The future of cars: Why car exhaust will be as anti-social as cigarette smoke is today

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Earlier this week I was interviewed on ABC TV about the future of cars, in a program to coincide with the start of World Solar Challenge, the annual solar car race covering the 3,021 km from Darwin to Adelaide.

I talked about several facets of the future of cars, including changing energy sources and their implications, new car materials and structures, and the rise of self-driving automobiles.

It is important to understand that while zero emission vehicles, usually electric, are a key objective in moving beyond petrol-driven cars, that electric cars usually still pollute. In most countries electricity is generated primarily by a variety of dirty fossil fuels. Refueling your car by plugging it into the mains doesn’t mean it isn’t polluting, simply that the pollution happens elsewhere.
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[VIDEO] In 1987 Apple predicted it would launch Siri in 2011

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This is very, very good.

This video created by Apple in 1987 shows how a ‘Knowledge Navigator’ would work, depicting a university professor interacting with a tablet computer through voice. The system’s animated avatar summarizes emails, responds to voice commands, extracts and displays data, provides intelligent information retrieval, and provides message filtering.

This video was posted on Waxy, where they calculate the date of the video as September 16, 2011, based on the calendar on the desk, and the request for a five-year old research paper from 2006.


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Watch a robot surgeon peel a grape: the extension of human powers

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This awesome video from New Scientist TV shows a surgical robot with a human operator peeling a grape. This technology greatly augments what human surgeons can do, and also provides a platform for telesurgery.

The New Scientist article Watch a surgical robot peel a grape, says:
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Animated excursions into the future: the extraordinary implications of utility fog

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I caught up with fellow futurist Kristin Alford last week, yet another first time face-to-face meeting after a long time interacting online. It seems most of the people I meet these days are people I know from Twitter.

Kristin pointed me to some of what her company Bridge8 is doing in creating animated videos about the future. I believe the primary intended audience is secondary school students, but they are excellent videos, well-paced, well-thought-out, educational, all in all very nicely done.

Here is their video on the implications of Utility Fog, starting with a segment on how to think about the future, introducing the idea of utility fog, and running through some of the possible implications. It’s a great study in futures thinking, and well worth watching.


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Creating the future of local government

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I recently gave the opening keynote at Local Government Association of Tasmania‘s annual conference. On the occasion of their 100th anniversary, they wanted to look forward to the future as well as to their past.

Incidentally, the event was just two days after I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Public Administration NSW’s annual conference on the Transformation of Government. My presentations at the two events were reasonably similar, but many issues differ across state and local government. One of the key issues is that in a world driven by community, local government is (or at least should be) closer to the community than any other level of government.

For the local government conference my topic was Creating the Future of Local Government. The current issue of the association’s magazine, LGAT News, contains a write-up of my keynote:

In a defining era for government globally, councils are in the front-line of changes and challenges and are best placed to take the lead in turning these challenges into opportunities. This was the message to Tasmanian councils from leading business futurist, Ross Dawson, in his keynote address to conference delegates.

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Looking for talented editors/ writers / project managers / social media on cool tech, media, and future topics

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We have just posted an ad on Elance, looking for editors/ writers/ project managers for some of our existing and forthcoming online publications.

Please apply on Elance if this seems like a match, or pass it on to others if you think it might be of interest. If you have questions before applying you can use our contact form. We hope to find some awesome people!

Talented editors/ writers / project managers / social media for cool tech and future topics

We run a series of content websites on topics related to technology, media, and the future, among many other activities.

We are looking for highly talented editors/ project managers who can drive quality content and traffic on these sites.
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Capturing all your browsing data: the difference between Amazon’s Silk and Opera Mobile

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Chris Espinosa has written a very interesting piece about the Silk browser that comes on Amazon’s freshly announced Fire tablet.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web.

In a discussion on Twitter, Mark Pesce and Alexander Sadleir pointed out that this is basically the same as what Opera Mobile does. The Registry wrote last year:
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Angry Birds and productivity at work: why distractions can help

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On Friday a journalist from the Herald Sun called me to ask for my response to an ‘analysis’ suggesting that $1.4 billion of worker productivity is lost to playing Angry Birds. It seems that my answers turned the story around from what could have been yet another populist headline to Is Angry Birds the new Solitaire or are we flying off the handle a bit too early?

I was quoted:
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Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the future of Nokia

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In this final video in the series of ‘futurist conversations’ between myself and Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, we discuss the future of Nokia as a keyhole on where the mobile phone market is going.

Here are a few of the points we make in the conversation:
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Why Steve Jobs’ resignation is a (relative) non-event as Apple becomes a living company

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I was just interviewed by ABC TV for tonight’s 7pm news about Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple.

My initial reaction is that is as close to a non-event as it could be. 

It was absolutely major news when Jobs announced his first medical leave for a life-threatening disease. It underlined that he would not be at Apple for ever, and might not return to Apple from his leave. He in fact returned twice, and now on his third medical leave he has said his role as CEO is over.
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