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About Future Now


  • IFTF's Future Now draws on research and forecasting at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA think tank specializing in the future of technology, health, and organizational change. It began in September 2003.

Who is Future Now?

  • IFTF's Future Now is a group weblog, founded by Institute research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in September 2003. Its contributors include IFTF researchers interested in emerging technologies, the future of Asia, and the social and economic impacts on new technologies; IFTF corporate affiliates; academic partners; and members of the Innovation Lab, a Danish futures group with offices in Aarhus and Copenhagen. A complete list of contributors is available here.

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September 27, 2007

Comments

Peter

Well, sure following epidemics is very important. But, and here I'm feeling bleak and a tiny bit snarky....

I would guess that the main use for this kind of technology is surveillance and anti-terrorist activities. And it's rather chilling, not at all fascinating or really cool (this is actually a similar tone to an earlier post which was more tongue-in-cheek - isn't there a technological determinism-sans-ethics that's worrisome here?)

I attended a talk by Marieke de Goede this past summer, where she's talked about governments are using realtime network data in finance to 'track' terrorist networks.

From her description of the project:


Data Wars: New Spaces of Governing in the European Fight Against Terrorist Financing

In the aftermath of the events of 9/11, political debates and public investigations emphasised the problem of locating information about risk and threat in advance of a terrorist attack. The idea that data offer the solution to problems of security risk has quickly established itself at the forefront of what has come to be known as the war on terror. Financial information occupies a special place within data-led security practices, because it is assumed to be able to reveal 'blueprints' of terrorist networks. The goal of this research project is to map and analyse the reconfigured spaces of governing that are emerging through the deployment of financial information in the European war on terror.

She had really interesting prelim findings, including a chilling 'if you're not guilty, you have nothing to worry about' kind of mentality from States, and a specific example of how even the lack of activity becomes suspect: a family in UK (Muslim, natch) whose flat was raided in the name of anti-terror, and as evidence was cited that they had a big stash of cash under a mattress someplace. So lack of regular, surveille-able financial transactions becomes its own suspicion (they didn't put it in a bank apparently because of religious restrictions on interest).

Social physics is an apt metaphor, one wonders if lessons of physical physics during development of super-cool tools for, you know, splitting atoms and stuff, are still thought of as important..

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