Why? – Who? – A Futurist?
Why?
Ok, it says ‘who and why’, but I am putting ‘why’ first because I feel it most relevant. 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. The commitments is that there will never be click based revenue. Hence, there is no click bait, and no content or opinions designed to generate 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 about various subjects. This site provides a place to put answers and allow me sharing a link, instead repeating these often technical answers over and over. Plus instead of a new answer each time, I can continually improve the 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. 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 as much to get the answer to “can this really be true” as to share, and I am very open to other conclusions.
Rather than content aimed to polarise, which is not the now proven path for popularity, I tend to try to look for balance of both sides, which unfortunately is unlikely to tickle anyone’s confirmation bias and drive up traffic. So, no compromise for 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?
I do have a science background, but have spent most of my life effectively as a futurist, working as CTO or CEO, predicting and working on the next wave of technology for the future. This has been both in ventures I initiated, and as the head of technical development for major international organisations. I grew up with a love of Science, and my first university course was a science degree. Although, in this galaxy, that was long, long ago, and I have never actually worked as a pure scientist. I have done quite a variety of things, 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. I had roles from Silicon Valley CEO, director of European companies in several countries, been based in latie America, and had roles as programmer, electronic circuit designer, Director of Product developer through to ‘systems analyst’. What is common is the ‘analysis’, the application of logic to problems where I am not the expert in the specific field, but 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 to be a CEO either, unless you think an MBA really does help. In fact my roles as CEO and directing product development all arose from have some success at foreseeing future trends, but it is mostly about spending a lot of time on the task.
Nor does being a ‘futurist’ involve a crystal ball, or some gift of prescience. Like most things, getting better just comes down to practice and working at it enough, with a lot of time spent doing research. If you spend the same time analysing possibilities as I have, you would probably come to the same conclusions. It is faster 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 you get proficient at what you do.