13 Years of Futurism by Cultural Luminaries

Every year since 1998, EDGE, the quintessential arbiter of all things cool and compelling in the world of science and technology, has been asking some of the brightest thinkers and doers across the cultural spectrum to answer one big question about the future of science, technology and society at large. The answers are then published in an annual edition, which serves as a fascinating and illuminating timecapsule of the intelligencia’s collective conscience that year.

This week marks the release of Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future — the fantastic compendium of responses to last year’s question, featuring greats like Chris Anderson, Esther Dyson, Howard Gardner, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno and 167 more.

Here are the past 12 editions, a home library must-have for anyone interested in how technology is changing the way we think, do and live:

• 1998: What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?
• 1999: What Is The Most Important Invention In The Past 2000 Years… And Why?
• 2000: What Is Today’s Most Important Unreported Story
• 2001: What Now?
• 2002: What’s Your Question?
• 2003: What Are The Pressing Scientific Issues for the Nation and the World, and What Is Your Advice on How I Can Begin to Deal With Them?
• 2004: What’s Your Law?
• 2005: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It? (book)
• 2006: What Is Your Dangerous Idea? (book)
• 2007: What Are You Optimistic About (book)
• 2008: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why? (book)
• 2009: What Will Change Everything? (book)
• 2010: How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think? (book)

This year’s question is perhaps most important of all — because it has to do with improving the very wiring of our existence, human cognition: What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?, with the thoughtful disclaimer that “scientific” is used in the broadest sense possible, referring to the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything from spirituality to history to human genome. So important was the question, in fact, that Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioral economics, declared it his favorite question yet. “You will get responses and actually move the culture forward.”

Answers come from a remarkably eclectic roster of thinkers, including our friend and Wired UK Editor In Chief David Rowan (“personal data mining”), BoingBoing co-founder Xeni Jardin (“ambient memory and the myth of neutral observation”), The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal (“the new normal”), Wired founder Kevin Kelly (“the virtues of negative results”) and Clay Shirky (“The Pareto Principle”), among 159 others.

Both I as a citizen and society as a whole would gain if individuals’ personal datastreams could be mined to extract patterns upon which we could act. Such mining would turn my raw data into predictive information that can anticipate my mood and improve my efficiency, make me healthier and more emotionally intuitive, reveal my scholastic weaknesses and my creative strengths. I want to find the hidden meanings, the unexpected correlations that reveal trends and risk factors of which I had been unaware. In an era of oversharing, we need to think more about data-driven self-discovery.” ~ David Rowan

This year’s edition was dedicated to the late, great Denis Dutton (1944-2010), whose provocative theory of beauty we featured mere weeks before he passed away last month.

A handful of the annual questions are available in book form, we couldn’t recommend them more.

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HBO’s Temple Grandin: Recasting Autism

Nearly a year ago, we had the pleasure of seeing author, animal scientist, Hug Machine inventor, and avid autism advocate Temple Grandin speak at TED 2010. A few months later, HBO released the semi-biographical film Temple Grandin, telling the story of the woman whose extraordinary work recast autism as “different” rather than “lesser” in the public eye and used the power of visual thinking to create more humane systems for animal farming. With Claire Danes as Grandin in a surprisingly excellent fit and powerful delivery, HBO earned nominations in 15 Emmy categories and won 5 awards for a film that’s part living manifesto for following your gut, part new ethos for our relationship to animals.

The thing is, the normal mind drops out the details. But the autism mind sees all the details. That’s more like the animal mind, because animals are centric thinkers — they think in pictures, they think in smells, they think in sounds.” ~ Temple Grandin

The film is now out on DVD and we couldn’t recommend it more.

See the real thing in her element with this fantastic TED talk on the importance of diversity of minds.

For more of Grandin’s remarkable work, we highly recommend Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior — an absolutely fascinating and deeply illuminating read on one of the great mysteries of science and philosophy: What goes on in the minds of animals.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Remastered

It’s no secret we love Carl Sagan, who has done for science what John Szarkowski has for photography and Paola Antonelli for design. What pushed him into the forefront of cultural awareness was the now-iconic 1980s 13-part TV series he narrated and co-wrote, entitled Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which was digitally remastered in 2002 and is now available in a glorious 7-disc DVD set. Nearly 3 decades ago, Sagan, eloquent and prfound as ever, touches on a number of today’s most critical issues — from international politics to our doomed dependence on fossil fuels — as he explores the universe and our place within it.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” ~ Carl Sagan

Cosmos is an absolute cultural gem that we think should be required viewing in any education curriculum that purports to foster intellectual well-roundedness. The DVD set is well worth the investment, but you can also scour YouTube for segments from the different episodes.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.