2015 Summer Confronting the Future
Pedaling to Tomorrow: Could an Electric Bike Kick-Start the Future of Transportation?
Emerging from the San Jose train station on my superfast electric bike, I lean into the first turn, boosted by the latest in lithium-ion battery technology. I’m headed to a business meeting at the Hayes Mansion, eight miles south of the commercial heart of Silicon Valley. And I am late. The built-in speedometer shows 26 […]
Speech Saver: Anticipating Upheavals, Project Aims to Preserve the World’s Languages
You’ve probably experienced that unique combination of loss and rage when your computer’s hard drive suddenly crashes, erasing years of work files, financial records, and precious photos in an instant. What if that happened, asks linguist Laura Welcher, of the nonprofit Long Now Foundation, on a civilizational scale? “Over the span of millennia, you have […]
Real Deal on the Final Frontier: A Former Astronaut on the Realities of Space Travel
Space has long been the province of dreamers. Science fiction writers have authored visions of our future with faster-than-light travel, colonies on other planets, and massive space elevators shuttling people to orbit. But what will humanity’s real future in space look like? One person who might know the answer is engineer, former astronaut, and UC […]
Robots With Us, Or Against Us? Rethinking the Risks Posed by Artificial Intelligence
“We turned the switch and saw the flashes,” said physicist Leo Szilard, describing his 1942 experiment that created the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. “We watched them for a little while and then turned everything off and went home. That night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for […]
Out of the Navy and Into a Cold War Job: “You Know Anything about Celestial Navigation?”
It was June 1954, the day after graduation. I had just received my shiny electrical engineering diploma from the imposing and stentorian UC President Robert Gordon Sproul. After finishing dinner with my proud parents, then bidding them a safe journey back to my hometown Los Angeles, I returned to my room in dear old Bowles […]
My Fictional Life: Prof Finds He’s Lead Character in Roper’s “The Savage Professor”
One of the great rushing noises in the background of life these days is the sound of all fiction being sucked into genre, particularly into America’s favorite genre: the crime story. When my good friend Robert “Bud” Roper, a successful writer of Qual. Lit. novels and high-class nonfiction with a master’s from UC Berkeley, announced […]
Parts Department: The You that Survives into the Next Century May be Mostly 3D Printed
The future will be an exciting time to be alive, if for no other reason than it will be so much easier to survive. We’ll have a bewildering variety of replacement parts for our organs and limbs. Stubborn diseases will be tamed by exotic treatments. New technologies will enable not just better living, but new […]
Theorist’s Tools: Marvin Cohen Uses Quantum Mechanics and Computers to Conjure Future
Since the early 1960s, UC Berkeley theoretical physicist Marvin Cohen has been predicting the shape of things to come. His name will be forever linked to the deep and complex physics behind semiconductors—the active ingredients of computer chips, flat-panel TVs, and solar panels. Cohen was a pioneer in the use of computers to predict the […]
Going Chameleon: What a New Material that Changes Color as it Moves Means for Humans
We’ve all probably experienced a moment when we envied a chameleon’s ability to blend into the background—say, after a gaffe at the office holiday party. As it turns out, chameleons change their skin color in response to all kinds of stimuli: physical threats, temperature changes, and the animal’s moods. What if humans could harness that […]
Line in the Sand: How Can We Protect a Shoreline from the Ravages of the Future?
When San Francisco’s Great Highway opened in 1929, some 50,000 people celebrated the coastal stretch of pavement with a parade and a 1,014-piece band. A magazine article from the time boasted of “a wonderfully constructed Esplanade of enduring concrete, which will render for all time the beach safe from the destructive effects of the ocean’s […]
No One Gets Hurt: Why the Future of Crime May Be Less Violent and More Insidious
Among the various anxieties that currently plague affluent modern society, cybercrime surely ranks near the top. It makes sense; as data comes to define our lives to a greater and greater degree, the specter of some unseen hacker pilfering our information with impunity or emptying our bank account with the click of a mouse is […]
Into the Deep Freeze: What Kind of Person Chooses to Get Cryonically Preserved?
The first man to be cryonically preserved was Berkeley psychologist James Bedford. Half a century later, he’s still on ice.
Stir-Fry Crickets and Sauteed Weeds: Why the Food of the Future Won’t Be Nutrient Powder
Remember Tang? It was the “space age” drink that in 1962 astronaut John Glenn sipped in orbit on his Mercury flight, and for a while thought to be the next generation of orange juice. It was considered convenient because it came in powder form, was less perishable than juice, and boasted lots of vitamins and […]
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