After a few years of cajoling, the organizers of the BIL conference (in particular, one Simone Syed) have finally broken me. I will be speaking at BIL 2012, on Saturday March 3. BIL will take place at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, and is open to the public. BIL runs in rough parallel to the (*much* more expensive and *much* more formal) TED conference; the pun at the heart of the conference's name ("BIL and TED" huh huh, huh huh) should give you a good reading of the original organizers' demographics and cultural background. But I digress.

I'll be giving a short talk -- 15-20 minutes seems to be the guideline -- on an as-yet undetermined topic. Here's where you, gentle reader, come in: what should I talk about?

There are some obvious choices, based on stuff I've written about or talked about at length before: geoengineering, human augmentation, ethics and robotics.

There are some choices based on stuff I've been mulling for awhile, topics that could either be a big smash or a big flop: social futures, the process of futurism/foresight thinking, what a successful sustainable future could look like.

Then there are the concepts I've written about or talked about, but are kind of outside my usual ideaspace: teratocracy, "we are as gods (but mostly like Loki)," the Fermi Paradox.

Again, it's only 15-20 minutes, so whatever I talk about will inevitably be more superficial or less detailed than one might wish.

Any suggestions?