Socially adapting to the pace and direction of technology changes has been a mixed bag. Sometimes, consumer pressures have the effect of driving change; sometimes consumers are indifferent; and at other times they challenge or resist a particular technological innovation. In Kurzweil’s case, some consumers are challenging the potential of technologies he’s projecting for the future.

Most challenges in advance of marketable products and services indicate ignorance more than fear. Most consumers do not read speculative (read science) fiction, and those over a certain age (about 35) usually don’t flock to science fiction movies or television shows. (No, “Lost” is not science fiction!) Hanging on to the past is easier and more defensible in the absence of known alternatives.

Where the rubber hits the road is the effects of adoption lags and challenges that affect education. While Leapfrog Institutes actively promotes the use of hand held, Web-enabled devices to facilitate 24/7 learning, schools sometimes challenge Web schools and -in the US- collect students’ tech hardware at the school door. This is a remarkable example of how ignorance of alternatives produces counter-productive and even anti-intellectual outcomes.

Kurzweil has a great projective track record. His futures are already on the way. The spoils will go to those organizations and societies that act as Beta sites for new technologies, not those who compulsively challenge, shrink away, or actively resist. The bottom line: get involved in testing and assessing new technologies, even when they are projected and not yet “real”.

Soon, we hope to begin collaborative work with the Minnesota affiliate of DI, and with the national/international level as well. Is it an exaggeration to say that DI is doing what the majority of schools (and colleges) are avoiding, namely to promote imagination, creativity, invention, and innovation? We think not! Hats off to everyone associated with Destination ImagiNation!

John compiled a short video from our visit:

To date, divisions of past, present, and future have been a necessary condition for a paradigm of futures research. We assert that the futures research field must progress beyond traditional assumptions and categories of past, present and future to the recognition that 1) these concepts are largely byproducts of industrial time, and 2) Newtonian/Cartesian thinking with precepts of control, determinism, and linearity. The construction of alternative pasts, presents, and futures offers a new mode for sense-making, design, and choice in human affairs. It treats futures research as an activity that involves the re-conceptualization, redesign and reconstruction of the present into alternative presents.

The futures field is built upon traditional understandings of time and the partitioning of time into past, present, and future. However, we assert that this historical understanding of time, as partitioned into past, present, and future, has become too limited for sense making in a more complex world. The futures field must now expand into the new frontier of alternative presents, thereby permitting new sense making, knowledge creation, and decision options.

We define alternative presents as distinctive existential states of continuous novelty and emergent complexity. Comparison is the mechanism whereby one present state can be differentiated from others. Shortly we will demonstrate the use of simtime in the creation and application of alternative presents.

As previously noted, humans are time-bound. Concepts of past, present, and future events are bound together to provide continuity and a framework for sense making, knowledge production, and decision making. The process of simtime suggests a new methodology for harnessing the continuous emergence of novelty, invention, and design in the scope of human time binding.

Simtime methods address historical and anticipated states in terms of time-binding and time-transcendence. They advance the concepts of imported pasts and imported futures that are continuously invented and re-invented within alternative presents. The ongoing construction and deconstruction of imported pasts and imported presents within alternative presents provides frameworks for new formats of time association. Thus, alternative presents are treated as continuously created and emergent resources rather than single points with the passage of chronological time.

The field of futures research is defined largely through its methodologies, or philosophies of method. Scientific futurists assert that discoveries of past, present, and future relationships (e.g., cycles, bifurcations, trajectories, and discontinuities) are best determined by methodological properties rather than objective observations of phenomenological properties. From this point of view, the futures field is already concerned with the invention rather than the discovery of temporal patterns and processes in phenomenological events. A central tenet of simtime is that different depictions of presents are, indeed, artifacts of human observation, categorization, and methodological choice.

We assert that the concept of alternative presents affords the possibility to develop new soft technologies of great importance. Rapid change and complexification have mutated time to become more than an interval measure; it has become a critical resource in the generation of new sense making, knowledge construction, and decision alternatives. The conceptualization of time has migrated from a value-free phenomenon to be studied to a value-rich resource to be developed.