Pontiac Holonomy Incubator -
HOLONOMY: the science of interacting parts within wholes. Holos = Whole. On = Part. Nomy = Systematized Knowledge. The Study or Science of Wholeness. The balance between Self-Assertion and Integration.
Monday, September 5, 2016
Division, Distraction, Short Termism, Materialism, Complexity, IDEAS
How the World Works! (When Free to Learn..)
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/opinion/sunday/what-babies-know-about-physics-and-foreign-languages.html?error_code=4201&error_message=User+canceled+the+Dialog+flow#_=_
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Cities as Classrooms: Design Walk Downtown Pontiac October 2015 pilot program/model
Cities as classrooms: The Urban Thinkscape project
Monday, July 25, 2016
Politics Post-RNC 2016
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/opinion/trumps-perilous-nation.html
Trump: Tribune of Poor White People
An interview with JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/
John Oliver "What just happened?"
http://youtu.be/zNdkrtfZP8I
Friday, July 15, 2016
Public Space at the Crossroads of Everything - Join the Conversation at the Piggyback BBQ Festival
http://www.pps.org/blog/public-space-at-the-crossroads-of-everything/
Piggyback BBQ Festival: https://m.facebook.com/PhoenixCenterRising/albums/1016170505141991/
Thursday, July 14, 2016
WHAT, HOW?
"A profound shift in our collective consciousness must occur, a shift that makes possible a new America." Michelle Alexander
https://medium.com/embrace-race/something-more-is-required-of-us-now-what-58e8ec2885b8?source=linkShare-b014ac9249de-1468518268
Monday, July 4, 2016
Rule by Beancounters
Legislature should repeal emergency manager law
The Legislature passed this law. Its members govern this state. They are charged by the people with a sacred responsibility. Indeed, they hold a sacred trust. This responsibility, this trust, may have been poisoned for generations. It is certainly in deficit.
Thursday, May 26, 2016
End of Suburbia - Jim Kunstler, Congress for New Urbanism Detroit - Towards Plan B
https://youtu.be/Q3uvzcY2Xug
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
TRADE and the Future Economy
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism/471630/
Millions of ordinary americans support Trump. Here's Why
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support
Monday, February 29, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Week in Review - Town Hall Pontiac Schools Millage Vote, OU Pontiac Grizz Night, Saturday Morning Breakfast Club
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Flint: Public NonScience - the Failure of our Systems - and the Money Grab for the RIGHT things by the WRONG people
The Water Next Time: Professor Who Helped Expose Crisis in Flint Says Public Science Is Broken
In 2003 the Virginia Tech civil-engineering professor said that there was lead in the Washington, D.C., water supply, and that the city had been poisoning its residents. He was right.
Last fall he said there was lead in the water in Flint, Mich., despite the reassurances of state and local authorities that the water was safe. He was right about that, too.
Working with residents of Flint, Mr. Edwards led a study that revealed that the elevated lead levels in people’s homes were not isolated incidents but a result of a systemic problem that had been ignored by state scientists. He has since been appointed to a task force to help fix those problems in Flint. In a vote of confidence, residents last month tagged a local landmark with a note to the powers that be: "You want our trust??? We want Va Tech!!!"
But being right in these cases has not made Mr. Edwards happy. Vindicated or not, the professor says his trials over the last decade and a half have cost him friends, professional networks, and thousands of dollars of his own money.
The infrastructural problems go beyond the public utilities of certain American cities, he says. In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Edwards said that the systems built to support scientists do not reward moral courage and that the university pipeline contains toxins of its own — which, if ignored, will corrode public faith in science.
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
Q. I just came back from Flint, and it may not come as a surprise to you that you’re something of a folk hero there. What do you think about that?
A. It’s a natural byproduct of science conducted as a public good. Normal people really appreciate good science that’s done in their interest. They stepped forward as citizen scientists to explore what was happening to them and to their community, we provided some funding and the technical and analytical expertise, and they did all the work. I think that work speaks for itself.
Q. Scientific studies by university-affiliated researchers, namely you and Mona Hanna-Attisha, were a big part of what broke this case open. On the other hand, it took a Flint resident writing to a professor in Virginia to start the process of finding out that there was lead in the drinking water. Do you see this as an academic success story or a cautionary tale?
This is something that I’m upset about deeply. I’ve kind of dedicated my career to try to raise awareness about this. I’m losing a lot of friends. People don’t want to hear this. But we have to get this fixed, and fixed fast, or else we are going to lose this symbiotic relationship with the public. They will stop supporting us.
Q. Do you have any sense that perverse incentive structures prevented scientists from exposing the problem in Flint sooner?
A. Yes, I do. In Flint the agencies paid to protect these people weren’t solving the problem. They were the problem. What faculty person out there is going to take on their state, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency?
I don’t blame anyone, because I know the culture of academia. You are your funding network as a professor. You can destroy that network that took you 25 years to build with one word. I’ve done it. When was the last time you heard anyone in academia publicly criticize a funding agency, no matter how outrageous their behavior? We just don’t do these things.
If an environmental injustice is occurring, someone in a government agency is not doing their job. Everyone we wanted to partner said, Well, this sounds really cool, but we want to work with the government. We want to work with the city. And I’m like, You’re living in a fantasy land, because these people are the problem.
Q. Now that your hypothesis has been vindicated, and the government has its tail between its legs, a lot of researchers are interested.
A. And I hope that they’re interested for the right reasons. But there’s now money — a lot of money — on the table.
Q. Not as much as some of them would like. I heard a lot of people say they thought that a zero might have been missing from the grant money that the University of Michigan made available.
A. Right. But the expectation is that there’s tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to be made available by these agencies. And some part of that will be directed toward research, so we now have a financial incentive to get involved. I hate to sound cynical about it. I know these folks have good intentions. But it doesn’t change the fact that, Where were we as academics for all this time before it became financially in our interest to help? Where were we?
Q. Now, of course, when you walk around Flint and ask people about the reassurances they’re hearing now, they don’t believe anybody. When is it appropriate for academics to be skeptical of an official narrative when that narrative is coming from scientific authorities? Surely the answer can’t be "all of the time."
A. I’m really surprised how emotional this interview is making me, and I’ve given several hundred interviews. What these agencies did in [the Washington, D.C., case] was the most fundamental betrayal of public trust that I’ve ever seen. When I realized what they had done, as a scientist, I was just outraged and appalled.
I grew up worshiping at the altar of science, and in my wildest dreams I never thought scientists would behave this way. The only way I can construct a worldview that accommodates this is to say, These people are unscientific. Science should be about pursuing the truth and helping people. If you’re doing it for any other reason, you really ought to question your motives.
Unfortunately, in general, academic research and scientists in this country are no longer deserving of the public trust. We’re not.
Q. I think of that rock with the spray paint on it that says, "You want our trust??? We want Va Tech!!!" That’s a vote of confidence in you at the expense of confidence in anybody else. Is that a happy piece of graffiti in your eyes?
A. It’s a symbol of the total failure of our government science agencies, and also of our academic institutions. I really derive no personal satisfaction from that. I feel shame. That’s what I feel.
Q. I keep coming back to these university researchers in Flint who said: "The state has 50 epidemiologists. They say that the water’s safe. So I’m going to focus my energy on something that’s less settled." How do you decide when the state should be challenged?
A. That’s a great question. We are not skeptical enough about each other’s results. What’s the upside in that? You’re going to make enemies. People might start questioning your results. And that’s going to start slowing down our publication assembly line. Everyone’s invested in just cranking out more crap papers.
So when you start asking questions about people, and you approach them as a scientist, if you feel like you’re talking to an adult and they give you a rational response and are willing to share data and discuss an issue rationally, I’m out of there. I go home.
But when you reach out to them, as I did with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they do not return your phone calls, they do not share data, they do not respond to FOIA [open-records requests], y’know. … In each case I just started asking questions and turning over rocks, and I resolved to myself, The second something slimy doesn’t come out, I’m gonna go home. But every single rock you turn over, something slimy comes out.
Q. But at some point in a place like Flint, trust has to be restored somehow in order for the system to continue working.
A. Exactly.
Q. I talked to this woman yesterday at the university pavilion. She’s a senior, a nursing student. We looked at the stickers the university had put on its water fountain, saying that this has a filter, that this is safe. And she said: "No. I don’t drink the water here. I don’t care what they say. I don’t care if it’s from the university." At that level of mistrust, the system doesn’t work. What do you think people would have to see in order to start trusting what scientists tell them?
A. It’s going to take time for the people in Flint. They have been so betrayed, and the callous way that our most vulnerable were treated in Flint by the very agencies paid to protect them is so profoundly disturbing. That’s why this is striking such a chord.
Q. You teach a course on ethics and heroism at Virginia Tech. How exactly does one teach heroism to college students?
A. We teach aspirational ethics. What I teach my students is, You’re born heroic. I go into these animal studies, and heroism is actually in our nature. What you have to do is make sure that the system doesn’t change you, that our educational system doesn’t teach you to be willfully blind and to forget your aspirations, because that’s the default position.
We talk about the realities of heroism too. It’s not fun. These are gut-wrenching things. But the main thing is, Do not let our educational institutions make you into something that you will be ashamed of.
Q. And you sort of warn them that you’re preparing them for a life of possible sadness and alienation?
A. Well, yeah. There’s a price to be paid.
Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Asset Based Community Development (To Save Us From...)
Posted: 20 Jan 2016 02:28 AM PST
Sadly ABCD rhetoric is being bandied about in some quarters as a quick fix solution, as is Time Banking, Local Area Coordination and anything else that speaks to community-led action.
But both citizens and savvy practitioners know rhetoric is not practice, and ABCD in particular is not a model. You can’t therefore throw it at people as a means of getting them to do for themselves and each other what you can no longer package and deliver in a service.
The thinking around all of this has become confused of late, especially in the UK, so in an effort to be helpful and hopeful, yet challenging, I wanted to put together a clear articulation of how ABCD as a practice and perspective differs to more traditional community engagement approaches.
Here it goes. Suffice to say Asset-Based Community Development practice does not seek to save the system money, but rather to save people from the system.
Ethical ABCD practitioners are not interested in creating citizen-led ‘services’ or alternatives to mainstream services, they are interested in supporting regular people to live interdependent lives and to grow powerful civic action. The box below sets out how ABCD differs to traditional “service based thinking”, hence it is not about service reform or redesign but about having a life, growing free space and deepening democracy.
As with every approach, when it comes to ABCD there are those who talk a good show but engage in crap practice, those who’ve never heard the words ABCD but live it every day in their practice, and those who do both. Hopefully the distinctions above help in figuring out the difference and making the best choices possible in difficult times.
Cormac Russell.
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Hands Off - Thinking about THINKING (Learning)
Hands-Off Teaching Cultivates Metacognition
Thinking About Learning
In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed everything we know about learning in a paper called How Students Learn. In this report, 600 pages of research culminate in a single word, which the NAS identifies as the key to effective learning: metacognition. Metacognition (or thinking about thinking) is the secret to and driving force behind all effective learning. If you want your students to learn as much as possible, then you want to maximize the amount of metacognition they're doing. It's a pretty simple equation.
The only problem is that most classrooms are set up to promote metacognition in the teachers, not the students. To succeed, you need to think about your own thinking (How did I learn this? How have I taught this before? What worked and didn't work?) as well as your students' thinking (What do they know? What will keep them engaged?). However, it's far too easy for your students to kick back, disengage, and wait for you to simplify the material for them. You're like a personal trainer who says, "I'm going to help you meet all your fitness goals. Now sit back and watch me lift all the weight."
Teaching is hard work -- you have to be constantly engaged and aware of your process and how to improve it. That's exactly what makes an expert learner. So share the wealth! If you really want your students to be better learners, then let them walk a mile in your shoes.
That's exactly what Eric Mazur decided to do. As a professor of physics at Harvard, Mazur was working with some of the most educated undergraduates in the world and yet, as he discovered, their lack of understanding was truly shocking. Mazur decided he needed to force his students to think more, so he made them teach each other. The change was astounding. His peer instruction approach has since grown into the flipped classroom movement, and research shows that it consistently produces better results than traditional lecture-based classrooms. No wonder! Flipping the classroom shifts the metacognitive balance toward the students. We want our students to do as much thinking as possible, and that's why the world's greatest teachers actively avoid teaching.
Shifting the Responsibility
We've seen this tactic succeed on a personal level. Ten years ago, when we started tutoring full time, we did everything we could to help our students. It was our job to make sure that they understood and succeeded. Pretty soon, we realized that our desire to help was exactly what was hurting our students the most. They knew we'd do everything we could, so they stopped doing things for themselves.
Eventually, we turned our tutoring sessions around. When a student asked how something was done, we'd play dumb and say, "I don't know. We should probably look it up." The student would look it up, ask another question, and we'd say, "Hmmm. That's interesting. How can we find that out?" Again, the student would go to the book. After enough of those sessions, our students stopped bothering to ask us for the answers -- they already knew all the behaviors that would lead to understanding.
Curious whether this shift in our students was just a fluke, we began working our way through the scientific literature, and the picture quickly became clear. Today's students have incredible resources -- and a troubling lack of resourcefulness. They have brand new textbooks that they never crack open. They have the collected knowledge of the world available at the click of a mouse, but they never use it to look up things they don't know. After years of classroom lectures, students everywhere -- regardless of cultural or socioeconomic background -- had internalized the idea that students are supposed to get answers from teachers. At its core, that translates to the idea that the person in charge of their learning is someone other than them. And that's a huge problem because, ultimately, no one else can be responsible for our learning.
No matter how entertaining you make your lectures, you can't make your students pay attention. Only they can do that, and yet we fall victim to the idea that if the student isn't learning or isn’t paying attention, it's the teacher's fault. From a neuroscience perspective, that's just wrong. Yet by doing the majority of students' thinking and rushing to solve their problems, we reinforce that idea. In our experience, that has done America's students a tremendous disservice. A great education doesn't come from a teacher who thinks for you. It comes from a teacher who teaches (and pushes) you to think for yourself.
The Hands-Off Teacher
Of course, being pushed to think for yourself can initially be frustrating and emotionally uncomfortable. But we need to let America's children struggle if we want them to develop the skills to succeed on their own in the workforce of the future. And that means we all need a more sophisticated model of what makes a great teacher. We've all heard the horror stories of tenured teachers who did nothing all class period, but the reality is that a teacher who doesn't push students to figure things out for themselves isn't much better help. A great teacher doesn't teach as much as possible. A great teacher teaches as little as possible, while modeling the behaviors of how to figure something out. Perhaps it seems too obvious to say that your goal should be for students to think as much as possible during your class. But in this case, "thinking" really means thinking about the material plus how to dig in, break it apart, understand it, and build on that. It means thinking about how to constantly get better.
We know that not every teacher has the luxury of flipping his or her classroom, but here are some simple things you can do to move your students toward more metacognition:
- At least once each class period, refuse to answer a student's question and instead get everybody to look up the answer.
- Instead of marking exactly where the mistakes are on a test, essay, or homework assignment, tell students how many mistakes there are and challenge them to find every one.
- Let students try planning an entire class period and recording themselves giving that lesson. The ability to teach something clearly is the best test of whether you understand it. (And there's no faster way to help them appreciate what you do!)
- After a test, give your students the same test again, but fill it in first with actual wrong answers that students gave. As students grade this test and provide corrections (a process typically reserved for teachers), they'll have to think not only about the right way to do things, but also why someone might make each particular error.
Can't Fix Flint, Can't Fix the Roads, CERTAINLY Can't Fix Education
Rochelle Riley: Detroit must fix its own schools
Gov. Rick Snyder has enough to do to fix Flint. State management has not worked, so let the city fix its own schools.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/rochelle-riley/2016/01/16/detroit-must-fix-its-own-schools/78885506/
Our school district is failing our parents.
It is failing our children.
That means it is failing our future — and Detroit’s renaissance.
This is no time to debate that some schools work while others don't. This is no time to defend graduation rates that remain too low and dropout rates that remain too high.
Teachers, through sick-outs, have forced us to look at the conditions some of our children endure every school year. The mayor looked and immediately ordered city inspections of all 97 schools. We can no longer look away.
It is finally time to stop living with failure.
It has become clearer than ever that the fix for our failing district will likely not come from the state Legislature. It won’t be found in the bills introduced last week by State Sen. Goeff Hansen, R-Hart, whose hard work is notable more for what they lack than what they do:
- They would allow for the election of a city school board, but one that cannot choose its own district superintendent.
- They would authorize $250 million to open a new school district, but ignore the current district’s $515 million-and-rising debt.
- They ignore the troubles of a second Detroit-based state district run by the Education Achievement Authority, a district being investigated by federal authorities.
Hansen didn't offer the legislation that was needed. According to news reports, he said "we had to craft something that would get 20 votes in the Senate and get through the House. The charters were unhappy with the governance of it.”
The charters were unhappy about the governance of it. Sigh.
Detroit needs someone to monitor the landscape, to ensure that all schools serve students equally and valiantly — and that schools exist where children live. More importantly, the city needs an entity that holds for-profit schools as accountable as other public schools.
So, again, the fix for our failing district will not fall from the sky between Dan Gilbert building purchases and transportation ideas suggested by Michael Ford, CEO of the Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan.
And the state Legislature cannot save it.
Detroit is going to have to stop waiting for Superman. That was Clark Kent, not Rick Snyder. And the governor, who can't fix roads and can’t fix Flint, certainly can’t fix education.
It’s time that Detroit stood up and fixed itself. It’s time that the governor stop holding the city district hostage, preventing it from declaring bankruptcy. It's time for Detroit to force the state to pay the state-guaranteed debt.
It's time for Detroit to shut down the old school district and create a new one on its own, one without crooks, without bad apples and with processes in place to stay financially healthy.
The governor's a little busy right now explaining how his staff allowed an entire city to drink toxic water. So let's tell him that Detroit no longer needs the state to run its schools. Or we can take a lesson from the teachers and just tell him we're sick.
Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Become More Human and Creative - The Machines are Coming!
From AI To Robotics, 2016 Will Be The Year When The Machines Start Taking Over
For the past century, the price and performance of computing has been on an exponential curve. And, as futurist Ray Kurzweil observed, once any technology becomes an information technology, its development follows the same curve, so we are seeing exponential advances in technologies such as sensors, networks, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The convergence of these technologies is making amazing things possible.
2015 was the tipping point in the global adoption of the Internet, digital medical devices, blockchain, gene editing, drones, and solar energy. 2016 will be the beginning of an even bigger revolution, one that will change the way we live, let us visit new worlds, and lead us into a jobless future. Yes, with every good there is a bad; wonderful things will become possible, but with them we will also create new problems for mankind.
Here are six of the technologies that will make this happen, and the good they will do.
Artificial Intelligence
In the artificial-intelligence community, there is a common saying: “A.I. is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. They call this the “A.I. effect”. Skeptics discount the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program by arguing that, rather than being real intelligence, it is just brute force computing and algorithms.
There is merit to the criticism: even though computers have beaten chess masters and Jeopardy players and learnt to talk to us and drive cars, Siri and Cortana are still imperfect and infuriating.
Yes, they crack jokes and tell us the weather, but are nothing like the seductive digital assistant we saw in the movie Her.
But that is about to change—so that even the skeptics will say that A.I. has arrived. There have been major advances in “deep learning” neural networks, which learn by ingesting large amounts of data: IBM has taught its A.I. system, Watson, everything from cooking, to finance, to medicine; and Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have made great strides in face recognition and human-like speech systems. A.I.-based face recognition, for example, has almost reached human capability. And IBM Watson can diagnose certain cancers better than any human doctor can.
With IBM Watson being made available to developers, Google open-sourcing its deep learning A.I. software, and Facebook releasing the designs of its specialized A.I. hardware, we can expect to see a broad variety of A.I. applications emerging—because entrepreneurs all over the world are taking up the baton. A.I. will be wherever computers are, and will seem human-like.
Fortunately, we don’t need to worry about superhuman A.I. yet; that is still a decade or two away.
Robots
The 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge required robots to navigate over an eight-task course simulating a disaster zone. It was almost comical to see them moving at the speed of molasses, freezing up, and falling over. Forget folding laundry and serving humans; these robots could hardly walk. As well, although we heard some three years ago that Foxconn would replace a million workers with robots in its Chinese factories, it never did so.
The breakthroughs may, however, be at hand. To begin with, a new generation of robots is being introduced by companies such as Switzerland’s ABB, Denmark’s Universal Robots, and Boston’s Rethink Robotics—robots dextrous enough to thread a needle and sensitive enough to work alongside humans. They can assemble circuits and pack boxes. We are at the cusp of the industrial-robot revolution.
Household robots are another matter. Household tasks may seem mundane, but they are incredibly difficult for machines to perform. Cleaning a room and folding laundry necessitate software algorithms that are more complex than those to land a man on the moon. But there have been many breakthroughs of late, largely driven by A.I., enabling robots to learn certain tasks by themselves and teach each other what they have learnt. And with the open source robotic operating system, ROS, thousands of developers worldwide are getting close to perfecting the algorithms.
Don’t be surprised when robots start showing up in supermarkets and malls—and in our homes. Remember Rosie, the robotic housekeeper from the TV series “The Jetsons”? I am expecting version 1 to begin shipping in the early 2020s.
Self-driving cars
Once considered to be in the realm of science fiction, autonomous cars made big news in 2015. Google crossed the million-mile mark with its prototypes; Tesla began releasing functionality in its cars; and major car manufacturers announced their plans for robocars. These are coming, whether we are ready or not. And, just as the robots will, they will learn from each other—about the landscape of our roads and the bad habits of humans.
In the next year or two, we will see fully functional robocars being tested on our highways, and then they will take over our roads. Just as the horseless carriage threw horses off the roads, these cars will displace us humans. Because they won’t crash into each other as we humans do, they won’t need the bumper bars or steel cages, so they will be more comfortable and lighter. Most will be electric. We also won’t have to worry about parking spots, because they will be able to drop us where we want to go to and pick us up when we are ready. We won’t even need to own our own cars, because transportation will be available on demand through our smartphones. Best of all, we won’t need speed limits, so distance will be less of a barrier—enabling us to leave the cities and suburbs.
Virtual reality and holodecks
In March, Facebook announced the availability of its much anticipated virtual-reality headset, Oculus. Microsoft, Magic Leap, and dozens of startups won’t be far behind with their new technologies. The early versions of these products will surely be expensive and clumsy and cause dizziness and other adverse reactions. But prices will fall, capabilities will increase, and footprints will shrink as is the case with all exponential technologies, and 2016 will mark the beginning of the VR revolution.
Virtual reality will change how we learn and how we entertain ourselves. Our children’s education will become experiential, because they will be able to visit ancient Greece and journey within the human body. We will spend our lunchtimes touring far-off destinations and our evenings playing laser tag with friends who are thousands of miles away. And, rather than watching movies at IMAX theatres, we will be able to be part of the action, virtually in the back seat of the car chase.
Internet of Things
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced plans to create his own artificially intelligent, voice-controlled butler to help run his life at home and at work. For this, he will need appliances that can talk to his digital butler—a connected home, office, and car. These are all coming, as CES, the big consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas, demonstrated. From showerheads that track how much water we’ve used to toothbrushes that watch out for cavities, to refrigerators that order food that is running out, they are all on their way.
Starting in 2016, everything will be be connected—including our homes and appliances, our cars, street lights, and medical instruments. They will be sharing information with each other and perhaps gossiping about us, and will introduce massive security risks as well as many efficiencies. And we won’t have much choice, because they will be standard features—as are the cameras on our Smart TVs that stare at us, and the smartphones that listen to everything we say.
Space
Rockets, satellites, and spaceships were things that governments built—until Elon Musk stepped into the ring in 2002, with his startup SpaceX. A decade later, he demonstrated the ability to dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station and return with cargo. A year later, he launched a commercial geostationary satellite. And then, in 2015, out of the blue, came another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, whose space company, Blue Origin, launched a rocket 100 kilometers into space and landed its booster within five feet of its launch pad. This is a feat that SpaceX only achieved a month later, so Bezos one-upped Musk.
It took a race, in the 1960s, between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to get man to the Moon. For decades after this, little more happened, because there was no one for the U.S. to compete with. Now, thanks to technology costs’ falling so far that space exploration can be done for millions rather than billions of dollars, and the raging egos of two billionaires, we will see the breakthroughs in space travel that we have been waiting for. Maybe there’ll be nothing beyond some rocket launches and a few competitive tweets between Musk and Bezos in 2016, but we will be closer to having colonies on Mars.
This surely is the most innovative period in human history, an era that will be remembered as the inflexion point in exponential technologies that made the impossible possible.