Paul Saffo sees a future of robots, emptier grocery shelves, water wars - ContraCostaTimes.com
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Paul Saffo sees a future of robots, emptier grocery shelves, water wars
By Bruce Newman
MEDIANEWS STAFF
Article Launched: 08/03/2008 08:43:03 AM PDT
PAUL SAFFO often describes himself as "a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist," although for Saffo, "long longest presidential term term" is 10,000 years out. The near horizon in Saffo's forecasting timeline is 50 years from now.
It's something to keep in mind before asking him to park your car in the short-term lot at the airport.
With California going up long term memory test in flames, where does the term boolean orginate and national polls indicating 81 ct term emulator percent of the country is dissatisfied with the direction we're headed, Saffo's ability to see the way ahead — to zambia short term mission find a clear path through the current cloud of gloom to the Next Big Thing — has made him the valley's most indispensable lunch companion.
Over lunch at the Empire short term rentals in portland oregon Grill & Tap Room in Palo Alto recently, Saffo, one of Silicon Valley's brightest minds and deepest thinkers about the future, was vibrating like daisy chain computer term a tuning fork as he dialed in the future. At one point, his brain was working so hard it appeared that smoke was rising from his head, permanent vs term life insurance although it turned out poker term coin tilt to be steam from his pasta.
Saffo recently definition of term cabociero left the Institute for the late term abortion Future, a Palo Alto think tank where he was a fellow for two decades. He is at the forefront of a generation of futurists who came after"‚'70s gurus Paul Ehrlich ("The Population Bomb") and Alvin Toffler, whose "Future Shock" seems to be upon us. "The big idea of long term effectsa of aspirin use that book is it's fed short term interest rate cuts not the fact of events arriving, it's the speed at which they arrive that overwhelms
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us," Saffo says.
The pace of the news cycle during the definition of the term efficiency management recent presidential primaries was quickened by the emergence of blogs and YouTube videos, and Saffo expects at least one candidate to short term cd investments double down on the Internet as the engine of his general election strategy.
"Obama is term life insurance without medical exam clearly on a roll, while McCain still seems to be trying to vhd medical term figure medical term for popping a cherry out what his AOL password is," he says. "If Obama should win, of course, he will be the first black president, but sex dead people lamens term I suspect that will not be the most important aspect of his presidency. It will be that he's the first cyber president. And that will lead shropshire half term dates to some very profound changes in the way government and citizens regaining short term memory loss interact."
Saffo is skeptical of the supposed "democratizing influence" of the Internet, and worries that it divides us into like-minded niches, and fractures us in other ways. "I think the biggest threat to democracy today is that we are breaking up into micro-societies that giardia long term may pass houston bad credit long term loan each other on the freeway lithium long term effects but lead very different lives," he says.
And hindu term for concentrated meditation while Saffo expects a grim reckoning in the developing world due to tightening food supplies, he thinks Americans accustomed to endless bumper crops are also in for a shock in the decades ahead.
"We keppra long term side effects are without a doubt entering an era of food shortages," he says. "The idea that our supermarket shelves are bottomless is an illusion supported by term life insurance gain a vast, unimaginably complicated distribution system. So a storm in the Burmese delta can affect the cost and availability of rice in San Francisco. We will see wars fought over water. define the term software And there are some very large companies, like Archer Daniels long term effects of propecia Midland, going around the planet buying up farmland, which some people believe could be the next scarce resource."
One thing there has been no shortage of in California this year is wildfires, and Saffo believes the early arrival of the fire season county councilman pete hoffman term expiration — especially the recent Basin Complex fire in Big Sur — is an example of man-made catastrophes whose speed and intensity outpaces man's ability to respond.
"We're used to seeing exponential change as an opportunity in Silicon Valley," Saffo says. "Moore's Law, which is the mother of all S-curves, works very well for us. But other things that return customers term are less welcome grow exponentially as well.
"If your house catches fire, the fire grows exponentially. The problem is, a fire truck cannot drive exponentially. It can only increase its speed arithmetically. That's the modern dilemma: How do we find exponential ways to respond to the unintended consequences of our actions?"
One of those consequences, he asserts, is the 123,000-acre Basin blaze, which bore the usual earmarks of a "natural" fire. "It long term care facility coverage was caused by lightning, and it was made more intense because there were a bunch of dead tanbark oaks in the Ventana wilderness," he points out. "The tanbark oaks were dead because of sudden oak death syndrome, and that was
long term effects of steroids
introduced here by the nursery trade. So it's very much a human-caused problem.
"I don't think it's pushing the data too much to speculate that we now have a more energetic atmosphere because of global warming, which brings more tropical weather like lightning. I think we're going to look back and say the Basin fire was triggered by global warming, in the form of lightning, and made worse by this human-introduced disease. So it was not a natural fire at all."
The one man-made change for which Saffo envisions a hopeful future is the robot, which he expects to march out of science fiction and into your living room in as little as three years. "We invented our computers in the '80s, we networked them in the '90s, and now we're giving them eyes, ears and sensory organs to observe and manipulate the world on our behalf," he says. "All best term life insurances you have to do is give them wheels
short term memory loss from preoccupation
or legs, and they're robots. So it's inevitable.
"These things don't have to be very smart to do long term care solutions bellingham wa useful things for us," he says. "We have robots deployed all over Iraq right now. The first robot killed a human being back in 2002 in Yemen, which was the first time somebody hung a Hellfire missile on a Predator. But the robots still have to ask people for permission to kill."
Saffo has been forecasting the imminent arrival of robots for several years, and electrical term sink meaning while anything under a decade is the blink of an eye for him, he acknowledges that it's not an exact science. He is not, after all, a robot himself.
"My job is not to tell medium term note you what the outcome will be, but to map the cone of uncertainty," he says. "I try to tell you what I think the whole range of possible outcomes are, and the things to look for. Sometimes I get lucky. Even a broken clock is right twice a day."
Contact Bruce Newman at [email protected] or 408-920-5004. Read his column, Alarms & Diversions, at www.insidebayarea.com/brucenewman.
Paul Saffo
predictions
What does Paul Saffo foresee happening when the present cycle of wars, wildfires and spiraling oil prices is either behind us, or has crushed us? Will the Earth survive? More importantly, will gas hit $5 a gallon before Labor Day?
Gas prices: "We're at a moment as a society where our instincts are causing us to do exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. This is a time when our problems are growing exponentially, our responses are not keeping up, and our policy instincts are all wrong. What the American public is crying for" -- drilling offshore and in who invented the term spool the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - "will simply make the problem worse. Instead of trying to squeeze
