Posts Tagged ‘Foresight’

When Water Futures Don’t Trickle Down

// February 14th, 2007 // Comments Off // Opinion

There’s something inherently frustrating about good futures work in a corporate environment. Early 2006 several Melbourne based futurists including Peter Hayward (Swinburne Masters of Strategic Foresight program director), Rowena Morrow (teacher in the course), Susan Oliver and I facilitated the development of a set of scenarios for South East Water.

Working with a cross-section of SEW staff and a wide array of stakeholder representatives – so as to include the ‘whole system’ in the process – the three key scenarios that emerged brought clarity to how different value systems and thinking styles could drive social responses to water. In Spiral Dynamics terms, we explored the possible responses of mythic, individualist and pluralistic worldviews and their signature preferences for a regulatory/rules based approach, a market forces economisation approach and a community ‘values leadership’ approach respectively, to the increasing water crisis. (more…)

We all knew this was coming….

// February 10th, 2007 // Comments Off // Opinion

Mind reading computers… we all knew this kind of technology was coming along, but did anyone really think they’d get the correlations between brain waves/localised activity and intention/meaning so quickly? And, have they really? Will they ever? From a stub article in The Age newspaper today:

A TEAM of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.The research builds on a series of recent studies in which brain imaging has been used to identify tell-tale activity linked to lying, violent behaviour and racial prejudice.

The latest work has prompted the researchers to call for an urgent debate on the ethical issues of the technology.

Here’s the original UK Guardian article and a nice comment on Slashdot.

(more…)

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