Cinum2006
From uvvy
I am back from the Digital Civilizations Forum Ci'Num 2006 - 6 & 7 october 2006 : Les scénarios du futur / Scenarios for the Future.
The meeting was in the Relais de Margaux hotel in the best French wine areas. There were about 120 participants. The format of the event was a scenario planning playful brainstorm - "giving voice to the parts of your mind that normally do not have access to language" (as described by Daniel Erasmus, DTN, standing in the image above with the main organizer Daniel Kaplan, FING). The two-days brainstorm was broken by short presentations.
The first day was dedicated to imagining a World Expo in 2026. Participants were broken in groups. I was in a group set to imagine the "Virtual Worlds" pavillion in the World Expo. We played with actual clay to build and assemble typical objects in the Expo. Then we merged the clay objects created in a description of a typical user experience in the pavillion. There was a consensus that by 2026 VR will be fully immersive and part of the texture of everyday life.
The second day was dedicated to scenario planning by groups of 8 participants aided by a card game (The Scenario Game). It is interesting that, although the mechanism of the Scenario Game has random elements, the resulting scenarios are mostly compatible with each other and with the trends we can see in today's world. I was in a group that elaborated a scenario "Power to the cops or power to the co-op". All scenarios were presented at the end of the workshop. Some scenarios will be selected for a more in-depth analysis at the 2007 workshop, which is meant to produce a manifesto to be presented to the public and the regional-national-european authorities. I really look forward to reading the organizer's synthesis in a few weeks on the Ci'Num website.
Beginning with today's VR worlds and MMOGs, I gave a short presentation of transhumanism, watered-down some but not too much, which was received better than I hoped. Of course there were concerns about irreversible runaways toward "other-than-human", but human enhancement, mind uploading etc. were not seen as Bad Things by the audience, more like options to be carefully considered.
The two images above show a resident artist's impressions of some human-enhancement-related ideas presented by me and others.
A list of all the smart and deep thinkers I met would be too long (see the Ci'Num 2006 website), but I ws especially happy to meet Robin Hanson, one of the thinkers I admire more, for the first time in person.
Main keywords emerged from Ci'num 2006: "Glocalisation" (I LOVE this word), universal access to cyberspace/metaverse (the universal access system is called "UNA-VOLTA" in the scenario elaborated by my group), ubiquitous computing, Metaverse, NBIC convergence, human enhancement, large migratory fluxes, social unrest, opportunities and dangers. Most participants and groups did not imagine a utopian Heaven or dystopian Hell, but today's world with some emerging cultural, social, political and technological trends running at full speed in 2026.
My best picture (below) taken in a wine factory tries to capture the impression of a world moving to the future without losing touch with the present.
