Cindy Wagner's blog

In honor of Women’s History Month, Forbes magazine published its list of the world’s 50 leading female futurists—including the article’s author, Blake Morgan, who describes herself as “a Customer Experience Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker.” See “50 Leading Female Futurists” by Blake Morgan, Forbes.com (posted online March 5, 2020). [Disclosure: The Forbes article includes me in the “extended list” of honorably mentioned. —CGW]

The digital tools for manipulating images, sounds, and other information—already used for such things as making movies—are increasingly being misused as well as democratized, said panelists at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation’s March 12 forum, “Responding to the Deepfakes Challenge.” But calls to regulate “deepfake” technologies that create deceptive sounds and images could have unintended negative consequences, they pointed out.

On January 9, 2020, the Brookings Institution and R Street co-hosted a presentation by the American Political Science Association’s Task Force Project on Congressional Reform.

With the release of a new report, “Will America Embrace National Service?” the Brookings Institution convened a discussion on National Service: Rebuilding America’s Civic Fabric, October 10, 2019. The report and the event were co-sponsored by Brookings’ Future of the Middle Class Initiative and Service Year Alliance.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s newly formed (2018) Center for Strategic Foresight held its inaugural conference September 10, 2019, focusing on the policy implications arising from two major trends: increased international activity in space and the weaponization of misinformation, particularly with the use of social media.

Information Technology & Innovation Foundation panel at Rayburn House Office Building, July 16, 2019.

From a conversation with General Paul J. Selva at the Brookings Institution, June 28, 2019.

In Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military (W.W. Norton, 2018), astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (with co-author Avis Lange, a research associate at the Hayden Planetarium) relates the history of the relationship between scientists who seek to expand our knowledge of the universe and the strategists who seek to expand their dominance of it.

Upon his retirement after a nearly 40-year career in futures research and analysis, Bob Olson agreed to an “exit interview” with Foresight Signals. Olson’s career as a futurist began in 1979 as a project director with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).

The first time I saw Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey—or rather, tried to watch it—was in college not too many years after it was released. I mostly slept through it, and by the end of the film I suspect others in the audience were as mesmerized by what they were smoking as by what they were watching. In the maybe half dozen times I’ve tried to watch it on TV since, I’ve made it through the film’s entirety just once. By that time, the graphics seemed dated, we still weren’t taking commercial flights to space stations or the Moon, and the placidly sinister mechanical voice of HAL is really all I remember.