21st Century ideas and inspirations

our transparent society

the role of the internet in shaping the 21st

Following the publication of the The Transparent Society, David Brin became a prominent voice in the debates over information openness and the value of light in the modern world. Find more articles, books, and media about the central issue of our age.

our crowdsourcing innovations

reality seems to be catching up with fiction

In this essay Brin discusses reviving the "lost art" of forming special-interest clubs and organizations: As a teenager, growing up in Los Angeles, Brin participated in the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), gathering mountains of data for professional astronomers" — one of countless such groups formed around a limitless range of interests. In Existence, he portrays this trend as it can become, as individuals and small groups become ever more agile at sleuthing, data collection and analysis & forming very very smart, ad-hoc, problem-solving 'smart mobs.'

how will we chart our future?

In one of the boldest and most popular essays about our destiny, "Singularities and Nightmares: Extremes of Optimism and Pessimism About the Human Future," David Brin explores a startling range of possible changes available to us — changes that could occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. It's an opportunity for humanity and the Earth to avoid dangers and inspire hopeful futures — if that's what we choose. Weigh the range of possibilities for yourself. This article is also available on the Lifeboat Foundation website.

brain by design

What will happen as we enter the era of human augmentation, artificial intelligence and government-by-algorithm? Those fretfully debating artificial intelligence might best start by appraising the half dozen general pathways under exploration in laboratories around the world. While they overlap, they offer distinct implications for what characteristics emerging, synthetic minds might display, including (for example) whether it will be easy or hard to instill human-style ethical values.

disaster planning amid the rubble

Rebuilding a region devastated by a natural disaster means not only recovery but also building infrastructure to ameliorate future occurrences. Money, combined with ingenuity and goodwill, can take care of the short-term solutions: Stop the dying and bury their dead; provide survivors with food, shelter and basic sanitation; help restore basic utilities; repair the ports and roads enough to get commerce flowing again. So far, no arguments. It's when we start talking about longer-term, preventive solutions that the discussion gets clouded by xenophobic preconceptions and anti-globalism dogma — 60 years after the Marshall Plan proved that foreign assistance can work, some of the time.

a revolutionary rorschach test

The motivation for the Boston Tea Party protest serves as a Rorschach test for each succeeding generation. The 1920s viewed the rebellion as a phase shift from monarchal domination to empowerment of the bourgeoisie. In the 1940s, literalists took the Founders at their word — that the Revolution was an idealistic exercise in limiting the scope of government. During the 1960s fashions changed again, viewing the rebellion as a manipulative putsch that allowed local gentry to displace others at the top of the heap. What these generations of scholars all seemed to agree about was that the colonists weren’t rebelling over the raw magnitude of taxes.

scientists give the best advice!

Nothing could better indicate the turn in our national fortunes than to see science no longer dismissed as a realm of pointy-headed boffins, but viewed as part and parcel of our nation's future. If we want a resilent government and responsive politicians, perhaps it's time we restore independent science advisory agencies.

do all voices deserve a hearing?

Anthropologists tell us that every culture has its core of central, commonly shared assumptions — some call them zeitgeists, others call them dogmas. These are beliefs that each individual in the tribe or community will maintain vigorously, almost like a reflex. We, too, have our zeitgeist. But contemporary America's dogma is very, very strange in one respect. It just may be the first society in which it is a major reflexive dogma that there must be no dogmas!

waging war on ideas

I do not need 'liberal thought' to make me favor equality of opportunity (while opposing artificial equalizing of circumstance). All I need is the blatantly obvious fact that we were wasting staggering amounts of human creative potential when people were repressed because of presumptions having to do with race and gender and class. The fantastic success of pragmatic 'liberalism' at spurring us to take on these devils is so overwhelmingly more important than any other event of the last century that the burden of proof is on anyone who disses 'liberals.'

is the internet helping us evolve?

Is the internet era empowering us to be better, smarter, more agile thinkers — or devolving us into distracted, manic scatterbrains? Is technology-improved discourse going to turn us all into avid, participatory problem solvers? Or will the Web’s centrifugal effects spin us all into little islands of shared conviction — midget Nuremberg rallies — where facts become irrelevant and any opinion-monger can be a memic god?