Institute for Learning Sciences and then as a Web Developer and Entrepreneur. While at the Institute for Learning Sciences he worked with Virtual Reality, web based video delivery, Internet learning and content indexing. Current he works for Fujitsu Services in the United Kingdom. He has lived in London for the last 10 years.

James Maxey is the author of the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

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Recent Topics

Robots as smart weapons,

A driverless vehicle race (the Second DARPA Grand Challenge),

New 3D displays for TV and for video games,

Self-fueling robots,

Privacy vs. life-logging,

Competitive robot events draw Rock-Star-sized crowds and are doubling in attendance each year,

The incessant text-messaging some people do about the trivial minutia of their daily lives,

Hundreds of thousands of hobbyists are building robots,

Sociological research inside Second Life,

Robotic dance competitions,

The lack of national unity in the UK; bigotry and prejudice in Europe against non-European immigrants and against Eastern Europeans,

Fighting methods used by TV battle robots,

How globalization is changing Europe (for good and bad),

Robotic fighter jets,

Trends in medicine and the possibility that cancer may someday become completely curable,

How to get started in robotics without much money or without having to build your robot,

The importance of gender roles in the real world and in virtual worlds,

Rat brain tissue (grown in a culture dish) wired to a robot and taught to navigate an obstacle course,

Powerful software which is totally free to download and use (such as: Open Office, Gimp, and Ubuntu),

How vacuum cleaning robots are getting improved house-mapping abilities,

The overwhelming reason why users have not adopted Linux even though it is excellent and free,

What's happening in artificial intelligence for robots?

Trends in England and Europe compared to the USA especially involving cell phones, Internet connections, and other technologies,

Trends in Japanese robots,

Ways to find answers to specific questions online,

Why the impact of China and India are large but completely different,

Trends in North Africa (based on a year of living in a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia)

Is the Internet increasing or decreasing global acceptance of diversity?

Which needs to advance more to put robots to work in our homes as cooks, house cleaners, gardeners and laundry workers—artificial intelligence or the basic mechanics of robotic bodies?

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You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here, or here.

And more about his podcast: The Future And You here, or here, or even here.