If I'm superb at shopping, a super-user whose word is law for those who trust me for recommendations, how come I'm not paid to shop?

Bruce Sterling is a futurist, journalist and science-fiction writer. He is living in Belgrade, capital of Serbia and Montenegro, and witnessing markets in transition.

The Futures Of Money

You live in a world of things that create longing and revulsion at the same time. You don't know if you want the things you want because you want them or because somebody has provoked your desire. It's hard to tell anymore if they are bad things — made by people under duress, bad for the environment and your body — or good things that fold neatly back into the biosphere when they're used up.

So here's Bruce Sterling.

Bruce Sterling does not worry about the nefarious uses of radio frequency identification chips

In contrast:

Adi Shamir has applied power analysis techniques to crack passwords for the most popular brand of RFID tags.

"I haven’t tested all RFID tags, but we did test the biggest brand and it is totally unprotected," Shamir said. Using this approach, "a cellphone has all the ingredients you need to conduct an attack and compromise all the RFID tags in the vicinity," he added.

When worlds collide

Ray Bradbury has the solution to LA's traffic nightmare.

In recent months there has been talk of yet another subway, one that would run between downtown L.A. and Santa Monica. That would be a disaster.

A single transit line will not answer our problems; we must lay plans for a series of transportation systems that would allow us to move freely, once more, within our city.

The answer to all this is the monorail. Let me explain.

Ah, the monorail [mp3] :

Lyle Lanley: That's right! Monorail!
[crowd chants `Monorail' softly and rhythmically]
Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud...
Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud.
Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend?
Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend.
Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lyle Lanley: You'll all be given cushy jobs.
Abe: Were you sent here by the devil?
Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can.
Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man.
                I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
                Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: [singing] Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: Once again...
All: Monorail!
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: [singing] Monorail!
                Monorail!
                Monorail!
                [big finish]
                Monorail!
Homer: Mono... D'oh!

LA's future is up in the air

MORAL: Many a plan has just one flaw: No one has the courage to try it.

To Bell The Cat

ACM interviews Kurzweil.

The "singularity" is a metaphor borrowed from physics, really referring to the event horizon. We can't easily see beyond the event horizon around the black hole in physics. And here with regard to this historical singularity, we can't easily see beyond that event horizon, because it's so profoundly transformative. We will literally multiple the intelligence of our civilization by merging with, and supplementing our biological intelligence, with this profoundly more capable nonbiological intelligence by a factor of billions, ultimately trillions. And that will dramatically change the nature of human civilization. That in a nutshell is what the singularity is all about.

Singularity: an interview with Ray Kurzweil

Across the world of science, the boundaries are being redrawn. A new political emphasis is being placed on science and innovation by countries such as China, India, and South Korea. At the same time, a gradual process of ‘offshore innovation’ is underway, as higher-value R&D begins to flow overseas. Confronted by these trends, Britain has a choice. It can either retreat into a scientific version of protectionism. Or it can embrace the new opportunities for networking and collaboration that such transformations create. This two-year project, to be carried out in partnership with the Foreign Office and others, will provide a compelling framework for understanding the new geography of science.

The project has five central aims:

1. To map emerging trends and patterns in the globalisation of science, with a primary focus on three countries: China, India and South Korea;
2. To forecast how such trends might evolve over the next 10-15 years;
3. To identify new models of networking and collaboration between scientists, policymakers and companies in China, India, South Korea and the UK;
4. To analyse the implications of these trends for science policy and investment in the UK and Europe;
5. To produce an agenda-setting publication which sparks widespread policy and media debate.

Research themes and questions will include:

1. Knowledge mapping and forecasting
2. Networks, competition and collaboration
3. Science and sustainable development
4. New metrics and indicators
5. Talent attraction and knowledge diasporas
6. Innovation, precaution and public engagement

You can download a project summary in PDF.

Atlas of Ideas

Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, including some lifted from American science fiction of the '40s and '50s.

Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data.

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going.

We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us.

God's Little Toys

I think you'll find that the insights of this 1998 interview still resonate with many of our current affairs. Often the best advice is timeless and broadly applicable.

Brand: You say in Imagined Worlds that the two human institutions that can think about long-term issues are science and religion. And you raise the question in the book -- a little more than you answer it -- of long-term ethics. It's an area that I'm acutely interested in. How might long-term ethics differ from ethics as we generally understand them?

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Brand: Do you have a list of these principles?

Dyson: No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

Brand: But if they're going to be long-term ones, you'd better have some agreement. This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

I'm working on a project, The Long Now Foundation, to encourage long-term responsibility. Esther's on that board, too. We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

Dyson: I'm accustomed to living among very long-lived institutions in England, and I'm always surprised that the rest of the world is so different. At the beginning of Imagined Worlds, I mentioned the avenue of trees at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is an extremely wealthy foundation, founded by Henry VIII with the money he looted from the monasteries. He put his ill-gotten gains into education, much to our benefit. So we pray for his soul once a year. I went to the commemoration feast last March and duly prayed in appropriate Latin. Trinity is an astonishing place because it has been a fantastic producer of great science for 400 years and continues to be so. Beside Henry VIII, we were celebrating the 100th birthday of the electron, which was discovered there by J. J. Thomson. He was appointed professor at the age of 28.

Anyway, they planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones. That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

If you haven't read this book, you might be interested in Rudy Rucker's review of Imagined Worlds. You can also read the first chapter of Imagined Worlds.

Freeman Dyson's Brain, by Stewart Brand | Wired 6.02

Mixing together anecdotes, graphics, and fables, Rucker teases out the implications of his new worldview, which he calls "universal automatism." His analysis reveals startling aspects of the everyday world, touching upon such topics as chaos, the internet, fame, free will, and the pursuit of happiness. More than a popular science book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul is a philosophical entertainment that teaches us how to enjoy our daily lives to the fullest possible extent.

The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul

As reality television becomes ubiquitous, being unknown becomes cool. Oprah proclaims that "Anonymity Is the New Fame," and the hottest new program is a worldwide search for someone who has never been on television.

Hey, that's my idea! Conan O'Brien stole my idea. He's so derivative ...

The Future of Television, by Conan O'Brien