Hawaii Futures

Halbert in Hawaii

2008-04-16T14:08:00.004-10:00

We are extremely pleased to announce that Dr. Deborah Halbert will be joining the Faculty of the UH Department of Political Science. The position itself, contributing to futures studies and public policy, is a tremendous boost to our program and the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. Having a scholar of Debbie's caliber elevates us even further. Her work on the politics of intellectual property law is first rate [see: Halbert CV], and is an area of prime importance for our collective ability to imagine and express alternative futures, and to create preferred futures.

The process to bring in a new futures faculty, though slow and difficult at times, has paid off in a fine result. We look forward to welcoming Debbie back to Hawaii this Fall and for great things to come.

Like a setting Sun

2008-04-14T10:59:00.004-10:00

Star-Bulletin politics reporter Richard Borreca laments the lack of vision and action among Hawaii's elected and non-elected leaders in a Sunday editorial.
Borreca's arguments are built on those made by our own Jim Dator, and are in-line with the noises the HRCFS has been making for some time.

Says Borreca:

For isolated economies, the first sign that you have flamed out might be that the planes stop flying to your airport on a regular basis.

There is a tipping point to governing. At one point you can grab something before it goes down the tubes. But there is a moment when it is going to slip away no matter how hard you try to pull back.

As James Schlesinger, the first energy secretary, put it: "We have only two modes -- complacency and panic."

and

Three years ago Dator wrote that the Hawaii's actual state plan was "built on the assumption of an expanding global supply of oil."

"A shrinking global supply of oil might be harmful for Hawaii's economy, reducing tourist arrivals, deflating real estate values and resulting in significant economic contraction," Dator and Honolulu engineer Manfred Zapka warned.

...

Dator reports that "things have gotten worse while the state has basically played the fiddle."

When one of the nation's leading futurists is so decidedly gloomy about our own options, the state's leaders might want to start making decisions for real and not for show.

For real though.

Justice Futures

2008-04-07T16:04:00.002-10:00

During the 01980s and early 90s, the HRCFS headed the Hawaii Judiciary Futures Research Project. The newsletter chronicling the project, Justice Horizons--Nou Hou Kanawai, has been posted at Metafuture, the website of Futurist and UH Alum, Sohail Inayatullah. We are looking forward to Sohail's return to Oahu for a short visit later this month.

Boogie Rights at SXSW

2008-03-22T10:48:00.007-10:00

/part 2 of 2/

South by Southwest Interactive 2008, Austin Convention Center, Ballroom B, March 11, 5pm Central Daylight Time.

Hauntingly familiar, but unplaceable organ music* fills the hall; on the large screen to stage right, the audience, filing in to see a panel on scenarios for social media in 2025, finds this curious image:

Just left of the lectern, on a pedestal in the middle of the stage is a...hmm...a stainless steel container, which looks somewhat like a turn-of-the-20th-Century diving helmet. Steam or smoke seems to waft out through its cracks. In front of the container is a framed picture of the man on the screen, only much older and carrying the countenance of hard-earned wisdom.

The Ballroom is full now; people are sitting along the walls and between rows of seats. The music fades, and a man--in Priest's garb?--addresses the audience, “Please be seated…”

And so began our South by Southwest Interactive presentation—a eulogy for one Eddie Adams, a.k.a Dirk Diggler, the protagonist in P.T. Anderson’s 1997 epic film Boogie Nights. For the next 20 minutes, we told the life-story of Eddie Adams through reflections and recollections of his Priest (Stuart Candy), his Lawyer (Jake Dunagan), and through his friend, lover, and co-star Rollergirl (played by the extraordinary Sandy “The War of Desire and Technology” Stone—thanks Sandy!).

Text of Rollergirl and the Lawyer's eulogies can be read here: MyDigglerEulogy.doc

About the scenario and experience

Scenarios are coherent stories about possible futures, but the context in which these stories are to be presented and received exerts a considerable influence on the content of the scenario and the representational strategies we choose. A contracted report to the Board of Directors of a Fortune 500 company creates a different landscape of possibility than a 15-minute presentation to a media-savvy festival audience. However, knowing the situational conventions of diverse contexts allows us to “play” with those conventions for maximum pedagogical utility. For the SXSW Interactive event, we felt like we could (and should) use the opportunity to experiment with affective forecasting, provocative performance art, and future-shock therapy.

The givens:
-the room: Ballroom B, capacity 300+
-day and time: March 11, 5pm (the last panel of the conference)
-the audience: SXSWers—media and technology oriented, well-educated, demographically skewing male and in the 25-40yr old age range.
-length of panel: 1 hour, to be divided by 4 panelists, so 12-15 minutes per presentation.

The variables:
-the generic scenario. Choice: top-down totalitarian control.
-the specific scenario. Choice: an Intellectual property-led media oligopoly.
-generic presentation format. Choice: a participatory, experiential scenario based around an event appropriate to and indicative of the world we envisioned for 2025.
-specific presentation content: Choice: A funeral service for Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler, with several eulogies in his honor.

Why Dirk Diggler?

The world of 2025 we had created was rich with productive tensions. It was a world ruled by entertainment and media companies, yet it locked-down content and expression—creating the ultimate permission culture. Everyone would be affected by this system—and the impact on social networks and media would be profound. We imagined the course of creativity in this world, especially for people who were supposed to make a living in the aesthetic economy. How would designers, musicians, filmmakers, writers, actors, and others navigate a world in which their creative output was centrally controlled? How would content be produced and distributed over communication networks? Who were the winners and losers?

We were confident on the general shape of the scenario, but we were struggling to find the most fruitful “tip of the iceberg” to evoke this world. So, Stuart suggested we turn to a classic Edward De Bono technique and choose a word at random to kick-start some lateral thinking. The first word that appeared was “lecher.” Now, neither Stuart or I would likely describe pornography as a necessarily lecherous endeavor, but certain conditioned responses made the cognitive bridge to the concept seemingly unavoidable.

Some of the most egregious abuses of IP (from our perspective) involve the increasing shrinkage of the public commons and the commodification of cultural knowledge and life itself. If the scope of control were extended to its most extreme, what else could be owned? Within a few seconds, we connected the top-down creative governance to pornography to one of the most famous names in porn—Dirk Diggler—to the alienation and ownership of Dirk’s most special gift. It basically wrote itself from there.

Why a Eulogy?

Knowing the space and layout of the facility where the event is to take place is a fundamental, but often under-appreciated, part of designing experience. We knew that we would have hundreds of audience members, sitting in rows, looking forward at a stage. With other presentations to follow, and limited time, we knew we couldn’t arrange or re-arrange the room too drastically. So Stuart and I began to brainstorm contexts in which people would be so situated, but somehow still directly involved in the proceedings. It adds to the impact of the experience, in our view, if the audience is somehow implicated in the performance. For example, in one of our Hawaii 2050 futures, audience members were cast as climate refugees, fresh off the boat from inundated Micronesian islands, and in the process of being forced into the citizen-soldier military of the Democratic Kingdom of Hawaii.

Two ideas began to hold out the most promise: an awards ceremony and a funeral service. The awards ceremony was inspired by scenes in Boogie Nights where Dirk receives several awards as the industry’s top actor. We thought about Dirk returning for a lifetime achievement award, and through the ceremony we could tell the story of how his image and publicity rights were sold and later abused, the court battles lost, and the power of media giants in conditioning our everyday lives.

Having suffered a recent loss in my family (to be unfortunately repeated in the subsequent weeks for both Stuart and me) I was intrigued by the process of narrativizing a life and the affective registers associated with a funeral service. And, as a funeral is an event which almost everyone has experienced at some point in their life, it gave us a formal structure and set of shared conventions in which to hang the performance.

As we fleshed it out, the funeral/eulogy experience seemed to hit all the right marks. It would immediately signal to the audience that a different kind of attention was required for this panel. It would put them in “up-time” as our colleague Matt Jensen likes to call it. Secondly, there was the right mixture (for our sensibilities) of absurdity and provocation in the concept of eulogizing a fictional porn star. The ready-made backstory helped us craft a narrative trajectory in which we could uncover the processes and choices that led to the “Dream Society” of 2025, and personalize the stakes involved for individuals and collectivities as well. Finally, we designed the scene to be humorous and fun, but even the parody of the sacred allowed us to show the profanity that over-reaching intellectual property laws could have on expression and basic freedoms.

This format also gave us clear genre conventions around which to imagine and design artifacts and images. We knew we would have a funeral announcement (see previous post, which we distributed around the festival in the days leading up to the panel), a slideshow with images from key moments in Eddie/Dirk’s life, and other items such as protest signs from Eddie’s trials, a ‘Che Guevara’-like icon shot of Eddie, and movie posters from his career, post Boogie Nights.**

Long, Strange Trip

We did not want to waste a great opportunity to push ourselves in new experimental directions, to make an alternative future for 2025 come alive in a meaningful way, and to create a memorable experience for the SXSW audience. In this I think we succeeded. We also had a great time at the festival, and contributed the best we could to keeping Austin weird.

*"Living Thing" by Electric Light Orchestra, transformed into a funeral dirge by John Maus. Thanks John.

**Samples seen in this post. Thanks to designers Melissa Jordan and her team at PinkerGreen Design or their spot-on designs and our fellow asylum inmates-- designers Eliot Frick and Matt Jensen, for their willingness to contribute intellectually and creatively to this absurd concept.

SXSW Interactive Report

2008-03-19T06:46:00.005-10:00

/part 1 of 2/

How will people communicate and what will social networking look like in 2025? That was one of the guiding questions for the South by Southwest Interactive panel: Futurists’ Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies.

Stuart and I, along with panel organizer Michele Bowman (Global Foresight Associates), Wayne Pethrick (Pitney-Bowes), and Jamais Cascio (IFTF and Open the Future) participated in this unique event--which those who attended will not soon forget.

We began working on the panel in January, starting with group discussions on emerging issues in social media and technologies and how these would interact with larger global trends. After surveying the landscape through our initial conversations, we developed four distinct, but generic, future worlds. From these futures we would imagine and write specific scenarios involving social technologies and the shape of human interaction.

The generic futures were:

Mobilization—A top-down world of government and corporate power. Consolidation against terrorism and the rise of eco-mercenaries to go after rogue carbon emitters, and a strong centralization urge.

Community—A bottom-up world of distributed networks and localism. Open models do well here, but so do open-source guerillas.

Challenge—global warming, peak oil, and the failure of resilience. Some parts of the world are worse than others, but nobody’s very happy.

Transfiguration—Better computers enables early-stage nanomanufacturing enables emergent AI enables full molecular manufacturing enables full artificial general intelligence systems. All in about 3 months.

We each 'volunteered' for one of the four alternative futures, and then each created a logically coherent and consistent story within that future. Stuart and I chose the totalitarian, control future. Combining our concern with expanding IP rights and their impact on expression and freedom, we decided to integrate elements of the aesthetic economy, IP expansion, and surveillance culture--thus creating a disturbing totalitarian corporate-state. In this world, social media and networked communication would have to navigate a field of technological and legal impediments, all built on the logic of complete and absolute content control.

Our co-panelists had their own creative approaches to their scenarios--the results are presented here:

Mobilization:

The Total Dream State: A Eulogy for Eddie Adams

Stuart Candy & Jake Dunagan

The aesthetic economy, including the communications, entertainment, design, culture and other content industries, has become the dominant economic and political force in early 21st Century states. These industries emerged from the economic and energy upheavals of the 2010s consolidated, efficient, and with a clear agenda (and the means) for further growth. The aesthetic economy quickly transformed into the Dream Society, conditioning all the ways people communicate and express themselves. Seizing on weakened governments, and leveraging their increased economic power, corporate media giants lobbied for and received unprecedented legal mandates to control, monitor, and enforce the intellectual property rights held in their content, media, technological platforms, and distributed wireless digital networks. Protecting copyright, patents, and ever extending IP rights became part of U.S. national security policy, dictated by the business models of the content oligopoly. Select corporations (the Big 5, and later the Little 2) were given access to Department of Homeland Security surveillance and field agents to find and prosecute alleged infringers and pirates. The Content Security Act of 2011 and the International Anaheim Treaty on Trade and Tariffs(ATTT) of 2015 criminalized a wide array of content and information sharing and established severe penalties for those found guilty in the tribunal courts. The United States and much of the rest of the world became a de-facto version of the Hollywood "studio system" from the early 20th Century, this time on a global scale and with total vertical control.

No one exemplified the rise of the Dream Society (and its impact on individual and collective liberty) more than Eddie Adams, a.k.a Dirk Diggler. From a small-town kid in Ohio, to the face of the Golden Age of pornography, to the icon of the free-culture resistance, and up until his tragic end, Eddie's life is a testament to the vicissitudes of freedom and the enormous stakes of the current struggle. Please join us on March 11th, as we pay tribute to the man and celebrate the legend.

Design: Eliot Frick

Community:

DATAPOINTS® the personal data marketplace

Wayne Pethrick

The world, like the network that connects it, is always on, wide-open and flat-out fast. In terms of social technologies, bottom-up distributed networks have made their presence felt, manifested by unbridled lifestreaming otherwise known as sousveillance by those over 50, and self-veillance for those under.

In this future, data flows free like acronyms during a corporate powerpoint presentation (which, incidentally, is where we find ourselves today). Data is highly valued, a point now recognized by the average consumer largely through the establishment of a marketplace for information and data. To command top dollar, those generating data must keep their information clean (i.e. verified) and, where possible, contained. The principles of supply and demand still apply, if your data is of good quality and there is not a glut of it on the market, you can do well.

Enter the precocious star of this future scenario, a company called DATAPOINTS. Specializing in data verification, consolidation and trading, DATAPOINTS provides consumers with the products and services to secure and unite their information into a holistic data profile, the kind that organizations, both commercial and governmental, are always interested in acquiring.
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the DATAPOINTS Shareholder Meeting for 2025.

Challenge:

Can You See Me Now?

Michele Bowman

As our information technologies continue to propagate the world, the electronic exhaust of our click stream is generating unprecedented amounts of metadata. Rather than a useless by-product, however, metadata is a valuable resource, an untapped gold mine of previously invisible patterns, desires, intentions and relationships.

Social technologies are emerging to help us navigate, control, connect and leverage metadata, helping us make the invisible visible. How can we recycle and repurpose metadata to expose the hidden layers of connections between people, objects and environments? How will it be instantiated into the world and the Internet of things?

In the future, will we use metadata judiciously, or will we create a world of characterized by information obesity? Can you see me now? explores the social, legal and political implications of the evolving relationship between social technologies and metadata.

see Fringehog for more on Michele's scenario.

Transfiguration:

Turn Off, Unplug, Drop Out

Jamais Cascio

Welcome to the Last Chance Session, potential Drop-Outs!
In a all-too-near world of nanomanufacturing, emerging machine intelligence, radical gene therapies, ultra-smart environments, and an all-pervasive, always watching global network, some people just don't want to fit in. In a free, open society, removing yourself from the network is an entirely valid choice -- but it's a choice with consequences. The visitors in the audience are at the last point in the process, and have one more chance to decide whether or not to drop out.
The brief session will cover what they'll gain and what they'll lose by dropping out.

Topics include:
Reputation networks
Environmental awareness
Augmented reality
Community relations
Taxes (it always comes down to taxes)

At the end of the discussion, the audience will be asked to make their decision -- do they drop out, or hook back up?

Jamais' post at Open the Future.

As you can see, these summaries also reveal the presentation format we chose to represent the scenarios at SXSW. Again, we move from general to specific, as the presentations were but "the tip of the iceberg" of the scenarios themselves. Very much in the vein of the Hawaii 2050 kickoff event, we chose not to simply present or read the scenarios as is, but rather to create brief experiential performances, supplemented with tangible artifacts and images from this future (see the funeral announcement above). We enacted a interpretively rich scene to serve as a metonym for the larger world in which it exists. For our scenario, we chose to tell the story of the locked-down Dream Society through a eulogy for Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler from P.T. Anderson's film Boogie Nights [details of this concept and performance in part 2] .

There was no indication in the SXSW festival materials that our group would be ‘performing’ scenes from our scenarios, and, after some debate, we decided not to preface the panel with an explanation of the method. This was a risky choice, and with access to the active twitterati and audience members commenting live on the SXSW Meebo chatrooms, we could see that the reaction to the panel was mixed, but passionate. Still, for what might be risked in subverting audience expectation, we feel this performative, immersive technique is much more effective at engaging the audience at both emotional and intellectual levels—creating an unusual, thought-provoking and memorable event.

Of all the work we have done at the HRCFS during my tenure, this was the most completely realized embodiment of Dator's 2nd Law.

Details of the Diggler Eulogy next...

Trusting emergence on the fly

2008-01-29T12:56:00.000-10:00

Invisible, perfect avian motorways, made physical by the bodies of the birds.
[...]
They start out flying in the groups they've been feeding with all day, and slowly merge into bigger and ever denser flocks.

I've spent hours watching and never seen a collision. How can that be possible?

~Dylan Winter, (filmmaker) "Starlings on Ot Moor", February 02007.

This astonishing video of emergent order was sent by in by designer extraordinaire Matt Jensen (via Motion Abbey). Thanks Matt!

Unimaginable?

2008-01-27T18:01:00.000-10:00

In a world of accelerating change, when novelties increasingly outpace continuities, how can we, as futures-oriented global citizens and educators, accept that only 6% of a population of almost 800,000 are ready for this possibility? How many Katrinas must we suffer before we wake up?

Report: 94% Of South Dakotans Unprepared For Mt. Rushmore Faces Coming Alive And Eating Everyone

Thinking fifth dimensionally

2008-01-24T17:50:00.000-10:00

This 12 minute short uses simple diagrams, animation and sound effects to introduce thinking in ten dimensions. It's based on a book by Canadian composer Rob Bryanton (blog). Check it out.

Now, a few thoughts:

First, we have here a powerful demonstration of visual communication. This single posting of the video above (link) has logged over half a million hits, probably well under the total number of views, since it's also been posted multiple times at YouTube, and no doubt elsewhere too. A pretty impressive audience for such a complex thought experiment.

Second, and building on the first point, a clear explication of the fifth dimension offers a way to visualise and conceptualise a logical (as I say, not necessarily ontological) mechanism that enables alternative futures. Things could be other than they are, and, looking forward (temporally), possibility space encompasses many, many potential paths. Monofuturistic, predictive thinking appears to presuppose only four dimensions -- i.e., unilinear time. The fifth dimension allows room for alternative futures, which makes sense of what happens when we exercise choice, as well as chaotic contingency.

Third, even though the explanation is couched in a simplified language of theoretical physics, a frame which invites evaluation of correctness, I'm not especially interested in whether the claims in this video are true (ontologically correct). For one thing, there may not be any way to test them (i.e., folding the 5th dimension, or higher). But the point is, to me, what's more interesting to me than ontological accuracy is what the consequences might be of lots of people thinking this way and taking it seriously. We don't need to take a special interest in the truth question in order to discuss the potential consequences of it becoming a social truth -- an influential meme. Could it lead to a greater or more widespread sense of personal and political agency? Or at least, a growing desire to explore future possibilities more creatively and systematically? The latter, I suppose, is probably my bias and my hope. What if lots more people are able to wrap their heads around this approach? That question is what excites me about this little video, and the tip of the iceberg of explanatory power that it represents. This illustrates my pragmatist's epistemology: what do certain beliefs, or types of belief, lead to, and what do they enable us to do?

One last thing. Funny that the hyperlinked ads that appeared after the animation screened for me at the book's website (Flash 8 required) all had to do with The Secret and other New Agey concerns. I wonder if this intersection of physics and pop culture (also witness: What the Bleep do We Know?) is leading to pop culture getting smarter, or physics just getting diluted beyond all recognition?

Thinking fifth dimensionally, I guess the answer is: both.

OLPC ARRIVES

2008-01-23T15:25:00.000-10:00

So someone tell me what the future of education is?

Yea, I don't know either, probably a bunch of bumblers bumbling around with a new fangled cheap computer for poor people

erm, yea, thats the future of education and its arrived!!!

With pictures even!

I received a darn olpc computer for xmas, (someone thinks i'm neat!! They're obviously high!)

Its basically a 500 mghz computer running on linux with 3 usb ports, a small web keyboard, a wireless router (can create mesh networks) and VIDEO GAMES!!!

Yea, there's education software and other things that the educationally inclined might care about.

But the best part is it HAS DOOM!!!!! Yes, all we need is one more opportunity to run around and kill people. Hey, it'll reduce stress in the third world, I SWEAR!! Math teacher pissin you off? Might as well kill her a thousand times in doom!! I don't make this up, honest!

It also comes with Sim City, the original version, vut as much as its great to make godzilla run around and kill people, I like the personal doom version best!!

I could talk about all the great education opportunities this thing has, such as a neato word program, soon to be an excel program, some music and programming stuff. But really, who cares? Its all about a small portable killing machine! I'm really getting my homework done now!!!

Ok, so I'm done, but I've attached some pics for the curious! Any questions, let me know, and I'll try and respond, but also check out http://wiki.laptop.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1 for more background.

Peace out!

Da Gompernator!

Here is a pic of just the laptop

Here is the open laptop, the little rabbit ears are for the wireless router.
There is a little gamepad on the screen and 2 speakers. The screen can pivot on that little
metal thing you see in the middle, so that it can be a pdf reader and save energy.

We all know what computers are really for!!
Running around and killing people!
Hey, better killin computers than killin people, right??
Any takers, anyone??
I haven't figured out multi-player support yet, but I'm sure it will happen eventually.

The futurist's futurist

2008-01-16T13:28:00.000-10:00

For more than 35 years, HRCFS, under the guidance of Director Jim Dator, has helped individuals and organisations of all kinds explore alternative futures, as well as training several generations of consulting and academic futurists, in the art of inventing and pursuing preferred futures.

But what about preferred futurists?

Exciting news from the futures community: Jim Dator tops the list.

Says Mike Jackson (via email), Chairman of UK-based foresight intelligence service Shaping Tomorrow:

In a recent poll, Shaping Tomorrow asked its 600+ futurists members in its Foresight Network to say who their favourite futurist was of all time. Hazel Henderson and Jim Dator shared topsite with Joe Coates in third.

It's worth pointing out that Dator is the only full-time academic of the three, which is significant because despite his extensive, ongoing extracurricular work as a consultant and speaker, the respect he has earned among futures practitioners comes through his influence as a teacher and colleague, more than through being a public figure.

So, this poll result -- honour though it certainly is -- does not come as a complete shock to us, Dator's colleagues and students. He has over the years taught and mentored hundreds of students here in Hawaii, and challenged and transformed the thinking of thousands of clients and others, in audiences all around the world. Although we can be sure in view of his astonishing modesty that he won't particularly relish the attention, it remains for us to say --

Thank you, Jim, and congratulations!

TED-ucation

2007-12-05T14:25:00.000-10:00

Sir Ken Robinson gives a thoroughly entertaining account of the shortcomings of industrial paradigm education, and the need for encouraging creativity and the freedom to make (gasp!) mistakes in order to prepare students for uncertain futures.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
TED Talks, Monterey, CA Feb 02006

Explore Chinatown's futures

2007-11-14T14:28:00.000-10:00

What futures for Honolulu's Chinatown?

Residents, business owners, and others will have an opportunity to reflect on this question as the FoundFutures:Chinatown project culminates at the end of this week. HRCFS is staging a free futures workshop in the city this Saturday afternoon, to coincide with the end of the Alternative Urban Futures exhibition at The Arts at Marks Garage.

Here's the text of the above flyer that we're distributing around the neighbourhood to draw interested parties out of the woodwork. By all means, pass this around and encourage people to attend if they wish.

EXPLORE CHINATOWN'S FUTURES

Cultural museum, corporate investment engine, outpost of a new global power, quarantined ground-zero, transformed society?

Utilizing innovative techniques, and building on the response to the distributed installation of "artifacts from the future" in and around Chinatown, the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS) invites you to expand your thinking about possibility and participate in a guided exploration of alternative futures for the district. Led by renowned futurist Jim Dator and FoundFutures:Chinatown creators Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, this workshop offers residents, community leaders, business owners, and others a unique chance to think beyond short-term concerns and dig deeper into Chinatown's past, present, and possible futures.

The workshop is free of change, and takes place at The Arts at Mark's Garage [cnr Nuuanu and Pauahi, in Chinatown], this Saturday 17 November from noon to 4pm. Space is limited, please RSVP to info at foundfutures dot com or call 808.956.2888.

Reminder: Futures Faculty Opening

2007-11-08T14:48:00.000-10:00

Assistant Professor, Position No. #82278, Department of Political Science, College of Social Science, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, full-time, 9-month, tenure track appointment, to begin August 1, 2008.

Duties: Teach graduate and undergraduate courses in public policy and futures studies; conduct and publish research; share in advising; contribute to departmental, college, and community life and to the development of the public policy concentration; seek extramural funding.

Minimum Qualifications: Ph.D. in Political Science or a related field. [ABD with all requirements for degree completed by August 1, 2008, considered]. Demonstrated ability to teach and conduct research in public policy.

Desired Qualifications: Applicant should demonstrate the ability to identify and analyze continuing and emerging issues in policy analysis in contexts of accelerating change and uncertainty in the near- and long-term, and to use critical and futures-oriented approaches to address major questions such as globalization, climate change, energy, new technologies, health, and demographic change and mobility. The ability to contribute to one or more of the other parts of the Department's curriculum such as political theory, governance, comparative politics, indigenous politics, and global politics is also highly desirable. Selected candidate should be committed to innovative educational strategies and work with students with diverse backgrounds and experiences. The College is committed to excellence in scholarship and favors candidates who are collegial and attentive to issues of race, gender, sexuality and other dimensions of diversity.

Salary Range: Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.

To Apply: Send a dossier that includes a curriculum vita, a writing sample, a sample course syllabus, a statement of teaching philosophy, and at least three letters of reference, to Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Chair, Political Science Department, 640 Saunders Hall, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822.

Closing Date: Review of applications will begin on January 10, 2008 and will continue until the position is filled.

EEO/AA Employer

Wow!

2007-11-08T08:25:00.000-10:00

I could talk about the future of extreme sports, or the continuing search for new thrills, but how about just...wow.

FF : Chinatown Press Round-up

2007-11-05T11:40:00.000-10:00

The FoundFutures:Chinatown project has received quite a bit of attention. See links and excerpts below.

David A.M. Goldberg reviews the gallery show in this Sunday's Honolulu Advertiser:

In the same spirit with which Kalakaua went to centers of European power to negotiate on behalf of colonized Pacific Island people, the group FoundFutures samples and repurposes the visual language that colonizes us today. From recognizable branding strategies to government-style posters, FoundFutures projects look at current political, ecological and socioeconomic situations and projects them forward by 10 to 20 years.

"Birdcage," the story of the 2016 H8N2 or "Hang Ten Flu" flu epidemic in Hawai'i, is the most thoroughly realized. FoundFutures, led by University of Hawai'i graduate students Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, crafted everything from the government's quarantine zone maps to this-property-is-condemned posters, to the 9/11-style missing-persons fliers that citizens would post in the wake of forced quarantines. The finishing touch is a tourism poster for Maui (unscathed by the flu, how?) which proudly declares that the island is "Still Paradise."

Typically cinema is the chosen medium for visualizing the future. By installing elements of their projects in the urban fabric itself, FoundFutures turns Chinatown into a movie set of sorts, approaching the level of production design that goes into films like "Children of Men."

A review in today's Star Bulletin:

"It is unique and surprising and stretches the expectation of what to find in a gallery."[-Richardson.]

The exhibit actually began outside the gallery on the streets of Chinatown in early October, when Marks Garage helped the collaborative multimedia group FoundFutures present four scenarios of the district's future via agitprop (political perspectives communicated through art).

Fictitious ads were plastered along Chinatown streets that had some folks worried. One scenario, titled "McChinatown," for instance, utilized posters announcing the arrival of such franchises as Starbucks.

Two earlier articles about the 'ambient' installation in Chinatown:

15 October Advertiser story

Coming soon to Chinatown: a Starbucks, TGI Friday's, American Apparel and luxury lofts priced at $2.5 million each?

No, but that's what several signs announced earlier this month in what turned out to be a controversial campaign by two University of Hawai'i doctoral students to get Chinatown residents talking about their community's future.

21 October Star-Bulletin story

It was part public installation art, part social experiment, and only the first of more scenarios to come.

The intention, according to Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, was to manifest a possible future for the district, and simulate a real scenario to get business owners, residents and others engaged in a discussion about what they would like the neighborhood to become.

Their goal was to get a conversation started -- and the dialogue has begun.

Reactions were both emotional and intellectual. Many were fooled by the hoax, some angry, some apathetic and yet others amused.

The pair fielded a range of public responses, from those who were perfectly appalled at the corporate invasion, to those who welcomed Starbucks as a sign of economic achievement.

Blog reactions:

Doug White Poinography
Michele Bowman The Verge
and Stuart Candy The Sceptical Futuryst

Requiem for Fossil Fuels

2007-10-31T11:00:00.000-10:00

...and just when we thought we were ahead of the curve, comes this...

A four-member choir, dressed in downtown black, sang ecclesiastic music in Latin while truck horns, the screech of brakes and other sounds emanated from elevated speakers encircling the main hall in Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.

The New York Times
October 28, 2007

The Music of the Gears
By J.R. BRANDSTRADER

FOR sanity’s sake, most New Yorkers try to keep the city’s cacophony at bay. But the composers Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, who go professionally by the name O+A, insist that the time to listen is now, before it is too late. In their opinion, the bell tolls for the sounds generated by oil-fueled transportation because fossil fuels are running out. Yet how do you say goodbye to fuel?

The composers offered an answer one recent Friday evening with a piece called “Requiem for Fossil Fuels.” A four-member choir, dressed in downtown black, sang ecclesiastic music in Latin while truck horns, the screech of brakes and other sounds emanated from elevated speakers encircling the main hall in Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.

It was as if the hundred members of the audience were at the bottom of a sonic bowl while the two composers, sitting at their laptops, channeled their digitized collection of discordant urban sounds from around the world. The clamorous results left some members of the audience staring at the air to see what might come next. Others kept their eyes squeezed shut, the better to absorb the unusual soundscape.

“The acoustic mayhem made me think of Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” said the actor Andre Gregory, who appeared in the film “My Dinner With Andre” and has worked with Mr. Odland in the theater. “It was terrifying.”

A highlight of the performance was a plaintive rendition of the Kyrie Eleison, the portion of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass that asks for mercy, in this case from the incessant petro-fueled din. And any commuter who regularly passes through Grand Central Terminal would sympathize with the composers’ efforts to make the Dies Irae audible above the failing brakes of an arriving train.

A visual artist named Marcy B. Freedman, who was in the audience, said she particularly admired the way the composers blended noise and classical voices. “It pulled my attention away from my usual visual perspective to a hearing perspective,” Ms. Freedman said after the concert as she headed into the raucous bustle of Washington Square South.

The composers regard their composition as both a warning and a salute to a dying way of life. One section of the requiem was sung over the sound of cars speeding along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; another made use of the roar of a helicopter taking off near Wall Street.

“Using all that oil to transport one or two people is a glorious display of power,” Mr. Odland said. Matter-of-factly, he predicted that in 20 years, all helicopters would be grounded for lack of fuel.

Thanks to Ira Rohter for the reference.

Come on feel the noise

2007-10-28T17:22:00.001-10:00

Jim Dator responds to this article in today's Honolulu Advertiser on the new sounds of Chinatown:

On the heels of the excellent publicity that Jake Dunagan, Stuart Candy, and Shanah Trevenna have been receiving recently, a tip of the futures hat to Stephen Lohse who also received outstanding photo and text coverage about his views on Chinatown in the Honolulu Advertiser for Saturday, October 27.

Although I must chide Stephen for complaining about the noise in Chinatown, as least as reported in the article.

One reason I like living in the heart of Hawaii's heavy-industry district, Waikiki, is because of the constantly rising and falling wail of sirens; the pulsing, deep-seated throb of slowly-passing woofers; the fighting, cursing, vomiting, and blood-curdling screaming when the bars let out at 12, 2, and 4 AM; the screech of poorly-maintained street-sweeping trucks, and the roar and fumes of the first morning buses competing with the grinding rage of beeping garbage trucks racing down the street underneath my window at full speed--in reverse--with the attendants, leaning out, barely holding on, and shouting gleefully like harpies heralding doom.

Ah the sounds of life, of urban life.

Cherish it, Stephen, while the dwindling oil and money flows, and dread the coming silence.

Samsung Dream

2007-10-22T10:17:00.000-10:00

The following is a video on the "Dream Society" produced by the Samsung Corporation. It features our own Jim Dator.

Coming soon

2007-09-30T20:24:00.000-10:00

...to a drugstore near you:

Inhale™ Health Enhancing Cigarettes

Garden of Eden™ Neurofoods ®

Memogum™ Chewable memory sticks

Transgendrin™

FoundFutures codirector Jake Dunagan and I recently took a few snaps of some of the futures artifacts designed for us last year by Hawaii-based graphic artists Sky Kiyabu and Steve Kiyabu (who claim to be unrelated).

These hypothetical products are not photoshop confections, but rather tangible items that are intended to be encountered physically, on an unexpected and serendipitous basis, out in the world. So that's where we like to put them. But real space has its limitations, and while we wait impatiently for Internet and other technologies to enable sensory experience in four dimensions, these 2D shots will have to suffice.

Incidentally, the first nine images currently posted in the Gallery at Sky Kiyabu's website are from designs featured in the experiential scenario rooms at the Hawaii 2050 kickoff last August.

Artifacts from the future are very much on our minds again as gear up for the next project in the series of FoundFutures interventions. We're very excited but can't say too much more at this point, except watch this space for more. And Chinatown, Honolulu, if you're in the vicinity.

[From the sceptical futuryst weblog.]

Seeking New Futures Faculty

2007-09-27T21:04:00.000-10:00

The Department of Political Science and the College of Social Sciences have approved the creation of a new public-policy/futures studies tenure-track position and are currently searching for candidates. Please see the note below for details of the appointment and application procedures. This is very good news for the program and the HRCFS.

Assistant Professor, Position No. #82278, Department of Political Science, College of Social Science, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, full-time, 9-month, tenure track appointment, to begin August 1, 2008.

Duties: Teach graduate and undergraduate courses in public policy and futures studies; conduct and publish research; share in advising; contribute to departmental, college, and community life and to the development of the public policy concentration; seek extramural funding.

Minimum Qualifications: Ph.D. in Political Science or a related field. [ABD with all requirements for degree completed by August 1, 2008, considered]. Demonstrated ability to teach and conduct research in public policy.

Desired Qualifications: Applicant should demonstrate the ability to identify and analyze continuing and emerging issues in policy analysis in contexts of accelerating change and uncertainty in the near- and long-term, and to use critical and futures-oriented approaches to address major questions such as globalization, climate change, energy, new technologies, health, and demographic change and mobility. The ability to contribute to one or more of the other parts of the Department's curriculum such as political theory, governance, comparative politics, indigenous politics, and global politics is also highly desirable. Selected candidate should be committed to innovative educational strategies and work with students with diverse backgrounds and experiences. The College is committed to excellence in scholarship and favors candidates who are collegial and attentive to issues of race, gender, sexuality and other dimensions of diversity.

Salary Range: Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.

To Apply: Send a dossier that includes a curriculum vita, a writing sample, a sample course syllabus, a statement of teaching philosophy, and at least three letters of reference, to Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Chair, Political Science Department, 640 Saunders Hall, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822.

Closing Date: Review of applications will begin on January 10, 2008 and will continue until the position is filled.

EEO/AA Employer

Judicial Foresight Revisited

2007-09-21T14:49:00.000-10:00

The following is the text of Jim Dator's presentation to the Senior Management Team of the Hawaii State Judiciary. As many of our readers know, Jim and the HRCFS were leaders in the creation and development of Judicial Foresight in Hawaii, the U.S., and around the world.

Judicial Foresight: Then, now, and tomorrow for the Hawaii Judiciary

For the Senior Management Team
Intermediate Court of Appeals Conference Room
September 12, 2007

The last time I appeared before some of you, at the Judicial Foresight Conference of 1991, I was dressed as the Energizer Bunny perpetually beating the big bass drum of judicial foresight. You may not see my ears and drum today, but judicial foresight is still very much on my mind and in my heart.

The Evolution of Judicial Foresight:

What eventually became judicial foresight actually was born in the world's first and so far still best exercise of citizen-based Anticipatory Democracy, called "Hawaii 2000", a set of extensive and intensive islandwide activities carried out in 1969-1970.

CJ William Richardson and Chief Court Administrator Lester Cingcade and other members of the Hawaii judiciary participated in those activities, and decided that the judiciary should have its own futures visioning conference which resulted in the Citizens' Conference on the Administration of Law in 1972, sponsored in part by the American Judicature Society. That conference was as groundbreaking and spectacular as was the culminating conference for Hawaii 2000, featuring outstanding speakers from around the world and in Hawaii. I recall a play produced by a group of inmates in Hawaii's prisons, and the impressive presence of Sammy Amalu who was himself just recently released from prison. We also produced a very extravagant multimedia presentation--with six slide projectors and two 16 mm motion picture projectors for that conference titled "A Dowager in a Hurricane: Futures of Law and Justice". Those WERE the days!

The citizen's conference resulted in the creation of a futures group within the judiciary in the early 1970s which included the CJ, Cingcade, Bambi Weil, Nathan Kim, Greg Sugimoto, and Wayne Yasutomi, among others. One of the results was the first state judicial plan which among other innovations identified and then planned for the five different dimensions for the judiciary--a groundbreaking document that inspired judiciaries worldwide.

Strategic planning is heavily influenced by who participates--and who does not. We learned, through bitter experience, that when we drew up a plan based largely upon extensive participation by the people who work in the courts, the resulting plan may address their needs, but not those of most other people who use the courts. It turned out, after a year of workshops, that the number one issue that the personnel working in the courts wanted the strategic plan to solve was parking--specifically, the fact that the secretaries and clerks of newly-appointed judges got better parking spots than did secretaries and clerks of standing judges. It was unfair, they said, and something should be done about it.

Well, it probably was, but that is not what we planners thought the main focus of our plan should be. We imagined it might be about equal access of all parties to the courts, or justice, or speedy trials, or the like. Those simply weren't things that concerned people who viewed the courts as merely a place where they happened to work.

And so we took time out and thought carefully about all the things the judiciary actually does ,and ended up identifying the five dimensions of the judiciary. We then drew up a plan that paid appropriate attention to each dimension.

Chapter Six, "The Conceptual Framework of the Judiciary", of Comprehensive Planning in the Hawaii Judiciary, (1981), lists the five dimensions, along with their respective mission statements:

Dimension I: The Judiciary as a Branch of Government

Mission 1: To uphold the Constitution--the government it creates, the rights and liberties it guarantees, and the policies and principles which it embodies.

Dimension II: the Judiciary as a Dispute Resolution Forum

Mission 2: To ensure to the people of the State the highest standard of justice attainable under our system of government by assuring an equitable and expeditious resolution of all cases and controversies properly brought to the state courts.

Dimension III: The Judiciary as a Public Agency

Mission 3: To provide for, promote, and ensure the effective, economical, and efficient utilization of public resources in the administration of the judicial system.

Dimension IV: The Judiciary as a Subsystem of the Legal System

Mission 4: To promote the effective and expeditious administration of justice by and among the various subsystems of the legal system.

Dimension V: The Judiciary as an Institution of a Changing Society

Mission 5: To anticipate and respond to the changing judicial needs of society.

Some of these dimensions--especially number one--were quite controversial. In spite of paying lip service to belief in the "separation of powers" of government into three equal branches--legislative, executive and judicial--in fact courts, especially state courts, are not very "independent", typically being highly dependent on the legislature for funding, and on the executive for budgeting, supplies, and personnel administration. That the Hawaii judiciary proudly proclaimed independence according to the separation of power doctrine, and actively sought it, is still a point of political contention.

And of course, Dimension V, which announces the judiciary's obligation to engage in judicial foresight, is the most inspiring, from my point of view, and perhaps the most controversial, of all.

But the Hawaii judiciary assumed its responsibilities under this dimension.

In itially, for meetings of the futures group, the HRCFS presented lists of scans of things to come, and the group then decided what from the list to analyze in more detail for their possible impact on the judiciary and how to prepare for them. That process eventually led to the creation of a futures unit within judiciary's Office of Statistics and Planning, and for a decade graduate students in the UH futures program provided two kinds of futures reports for the judiciary--one called “On the horizon”--things that were about to hit the judiciary in two or three years, and the other titled “Over the horizon”--reports about things with a longer time scale, such as the challenges of genetic engineering, which, as you know, have emerged rapidly after the completion of the human genome project a few years ago. Another example of an "over the horizon report" was the very first serious paper ever written on the rights of robots. And as you may also know, last year, first the government of the UK and then the government of Korea have established formal committees to come up with guidelines dealing with ethical relations between humans and artificial intelligence and robots. Both of these committees cite the Hawaii judicial foresight report of 1987 as the prime source in this area.

There are many other examples of Hawaii's leadership in judicial foresight over the years. But equally significant is that Hawaii's pioneering example is continuing to flow as a growing tsunami around the world. Hawaii's work in judicial foresight was initially repeatedly presented from the mid 1970s through the early 1990s at the annual meetings of the National Conference of Chief Justices and the National Conference of Court Administrators especially during the time when CJ Richardson and Chief Court Administrator Cingcade were active in the leadership of those organizations.

Among many other things, those presentations inspired Chief Justice Harry Carrico, Court Administrator Ron Baldwin, and Kathy Mays, head of the planning department of the Virginia judiciary, to study, institute, and substantially improve upon the futures work of the Hawaii judiciary. After a statewide futures conference in 1987, Virginia adopted a judicial plan that incorporates futures goals and policies into it, and has hired personnel with sufficient budgets to see that they are routinely carried out and that the long-range vision is regularly revisited and renewed As part of that process, the HRCFS has conducted long-range environmental scans every two or three years so that the Virginia judiciary can update its policies, plans and actions.

In 1990, there was a nationwide conference on the Future and the Courts in San Antonio, co-sponsored by the State Justice Institute and the American Judicature Society, in which Hawaii and Virginia where prime actors. A book based on the conference, and an instruction manual and video on how to do judicial foresight were all subsequently produced by the HRCFS and the Institute for Alternative Futures in cooperation with the National Center for State Courts.

In addition, the SJI, led by John Daffron, Chief Judge for the 12th Judicial Circuit of Virginia , made "Futures and the Courts" a major funding category, and a decade of futures work of many varieties was carried out in all state judiciaries with SJI funding. "Futures and the Courts" as a SJI funding category ended in 2000, but currently the National Center for State Courts is actively evaluating and elevating futures work within state judiciaries. During the month of May this year, the NCSC conducted an online discussion of judicial foresight and is considering engaging in futures scanning activities for state judiciaries.

When "Futures and the Courts" was a SJI funding category and subsequently, the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies worked with all state or commonwealth courts indirectly and with 15 state or commonwealth judiciaries directly. We also have worked with the Federal Judicial Center and many federal courts or federal court associations; and with many state and national bar associations (most recently including the National Conference of Bar Association Presidents last August and the Hawaii Bar convention at the end of this month).

Internationally, among our more interesting work has been with the Singapore judiciary since 1996, most recently last January. We have also worked with Australian national and state courts on several occasions, and with the national courts of New Zealand, as well as the New Zealand national police last November.

So it is my most devout hope that today is the beginning of renewed affiliation between Hawaii Judiciary--the mother of all judicial foresight--and HRCFS of the University of Hawaii.

What the future looks like now, compared to then.

Now, after that brief reminder of the history of judicial foresight, let's look at some substantive factors--some of the similarities and differences in Hawaii and the world--then, now and the futures.

In the late 60s and early 70s, the future of Hawaii and the world looked bright. The Hawaii 2000 activity and the Citizens' Conference on the Administration of Law were widely participative and extremely optimistic activities, generating many alternative futures for Hawaii that most people say still look very good.

Even though futures studies is about inventing the future and not about predicting it, it is amazing how many things we got right about the future back then. For example consider our modes of communication and transportation.

When I first visited Hawaii in 1960 while on my way to teach at Rikkyo University in Tokyo for six years, Hawaii had just achieved statehood. While I did fly on a jet plane and not a prop, and did not sail on the President Cleveland, my Pan Am airplane lost two of its engines on the flight from San Francisco--fortunately we had four and so we made it--and jets did blow up or crash with alarming frequency then--remember the famous Comet jet build in the UK?

Moreover, when I did come to Hawaii to live for good, in 1969, most of my friends in America waved goodbye sadly, assuming we would never meet again, nor would they ever hear from me again. Airplane tickets cost almost as much as they do now--not adjusting for inflation; in actual dollar amounts--so that transportation was much more costly then than now.

Also, it was a long distance call to phone from Waikiki to my mother in law in Lanikai, while phoning overseas was expensive and time consuming. I had to go to a central office downtown to send a fax.

Television shows from the mainland came on videotape--itself a new technology--shipped by air, so we saw all of our national TV programs--including football games-- a week after they had been shown on the mainland. Information to me at the University of Hawaii came in the form of books and journals that floated leisurely over on ships, arriving here many months after my mainland colleagues had read them. It was very hard to be a futurist back then given how long it took me to get even current information.

However, it is worthwhile to remember that Terence Rogers and other members of the Task Force on Science and Technology for the "Hawaii 2000" activities of 1969 and 1970 DID forecast the emergence of the Internet pretty well, though we in Hawaii then generally failed to take full advantage of their foresight.

The Task Force Report wrote, in discussing "Electronics":

"Small size and small power requirements will also lead to extremely flexible personal communications, with pocket radiotelephones linked to the regular telephone system only a very few years away. We predict that improved equipment and simpler techniques for computer information storage and retrieval will lead to generations of personalized, potentially pocket-sized computers. Through these, the individual citizen will have instant access to vast stores of information. It is already clear that the source of power in the world of today and the future is largely through access to information, as it was once through control of land, and then of raw material supplies and manufacturing facilities. Accordingly, we can expect the government (and other groups) to endeavor to limit access to some kinds of information, and we will see many constitutional battles fought over principles we can only dimly perceive at this time. Related to this is the vast problem of secret electronic surveillance of our citizens--good or bad. Devices already commonplace in 1970 make it possible to bug anyone almost anywhere, and the scale and sophistication of surveillance described in Orwell's 1984 can already be regarded as underestimated for that date."
From the "Task Force Report on Science and Technology 2000", by Terence Rogers, in Hawaii 2000, edited by George Chaplin and Glenn Paige. University of Hawaii Press, 1973, p. 257f.

In this day of the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions law, and all the rest, I don't need to say anything to you folks about the validity of that forecast.

However, a few years after those words were published, I was invited to become a member of what was called "EIES--Electronic Information Exchange System", an experiment being conducted by Murray Turoff of the New Jersey Institute of Technology. By using a Texas Instrument keyboard in the Social Science Research Institute, which had a telephone modem attached, I was able to dial a toll-free number, place the handset on an acoustic coupler, eventually connect with a computer in New Jersey, and then retrieve messages that other people involved in the experiment around the world had sent--but I could only read them on a monitor, or print them out on a printer--the Texas Instrument keyboard I was using had no memory whatsoever. I was not able to record what I read electronically at all--only by printing it out on paper--and I still have those pieces of paper if anyone is interested.

As a consequence, I had access to information that no other civilian in Hawaii had for the two years of the experiment, and so my ability to predict the future went up tremendously! I was indeed considered to be a fortune teller by many of my colleagues when I was able to tell them of things to come so accurately beforehand.

However, when the experiment ended and the funding ran out, I tried to get people at UH to provide funds so I could stay online, but no one understood what I was talking about: "Computer conferencing?" they asked? "Do you need money to go to a conference about computers?" No, I said, I need money to participate in a conference via computers, and that no one understood at the time.

But when UH did finally provide access to what came to be known as email and chatrooms and computer conferencing, I was among the first UH professors to use it in my classes, and it totally revolutionized my teaching and my relationship with my students. Students who would sit silently for a semester in class, suddenly told me their deepest secrets online, and eventually the chatter on the list was so frequent and insistent that I stopped being the teacher and soon became just one of the gang trying to get a word in edgewise.

And it was indeed email that made it possible for me to be first Secretary General and then President of the World Futures Studies Federation, with my Secretary General being in Finland, while my president, when I was Secretary General, was in Rome. It would have been impossible for me to be so globally active from Hawaii without the jet plane and what eventually become the Internet.

As a futurist, I of course study carefully the way communication technologies have transformed law from what it was in the old days, before the printing press, when law was in the mind of judges, and scribes only wrote summary decisions without any elaboration of reasoning involved. Moreover, given difficulties in transportation then, and the fact that all writing was hand writing, for most of premodern history, while the American judicial system was being formed in England, Judge A in County A probably didn't know what Judge B in County B decided in similar cases, so law was overwhelmingly very local and specific, and not at all national and uniform.

That all changed with the invention and evolution of the printing press--which pretty much changed everything else in the world at the time. Government for the first time became something ruled by reference to words on papers. Governments were based for the first time on certain precious written documents grandly said to "constitute" the nation-state. As a consequence, law came to be what some privileged people in supreme courts said the Constitution and the written laws and rules based on their interpretation of that Constitution meant. Suddenly, a government of written laws and not of human minds emerged.

But then a few decades ago came the first "word processors" where text could easily be cut and pasted into other documents, so that everything became a draft or plagiarized. Soon after came the World Wide Web and Internet, thus ending libraries and librarians, and expertise in general--especially legal expertise.

Now, if most people want to know something, they don't ask an expert if they can help it. Rather, they go online and Google their question, or, increasingly, they text message their friends and see what they think.

Currently folks post pictures of their boobs and other bodily parts on YouTube for all the world to see, so that the law once again must become highly flexible and both global and local, with precedence meaning nothing but the dead-hand of the past trying to squelch highly fluid and transitory new ideas and behavior which themselves become old ideas and behavior in a split nanosecond.

In the meantime, lawyers and clerks and judges are struggling to keep up with what all this new technology is allowing and indeed requiring, both in terms of presenting new challenges, and in resolving old limitations. The substance of the law and the administration of justice is changing once again, from dealing with the rights of robots and test-tube babies on the one hand, to the elimination of all but a handful of human judges who handle exceptional and non-routine cases, while most routine decision-making is done by artificial intelligence, on the other hand.

Yes, if there is one thing we got right about the future back then, it was the technology--at least the communication technology, including biology, which is essentially just a very important kind of communication technology.

Indeed, the Hawaii 2000 Science and Technology Task Force of 1970 that I quoted before was even more spectacularly right in what it called its "straight-line projections" in medicine and genetics. They stated that "virtually all infectious diseases will be controlled or have been eradicated prior to 2000 even though new, mutant forms will occur and there will be a continuing fight to handle both new vectors and agents, and to maintain our immunological resistance to common organisms" (p. 282). Absolutely the case.

"Progress in genetics," they also wrote, "suggests that it will soon be possible to alter human genetic makeup, and perhaps even to change the course of human evolution" (283). Most observers agree that is a major challenge over the foreseeable future as well.

Finally, at a time when food shortages were being widely experienced, and even greater one's forecasted, our task force in 1970 boldly said that because of what we now would call genetically-modified food, "Our conclusion is that our ability to feed any population present in 2000 will be easily within the grasp of mankind as far as science and technology are concerned", correctly anticipating that the reason 1/3 of the world is starving now in 2007 is not because of insufficient food to feed them but because the poor do not have enough money to buy the food that exists in great abundance now. In other words: "It's the economy, stupid!"

Global over-population was of considerable concern then, and for many years thereafter, and in fact enormous efforts have been made to control population growth, from China's One Child policy, to policies that enable women to obtain greater educational and job opportunities. Indeed, even though global population continues to grow dangerously, most parts of the so-called developed world are now experiencing population decline. This is true very dramatically in the former soviet bloc, and to a lesser extent throughout all of Europe. But the lowest fertility in the world is experienced today in Korea and Japan. There is a kind of strange race to extinction between those two countries, and forecasts have been made as to when the last Japanese or Korean will vanish from the face of the Earth if fertility remains as low as it is now. And yet, I know from a report I wrote for the Korean government, that no policies exist, short of abandoning the global capitalist system entirely, that can convince Japanese and Korean women that their freedom to consume and travel should be given up so they can have children. Those women have wisely decided that husbands and children are burdens that are not worth bearing .

However, it is important to remember that one of the biggest policy dilemmas in the 1920s and 30s was also population decline. In researching the report we wrote on the future of families for the Korean government, I read many forecasts from the pre-World War II period that said global population would level out at about 2 billion people around 1960, and thereafter begin to decline. I think you know that because of the unpredicted worldwide baby boom after World War II, global population in now is over 6 billion and growing.

I rather suspect that something might happen to reverse declining fertility now, but maybe not. However, in the meantime how to have a growing economy and a declining population at the same time is confounding most economists whose theories are based on the assumption that continued population growth will fuel continued economic growth. The conflicting trends are challenging us here in Hawaii where it is immigration, and not local fertility, that is keeping our population, and the US generally, growing while all other developed nations are declining in total population.

Big changes are also continuing in ethnicity as well. Globally, white people continue to shrink in numbers while people of color are growing rapidly. Twenty years ago I began saying that around 2050 white people will be so rare in the world that the rest of us will begin holding walks for white people, or participating in "take a white person home for Christmas" programs. The era of white, and thus western, dominance is over.

At the same time, we here in Hawaii seem to be moving against this global trend because while we still have no ethnic majority in Hawaii, white people are increasing, along with part-Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, while Asians are rapidly declining in numbers and proportion.

As far as age-cohort or generational changes are concerned, we have gotten much better at anticipating social change caused by cohorts abruptly moving into or out of power because of the excellent work done by William Strauss and Neil Howe about 15 years ago, and continuing. Personnel officers used to tell me how much they dreaded hiring the self-centered Gen Xers. Now they tell me how different are the Millennials they are just beginning to encounter. In contrast to the selfish and lazy Gen Xers, the Millennials are very group-oriented, amazingly well-educated, and disciplined, hard workers. But they expect to be praised continually for everything they do and don't respond to criticism well at all.

Instead of Employee of the Month awards--something we Protestant Ethic old-timers never understood to begin with--the Millennials seem to want to be designated Employee of the Day. However they insist the honor be shared among all of them. They see competition that rewards a few but ignores or punishes the many to be unfair and undesirable. And they expect you to congratulate them very warmly for simply showing up on time.

In short we have seen big changes in generational behavior from the old GI's, the Baby Boomers, the Gen Xers, and now the Millennials that fill my classrooms and soon will become lawyers, clerks and judges--and defendants--in your system. Are you ready for them?

Nonetheless, I think you have to agree that we did a pretty good job of forecasting new technologies and their impacts on society, law and the administration of justice.

But we didn't do nearly so well in forecasting social developments.

For example, even though there was a heavy presence of Hawaiians in the Hawaii 2000 conference of 1970, not least of which was George Kanahele, and Chief Justice Richardson himself, there was general agreement that by 2000, Hawaiians and Hawaiian culture would pretty much fade away, being replaced by the Golden Men of the Pacific--a new pan-ethnic local culture that had Hawaiian elements, but was much, much more than that.

We totally failed to see the Hawaiian renaissance that is so vigorous now.

Well, not everyone did. There was a youth conference held in old Frear Hall on the UH campus just before the main conference at the Ilikai Hotel, and the youth conference voted for three things--free milk for poor people, the legalization of marijuana, and Hawaii's secession from the United States.

If you look over the Hawaii 2000 documents, and also the many statements and acts during the 1970s, you will see considerable concern about environmental issues and especially energy issues. But there was general agreement then that these issues were so obvious and so urgent, that OF COURSE we would move immediately and quickly from dependence on oil to reliance on all of the many abundant renewable energy sources available to Hawaii--solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and OTEC--Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. There was also considerable discussion about Hawaii's Carrying Capacity, and talk about finding ways to limit population growth as well as urban sprawl on the one hand and beach front development on the other.

But here we are in 2007, with a Legislative Task Force on Hawaii Sustainability 2050 about to issue a report on September 22 that I am pretty sure will show we are far, far away from being locally sustainable, even though more and more people are fearful of what global climate change and variable warming, sea-level rise, ocean pollution, fresh water scarcity, new and renewed global pandemics, and the rest might do.

There is even concern about the future of tourism--that bulwark of our economy. I am doing a lot of consulting with representatives of the tourist industry worldwide, and with the School of Travel Industry Management here at UH, and I can assure you there is deep and widespread apprehension about the future of what is both the world's largest and the world's most fragile industry now.

However, I don't think anyone in 1970--during the last days of the Vietnam War--(or even during the 1980s or1990s) believed for a moment that a handful of scruffy people from the Middle East who we knew little about and cared less about, would crash three hijacked airplanes into three highly symbolic American buildings and set the US off on the direction it did go--from being the self-proclaimed land of the free and the home of the brave, to becoming the manifest land of people afraid of their own shadow; from proudly proclaiming "give me liberty or give me death," to hunkering down and begging, "give me shelter."

There is no doubt that in addition to energy and environmental challenges that have been long ignored but are now surging towards their own kinds of 9/11 attention getting, the US is not quite the nation in the eyes of the world that it used to be, while places we considered in the past to be basket cases--such as Korea or China and India--are now expected to be, along with a unified Europe, the major economic and political actors of the 21st Century, while the US perhaps slides to the number four or five slot--if we are lucky.

I think you all understand that it is impossible to predict the future. Futures studies does not try to predict the future. Instead we help individuals and organizations contemplate the implications of several feasible alternative futures, and then to envision and strive to achieve preferred futures.

And, most importantly, we believe this process of forecasting and assessing alternative futures, and then of envisioning and striving towards preferred futures, should become a routine part of the decision making of all public institutions, most certainly judiciaries whose power and influence is so very great in our society, and who are often the very first people in the public sector to be asked to decide controversies concerning new technologies or life styles. Judges are typically the applied futurists in our system. You often are asked to resolve controversies that are so novel that they may appear to be science fiction to the ordinary citizen--or legislator-- and so you need to get better at it.

I very much hope the Hawaii judiciary will decide to renew its leadership in judicial foresight--for itself, for Hawaii, and for future generations everywhere.

Thank you.

A Clockwork Kiwi

2007-09-13T12:59:00.000-10:00

New Zealand Novelty Folk Supergroup 'The Flight of the Conchords' have given tune and lyric to the cause of Robot Liberation. All the way from the distant future: the year 2000. The future may not need us, but it sure needs more humor.

The Humans Are Dead!

It's Fantistik.

Student as Sharecropper?

2007-08-30T01:49:00.000-10:00

Do the intellectual property rights to student work produced in the normal activities of a regular course belong to the student or to the University in which the student is enrolled? Should taking (and paying for) a college course be considered a "work for hire" arrangement? Well, if a student is taking certain courses at UH-Manoa's Academy for Creative Media, that student is required to assign all copyright of her work produced in the course to the ACM.

This unsavory (unjust?) policy is currently being challenged by a student in our program, who is waiting for a response from the ACM. The ACM's tactics and attitude toward this issue have so far been very disappointing. We have been researching the legalities of the policy and are honored that our cause is being supported by eminent IP legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. See his recent post: On teaching artists rights

See also a movement by USC students to change their similar policy here.

We hope the ACM will reconsider the more draconian and excessive terms of its agreement, especially the requirement for students to sign away their rights or be dropped from the course. This is a misguided policy and a disturbing precedent that undermines the ideal of fostering an environment of free exchange of knowledge--if that notion has (or ever had) any meaning in higher education.

Stay tuned...

---Jake Dunagan