Saturday - People in the Golden Age of Technology

Today I went to another lecture hosted by the London Futurists that was an extension of the one given by Stephen Aguilar-Millan, which I blogged about a while back. This was given by a bearded, soft-spoken Australian, Nick Price.

The emphasis of the talk was on the values of future leaders of society and what their general outlook will be, based on the generational model of American history put forward by William Strauss and Neil Howe and combining this with Clare Graves (a man, not a woman) extension of Maslows hierarchy of needs and the Spiral Dynamics of Don Beck and Chris Cowan. The presentation concluded by saying that future leaders would be much more community oriented, "caring heroes of the 21^st century", interested in "personal and expressive" technologies.

It was a rather slow talk, streched in a way by the Q&A sessions to extend the talk out to two hours. One of the anecdotes was that in one city they found that there was a rise in public transport because technology had caused people to socialise more and that was preferable to travelling on their own by car. Another thing was that the model has problems in factoring in life extension: what happens if the Generation X-ers (me!!) instead of retiring gracefully, continue in middle-age?

There was also a question about the (lack of) success of Silicon Roundabout (Shoreditch/Old Street) in London, prompted by this article. The view is that Britain has a risk-averse culture which frowns on failure rather than accepting it as part of learning to do business, but the report referred to in the article ranks us 7^th, behind only the U.S cities, and top of the European cities.