Thursday, March 25, 2010

East Bay Futurists Meeting Notes

This is a great meet-up that meets twice monthly in Oakland.


These are my notes from random discussion threads between Tom, Robin, Andy, Scott and myself. Feel free to edit and add context.  (There are links hiding behind many of the references - scroll over to find them)

Mentioned:

Books:

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking 
Outliers
Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious 
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Films:

Terminator re: post singularity robot
Colossus: The Forbin Project

TV shows:

Caprica
Battlestar Galactica
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Alien Nation
Faulty Towers 

Institutes:

Foresight Institute
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence 

Longetivity:

Methuselarity

Terminology:

Fundamental Attribution Error, attribution theory

Government ideas:

Futarchy 

Re: wikiarchy website idea
Design for America contest from Sunlight Foundation
Our goal is simple and straightforward -- to make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public. We hope to enliven and engage new communities -- just as we did with Apps for America 1 and 2 -- as partners and participants in making government information more engaging to the American public.
Debate graph on Government transparency

---I saw a demo at SF New Tech: Argument forum start-up: 
argumentclinic.com is neutral place on the Web where you go to have real-time arguments and debates on a variety of topics. Either argue on our carefully curated daily content by our editorial staff or add your own topics. Get a real feel of what the opposition thinks without fear of your point of view being deleted.

Oakland Businesses:

Oakland Technology Exchange - recycles computers for Oakland kids
Pandora Music Genome Project talked about how it sucks for rock music

People:

Aaron Swartz
Aubrey de Grey
Paul Buchheit
Charles Stross

Crowdsourcing definition we tossed around to define "human distributed computing"
1. work items can be done in parallel independently
2. gestalt is not rigidly dependent on any individual element
3. work of single contributors does not stand alone

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