Why? – Who? – A Futurist?
Why?
Ok, it says ‘who and why’, but I am putting ‘why’ first because I feel it most relevant. I only put who first in the title because to me, ‘why and who’ just doesn’t sound as good.
Firstly, this site generates no revenue through clicks. In fact, the site is not set up to generate any revenue at all at this stage, although that does limit resources. The commitment is that there will never be click based revenue. Hence, there is no click bait, and no content or opinions designed to generate clicks or revenue.
Despite the adage “there is no such thing as a free lunch”, this site was not created to generate revenue, but had two initial goals:
- There are subjects that raise questions for me, and I find the exercise of creating an ‘exploratory paper’ is one of the best ways to seek answers. Publishing those exploratory papers online and opening to scrutiny, provides additional motive to be thorough.
- I also get asked by people I know for analysis of various topics. This site provides a place to put answers and allow me to share a link, instead repeating these often-technical answers over and over. Plus, this way instead of a new answer each time, I can continually improve the existing answer.
If I ever get to the point where I am looking for revenue from this hobby, it would be through ‘buy me a coffee’ or something. The site does keep growing in popularity, and if anyone is interested in my take on a particular subject, just ask.
This site is not an attempt to convince the world of a specific point of view, or specific perspective. The papers are like scientific papers being opened to peer review, but opened to anyone who is interested rather than one specific group. My goal is to try and consider different perspectives, not enforce one perspective. I am open and seek answers.
There are times I come to a conclusion, and feel “wow, others should see this”, but I want other to see as much to get “peer review” and determine if what I have found stands scrutiny as to convince others.
Rather than content aimed to polarise, which is the now proven path for popularity, I tend to try to look for balance of both sides. This is unfortunately for readership levels and traffic is unlikely to tickle anyone’s confirmation bias. So, again, no compromise to drive popularity. Anyone is welcome to read, and comment, and provide other perspectives for consideration.
My goals are to learn, and to find answers to questions raised by what I, and others, encounter.
Have your ever heard “if your really want to learn, then teach it“. Most of exploratory papers here are created because I have an idea that feel I requires further exploration. By trying to put my ideas into a page, I am organising my ideas in the same way when trying to explain what I understand to someone else. It is like try to learn enough to be able to ‘teach it’. That is, each exploration, is my going through the process of ‘mastering’, or becoming confident I have reached a conclusion on that topic. This means that while I am organising my thoughts to a level of preparedness to for presentation to an audience, the main person I am trying to convince is me. If you disagree, then I welcome new information to consider. This site is not to preach or convince others, although sometimes I do feel I have discovered things I wish to share.
The papers are written as explorations of ideas. Writing down thoughts and exploring as I write, and as the goal is exploration.
The pages here are not organised to generate ‘clicks’, so not much traffic is to be expected. Most search engines are driven by AI optimised to have you using their search engine as much as possible, which means pushing people ideas to towards extremes, and driving outrage. As your search results are mostly ‘recommended for you’ on the basis the pages suggested will reinforce ideas you already hold, and push you further to extremes, these pages in their attempt to be balanced, are not likely to be search engine favourites.
If you do stumble upon these pages, it is unlikely you hold extreme views, or search engines would send you to pages to reinforce the views you already hold. If you have stumbled here and find views contrary to your beliefs….well …search engines ‘recommended for you’ algorithms fail sometimes I guess.
In the fashion of an armchair philosophers, I pontificate mostly on what I consider are the ‘big issues’.
More often that not, in the process of writing exploration, my own views change before the end, from those I held at the outset. When that happens, I have had a learning experience, although sometimes the evolution of ideas can make the exploration and unclear journey. That is a pity, because it is these times, when the though process has \ most interesting. In fact, sometimes I arrive at endpoints that are complete surprises.
I am compiling a list of these surprise results which can be found on the page surprises, together with a summary of the surprises, and links the resources that brought me to the surprise conclusion.
I also have a goal of trying to make the entire collection of exploratory papers blend cohesively into an online body of work that I have now labelled a ‘blook’.
I am also trying to create a table of contents, organising the thoughts into logical sequences. That is a work in progress, and needs more time.
The ideas published here are NOT done so to convince others, but research the ideas. If the logic presented here leads you to the same conclusion then you may sometimes find that interesting. Even more interesting maybe if it initiates your own further enquiries that call in to question what I have said.
Who?
This site is predominantly the work of a single author, found time for the project who began the project as a background activity when other activities were reduced to allow focus on being companion and carer for a relative with failing health. Other collaborators have so far conducted research and acted as sounding boards, but not yet contributed pages.
I have lived mostly in Australia, but I have also resided in the USA, Germany, France, Scandinavia and have even held residency in Mexico.
I feel my weakest area is in communicating the content here, which is one reason most pages here need several edits for clarity. Please bear with them especially on the date they are created, and feedback helps to make them clearer. Even at school while I did extremely well at subjects like maths, physics and chemistry without even working at them, English and literature were never my strengths, and on these subjects, I did no further study after school.
After school I initially studied some philosophy and mostly science with physics and chemistry as the major focus. Further studies have included software and electrical engineering, business administration and international law.
I have spent most of my working life effectively as technologist and/or futurist developing software and/or electronics or managing teams developing software and/or electronics. I have had major roles working as CTO or CEO, including as a Silicon Valley CEO at one time, mostly working on predicting the next wave of technology for the future.
Major roles have both been both in smaller ventures I initiated, and within major international organisations. Although, in this galaxy, it was not long, long ago that I studied initially as a scientist, I have never actually worked as a pure scientist. I have also dabbled in things outside my main fields, including working in the music industry and in motor racing, but the vast majority of my experience has been in technology. In practice, it has been a career in the practice of analysis and logic. From analysing business practices through to how to use electronics to automate turning logs into sawn timber. What is common is the ‘analysis’, the application of logic to problems where I am not the expert in the specific field but where I have access to people who are experts.
Everything I discuss in exploratory papers here is simply taking information, hopefully provided by, and attributed to, knowledgably experts, and using logic to assemble the information to reach a conclusion. As stated in ‘why’, the exploratory paper are to promote discussion and further research, they are not designed around an agenda, although the goal is to seek answers that are convincing.
A Futurist?
There is no formal training to be a futurist, but then again there is no training for the future predicting aspect of directing product development teams, or of being a CEO either, unless you think an MBA really does help learn about the predict the future part.
I would argue that a futurist is someone who spends a lot of their time trying to determine what the future will look like. A ‘futurist’ doesn’t involve a crystal ball, or some gift of prescience, but a lot of time deep in thought. Like most things, practice makes better, and it just comes down working at it enough, with a lot of time spent doing research. Science fiction novelists are often examples of people who spent a lot of time thinking about the future, and background in science can help.
My roles as “director product development” were about not just electrical, software and mechanical engineering, but because developing new products takes time, also about predicting what the world and market and evolution of technology would look like years in advance. This led to products that did build some empires, and then to roles as CEO originating from founding businesses the predicted future opportunities, I have tended to be better at predicting the future than being in the position to get the capital behind ways to profit from that future. Although I have had several years of having stepped back from product development for personal reasons, this has given me more, not less, time to focus on the future, and for the first-time decades to focus on not what aspects of the future might allow generating profit for specific niches, but the big picture.
I believe most people, if able to spend the same amount of analysing possibilities as I have, you would probably come to similar conclusions. But of course, not everyone. This site contains a lot of background information that may lead others to either variations of my conclusions, or completely different conclusions. Reaching conclusions is easier when someone has found the information first, and the information I have found may save others time in getting to even better answers. Hopefully the amount of practice I have had helps a little too, but I am not always right, and as it is from the times you get it wrong that you learn, I have done some learning. But when you keep going and working at it, eventually getting even more proficient at what you do.