For those folks who are interested, here's the Slideshare version of the presentation I gave last week at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute annual meeting. I was asked to talk about foresight thinking, as the event theme was "The Big One of 2056: What Went Right?" a look at a fictional 7.8 quake in the SF region that was handled as well as they could imagine possible.

My goal was to offer a bit of reassurance to the audience that there is some real utility to thinking about the future, and to spell out (in a cursory way) the kinds of big picture issues they should keep in mind while looking ahead forty-six years.

By and large, it was a successful talk. The post-talk questions were engaged, with little push-back, and I'm told that the overall response from the audience was quite positive.

The talk was video recorded, and I'm told will eventually be available to the public. I'll link when that happens.

Last month, I was interviewed for the syndicated "Living on Earth" program (typically heard on NPR stations) on the subject of geoengineering. That interview was run this past weekend, and is now available -- with transcript -- at the Living on Earth website.

(Direct link to the MP3.)

YOUNG: What do you think is the likelihood that we might need a geo-engineering approach?

CASCIO: I think it's more likely than not, unfortunately because...

YOUNG: Now wait a minute, you spent all this time telling me how it's a disaster, now you're saying we might have to use it?

CASCIO: Well, yes. It's because over the past few decades we simply have been ignoring the problem of global warming. We're in a situation where we simply no longer have the best option available to us. The best option would have been to deal with this 20 years ago.

And so, what we're stuck with [is] a selection of less good options. Are we talking rapid decarbonization and what that's going to the economy? Are we talking about making major changes to our energy infrastructure? Useful, but again, disruptive. These other alternatives are so seemingly unpalatable. It's very likely that we're going to be stuck in a situation where we will feel ourselves forced to take radical action.

Emphasis in that last paragraph on the "seemingly," btw.

(Well, "new" in the sense of it's the most recent; it actually went up earlier this week, I just didn't get around to linking to it here. Ahem.)

"iWorry" is my foray into the iPad discussion, focusing less on the product and more on its support infrastructure:

But the iPad isn't a phone; it is a general purpose computer. It does email and Web and documents and presentations and games and all of the other kinds of things we do with our "regular" computers. Yet it will suffer under the same restrictions as the iPhone--prohibition of any application that Apple doesn't like, for whatever reason. Sometimes that means the application uses undocumented features, but startlingly often it just means "duplication of features"--the application does something that Apple's own software does, but does it differently. (This raises the uncomfortable question as to whether the Kindle app for the iPhone--which works quite nicely, actually--will run on the iPad.)

These restrictions aren't going to hurt Apple's bottom line, and admittedly will probably make for a more comfortable user experience on the device itself. But the risk -- and the source of my worry -- is that the locked-down app model moves from these kind of appliance systems to the kinds of devices that have historically been open. If the next version of the MacOS insists that you use a "MacOS App Store" to get the software you want, I'll be moving to another platform.

I brought up a similar point in a conversation with Annalee Newitz, who wrote about her own concerns about the iPad for io9.com, Why the iPad is Crap Futurism. I think her summary of my point following the quote gets it exactly right.

As futurist Jamais Cascio told io9:

This is Apple's big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that's borderline acceptable, but it's not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers.

The iPad has all the problems of television, with none of the benefits of computers.

If I get one, it will be for the hands-on experience of seeing what kinds of uses I would have for a device that sits between a smart pocket device and a notebook computer. But I promise not to like it.

IEET's Mike Treder interviewed me on Bloggingheads.TV this week, and the video is now available. It runs about 45 minutes.

Egad, it's depressing. Sorry about that.

First time I've done one of these, and something that leapt out at me was that I can't seem to sit still. So, question for the viewers -- should I try to make a point of keeping still during something like this, or is being more "animated" a good thing?

Latest Fast Company is now up: Vampire Loads, White Roofs, and the Quest for Efficiency gives a shout-out to the newly-retired head of the California Energy Commission, Art Rosenfeld, and the benefits his policies have provided to California and, as other states adopt them and manufacturers adhere to them, the rest of the US.

Rosenfeld was, until his retirement, the head of the California Energy Commission, a state organization that shapes the rules surrounding electricity production and use in California. During Rosenfeld's 30-year tenure at the CEC, he made energy efficiency the overriding driver of regulatory policy, creating rules for everything from refrigerators (which now use only a quarter of the power that their less-fancy 1970s ancestors did) to "vampire loads" (the power still consumed by devices when turned off) to--most recently--the power consumed by flat screen televisions, which by some reports now account for nearly 10% of the power consumption in California.

And in doing so, is directly responsible for this remarkable fact: despite an explosion of consumer electronics, mobile gadgets, and personal computers of all types, energy use per-capita in California is the same as it was 30 years ago.

There are a couple of ways to look at this data point. You could say "See! With all of the effort we put into efficiency, people just find ways to keep using that power -- things never get better!" Or you could say "See! Through increasing efficiency, we can keep improving our quality of life without increasing the impact we have on the world!"

Which one is more persuasive depends on what kind of mood I'm in.

I've been awakened several times this week at 4am by 30+ mile-per-hour winds ripping through the bushes in the backyard, pushing the soaked metal table around on the stone patio. The rain is loud, but the wind somehow more disturbing, foreboding. And there's at least another week more of this to come.

California (and the western US as a whole) needs the rainfall, to be sure, but the intensity of the inundation in an El Niño cycle can itself be destructive -- flooding, mudslides, trees and power lines blown down, and so forth. California natives (like me) often joke about local news turing half an inch of rainfall into an OMGSTORMWATCH'010!!! environoia event, but when we're looking at getting close to a half-season's worth of rain over the course of a couple of weeks, the hyperbole is almost warranted. And rainfall arriving in torrential bursts doesn't soak in and store up as readily as slower, more spread out, showers.

And so our weather becomes a metaphor: we need the rain; the rain arrives, but it does so in a way that doesn't actually help much, and undermines other aspects of our lives. Sound like anything else going on these days?

Maintaining optimism when the storm is approaching its peak is difficult, at best. It's easy to fall victim to the 4am darkness. And, just maybe, it's good to let ourselves have that moment of despair. It's the despair, the fear, the sorrow that lets us truly appreciate the opportunities to act that will eventually come. The calm, clearing skies never look so good as they do after a terrifying storm; the tree limbs and broken fences littering the streets confirm the power of the wind and the rain, but in the breaking sunlight seem less like a nightmare made real, and more like a challenge to be cleared.

My 2010 calendar is filling up already!

I'm back to blogging at Fast Company, and my latest piece is now up: Innovation as Resource and China's New Magnetism.

The U.K.'s Independent reports that China has been gradually cutting the amount of rare-earth elements it exports, now down 40% from seven years ago. China now exports only 25% of the rare-earth elements it mines. [...]

So what are our options? We (as in, the non-China parts of the industrialized world) could try to pressure China to sell more, but that's unlikely to work--and China tends not to respond well to even mild criticism. We could try to rapidly reopen the now-closed rare-earth element mines, but mining is, frankly, an environmental nightmare and incredibly dangerous--hardly a sustainable practice.

Our best option is to innovate our way out of the problem.

China, and to a lesser (but increasing) extent India, can be seen as "leapfrog superpowers" -- undergoing a rapid shift in global status, a shift which remains incomplete. China has more influence and importance on the global stage than it is willing to admit (preferring to call itself a developing nation), but not nearly the power that some fear.

The question is, does the immense potential power of China (and India) make a leapfrog transition easier or harder?

When in Vienna a couple of months ago, I was interviewed for their newspaper Die Presse; that interview was finally published (although sadly/fortunately absent any of the pictures they took of me).

Futurologe: Die Zukunft passt wie angegossen

I suspect that the Austrian dialect of German is rather idiomatic, as the Google Translate version of the piece is especially nonsensical (in ways that you can't blame me for!). Anyone out there want to give a rough translation a shot?

(Update: We now have one translation from Torsten Meier in the comments, and other from Carmen Tschofen in the extended entry. Between the two of them, you should have a pretty good sense of the interview. Thanks, folks!)

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