Iqbal Quadir: Technology Empowers the Poorest
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - May 21, 2008
Linking new technology with the boundless resourcefulness of the poor drives innovation in surprising directions at surprising speed.
Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz: Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - April 28, 2008
Historian Ferguson and futurist Schwartz disagree on the nature of human progress. Both regard history as highly contingent. The question is, contingent on what?
Craig Venter: Vision: Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - February 25, 2008
With his current series of breakthroughs in synthetic biology Craig Venter and his team are not so much creating life as joining life. Reverse-engineering evolution's long-refined tricks and subtleties at the molecular level is building humanity's most powerful toolkit yet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - February 4, 2008
Skeptical empiricist and author of
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable has bracing things to say about the future.
Paul Saffo: China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - January 11, 2008
The most quoted futurist alive, Paul Saffo specializes in the history and future of technology. In this talk, he spells out the secrets of his trade.
Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais: At the Edge of Art
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - December 14, 2007
Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Enduring Principles for Changing Times
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - November 9, 2007
Kanter offers a positive agenda for the nation, focused on innovation and education, a new workplace social contract, values-based corporate conduct, and competent government.
Juan Enriquez: Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - October 12, 2007
Enriquez examines how we image and imagine what we are exploring, and thus image and imagine exploration itself.
Gwyneth Cravens with Rip Anderson: Power to Save the World
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - September 14, 2007
The best introduction to the current realities and benefits of nuclear power is Cravens book
Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.
Alex Wright: Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - Aug. 17, 2007
Alex Wright is a writer and information architect who currently works for
The New York Times. His first book,
Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages is an impressive survey on how societies have dealt with information overload through time.
Francis Fukuyama: "The End of History" Revisited
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - June 28, 2007
Fukuyama examines conflict with and within Islam, the need for a diffuse form of global governance to deal with problems.
Paul Hawken: The New Great Transformation
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - June 8, 2007
Paul Hawken describes conditions in which "the future is stolen and sold to the present," — a situation we are having to deal with yet again.
Steven Johnson: The Long Zoom
DVD : Long Now Foundation : Release Date - May 11, 2007
The value of a long zoom is in identifying and employing every scale between the very large and very small, noticing how they change each other when held in the mind at the same time.