Alex Steffen from Worldchanging.com says that we’re doomed — too many people, etc. — but that there is in fact another world already here. He points to Jim Moore’s Second Super Power, Howard Dean, Linus Torvalds, wikipedia, Creative Commons, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula is rengotiating the relationship between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, Alex says. Brazil is giving broadband to poor areas and seeing rapid economic improvement. He also points to the Internet Bookmobile, a merry-go-round that pumps water as kids play, a rollable water jug, and a flower that has bee nengineered to detect land mines. Then there’s the pond scum that emits hydrogen.

[Very upbeat talk. But we’re all doomed.]

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Phillip Longman says: Unless the secular socities find a way to reproduce themselves, the future belongs to fundamentalists…that is, a new dark ages.” (He’s at the New America Foundation.) More exactly: Fallling birthrates will bring a breakdown of modern welfare states, and the inability of secular societies ro reproduce themselves will lead to the rise of fundamentalist states.

He goes through the numbers. I, of course, I can’t evaluate them because, well, they’re numbers. “Does the future belong to those who believe a higher power command them to procreate? On the surface, the answer seems to be yes.” One conclusion: The future of America, demographically speaking, belongs to the Mormons, he suggests.

[My favorite slide title from this presentation: “An Aging Population Death Spiral” Quite the light-hearted talk! ; ) ]

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Tom is the author of The Pentagon’s New Map. I’ve been reading his stuff for a while. I don’t know enough to be able to tell if what he says is right, but it sure seems coherent and compelling.

You ought to go read his stuff.

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Jim was the visual effects supervisor on Lord of the Rings. He’s got a looong list of credits, LOTR is enough for me. “I could do Lord of the Rings on a laptop right now,” he says. It would take longer — they had 6,000 CPUs on LOTR — but you could do it.

He shows clips of the animation process. He says that he doesn’t expect digital effects to replace actors, except for stunts. [Last year at PopTech, one of the Pixar guys said that they won’t replace actors because acting is an art that actors do better than animators.] He shows the big elephant battle from LOTR III (I know that’s not what Tolkien called ’em, so just back off), variously exposing the layers of digital effects. It is a crazy-ass piece of footage, and seeing the layers was amazing. I went back to see the movie a second time when it first came out primarily to see that scene again.

He shows side-by-side clips of Andy Serkis and and Gollum in dramatic moments, closeups, to make the case that Serkis should have gotten a Best Actor Oscar.

He says that the industry is holding off putting in digital projectors because when that happens, anyone can make a movie and have it shown in a theater. The audience applauds.

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Florida says that the rise of the creative economy — where the real value is derived from creativity — is a fundamental change. You need not only technological creativity. You also need aesthetic creativity. You need cultural creativity. You need a people culture. And for that you’ll do better by going to a place that’s open culturally, that has lots of job opportunities, that has “energy.”

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The thesis of his upcoming book, Our New Selves, is that we’re at a hinge in history because for the first time technology is being applied inwardly more than outwardly. Are we engineering new types of humans? He says that every super power in the comics is either here now or will be “before your mortgage is paid off.”

[I got swept up in the backchannel chat and have obviously done a crappy job blogging this talk. Sorry.]

Gladwell: Not all the superpowers ar here yet. E.g., we can’t know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. [Also, no creepy stretchiness.]

Garreau: We’re developing infallible lie detectors.

Gladwell: If I don’t know if I’m telling a lie, how can you know?

de Waal: The people in the fields you (Garreau) are talking about don’t know enough about primate behavior. Anger can be beneficial. Alter that, for example, and who knows what you will screw up?

Metcalfe: The guy who designed the Pepsi Challenge is in our audience. Was Malcolm’s characterization accurate?

Guy: Yeah, about 75%.

Malcolm: My point is that things are more complex than these tests often think. E.g., people react to the packaging as if they’re reacting to the product. It’s better to observe human behavior than test it or ask for explicit explanations.

de Waal: I don’t trust questionnaires at all. Observation!

de Waal: I get jittery about proposal to change human nature because we know so little about it and everything is tied to something else.

Metcalfe: Do you, Dr. de Waal, think that we should behave more like chimps.

de Waal: [laughs] No, we’re all unique. For example, we have pair-bonding and families, which chimps don’t. We should be aware of our primate tendencies.

Jonathan Coulton is doing songs to close out sessions. He was great last year and now is singing a love song to his Mac.

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Frans says he’s going to convince us that we’re apes. He says that aggression also provides opportunities for reconciliation; aggression doesn’t just drive us apart. He has lots of funny examples of how the body laguage of politicians establish dominance hierarchies — including the political reconciliation of Bush and McCain. And he goes through the ways in which chimps and capuchins support basic ideas of fairness and sharing. [Totally enjoyable talk.]

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He’s giving us a preview of Chapter 3 of his new book, Blink. He’s going to talk about the development of the Aeron office chair. When it was first tested, the testers said they hated it because it was ugly. Yet, it’s become the best selling chair in the history of chairs. But after it became popular, the same groups said the chair is beautiful.

We find out what people like by asking them, he says. But the story of the Aeron chair shows that something gets lost between the feeling of a preference and the expression of a preference. What does this tell us about human nature? “Our preferences are extraordinarily unstable.”

He points to problems with blind taste tests like the ones Coke and Pepsi run. First problem: If you only take a sip, you’ll almost always prefer the one that’s sweeter, but not when you drink the whole can. Home use tests give different answers than sip tests. Second: People pick up cues unconsciously. We can’t explain how we do things or why we prefer them. Third: Asking people to think about what they prefer changes their preferences.

The real problem is that we have trouble distinguishing between things that are truly ugly and things we have trouble being articulate about because they’re too new.

Conclusion: We have to be skeptical when customers say “No.” And we have to understand that we don’t always understand our own hearts.

[Excellent talk and a great start for PopTech. And Gladwell is so good at making points by telling stories. But I’m a little confused. In some of his examples, the problem is that our prefs are unstable. In others, the prefs are real but we don’t report them accurately. In others, the test itself is flawed so the real prefs that we express accurately – we really do like the sip of Pepsi better than the sip of Coke – don’t reflect prefs outside of the testing environment. I assume the book lays all this out

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IT Conversations is (are?) streaming PopTech live, here.

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I’m at PopTech for the next few days, which looks like it’ll be an exceptional conference. I’m helping out with the official backchannel chat for attendees, which will probably prevent me from live-blogging it. But I don’t like live-blogging anyway. I only do it because Im too lazy to go back to my motel room and actually think about what I’ve heard.

I’m sitting in the blogger’s corner of the Camden, Maine, opera house. We have the power. No, really, this corner is where the power outlets are. I’m sitting next to Halley. Lots of friends in the audience.

Shh. The upbeat shut-up-we’re-starting-music is beginning and Bob Metcalfe is about to come on stage to kick things off…

Theme of the conference: The Next Renaissance. First session’s speakers: Frans de Waal, Joel Garreau, and Malcolm Gladwell. Not bad!

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