Future & Ecology

A number of world governments are making a play to put major decisions about the future of the Internet behind closed doors. It's a good thing we still have a free and open Internet — we probably wouldn't have found out about this without it - #ITU #panarchy #opensourceeconomy

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An 11-year-old girl is enrolled in an online college-level physics course offered by an education company in Silicon Valley; she lives in Lahore, Pakistan. In nearby India, the government has announced a plan to distribute subsidized tablet computers – the Aakash 2 tablet – to equip potentially millions of students and teachers throughout the country.

Halfway across the world in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University and MIT have invested over $60 million in online education platform edX, with the goal of educating 1 billion people. Other universities are following suit via platforms like Udacity, in a trend that promises to revolutionize education.

What do these three seemingly separate instances have to do with a United Nations treaty conference on telecommunications?

Possibly everything.

Starting today, more than 190 governments will come together in Dubai under the umbrella of the U.N. International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in an event called the World Conference on International Telecommunications or WCIT (“wicket”). There, governments will rewrite a 25-year-old treaty, the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), which sets the regulatory framework for the exchange of telecommunications traffic between nations."

 

(http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/internet-users-shouldnt-have-to-pay-the-price-of-an-international-treaty/)

Via Wildcat2030

By pairing biology and photovoltaics, a new "electrofuel" system could build alternative fuels...

Via Wildcat2030

In Western cultures, nature is a cosmological, primal ordering force and a terrestrial condition that exists in the absence of human beings. Both meanings are freely implied in everyday conversation. We distinguish ourselves from the natural world by manipulating our environment through technology. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly proposes that technology behaves as a form of meta-nature, which has greater potential for cultural change than the evolutionary powers of the organic world alone.

With the advent of ‘living technologies’ [2], which possess some of the properties of living systems but are not ‘truly’ alive, a new understanding of our relationship to the natural and designed world is imminent. This change in perspective is encapsulated in Koert Van Mensvoort’s term ‘next nature’, which implies thinking ‘ecologically’, rather than ‘mechanically’. The implications of next nature are profound, and will shape our appreciation of humanity and influence the world around us.

 

Via Wildcat2030