Craig Hodgetts: 'Joining the throngs of the faithful as they jostled for a better view of his paintings, and searching in vain for even one fellow architect, one could not help wondering why the place was not swarmed by young designers. And one was reminded once again of just how insular the architects of the “Me Generation” had become. On display were images depicting cityscapes and buildings that might have been snatched from the most recent international competitions. Lustrous metallic surfaces, twisting towers, parametric volumes, all hauntingly beautiful, and all bearing dates—wait for it—from the early 1970s and ’80s!'

A guest post from Cat Valente on why Star Trek (with particular reference to Deep Space Nine) looks not like the future, but the not-so-recent past.

"Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give."

"The problem, in simple economic terms, is that supply has gone down and demand has gone up. “We’re going back to where coffee began,” Giuliano says, “as an exotic, beloved culinary experience.”"

"This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. I just hope to suggest some places to look." "Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?"

A must-read interview with Greg Lindsay, author of Aerotropolis, a book that argues - if the interview is anything to go by, persuasively - that the cities of the 21st century will be designed around airports.

Andy Miah: "How should we regard the business card in a digital age, both in terms of its future, and in terms of what their function may be as historical artifacts? For a few years now, I have been photographing business cards that I have received and I decided today that they should go into the public domain."

"I'm sorry to note that most of the good stuff didn't happen to those of us in the developed world — but the human world is indisputably in better shape overall in 2010 than it was in 2000. And what makes my neighbour happier without damaging me makes my world a better place." I'm not: the majority of humans don't live in the developed world. Those of us who do are already more or less sorted. If we can drag the rest up without further fouling up our shared biosphere, we'll be doing better than I usually believe humans can.

"It seems to me that one of our besetting problems these days is that there's a shortage of utopias on offer." To summarise the post would be to drain it. Just go and read it.

"Over the past decade cricket, one of the world's oldest and most popular sports, has shown a remarkable capacity for change. In its format, its governing laws and regulations, its relationship to technological advances, and its social media savvy, a sport that could have languished in the past has become one of the most innovative on the planet."

"My iPhone can tell me where I am, tell me where the sun is and the moon will be, put watermarks on my images, stitch panos, apply tilt-and-shift-like effect, email them or send them directly to places I want them, and much, much more. My US$7999 D3x can't do any of those things. Doesn't anyone else find something wrong with this picture?" The whole thing piece (collection, really) is long, but well worth reading if you're interested in cameras, customisation, and computing.

Alain de Botton's thoughts on a world without air travel, sparked by the current lack of flights across much of Europe.

"Bressey didn’t really try to 'kill' London, of course, though parts of his Greater London plan for redirecting and accommodating increasing vehicular traffic certainly would’ve destroyed some great beauty" "Trafalgar Square as a triple-decker parking deck. (What can one say?)" A curiously British pre-war approach.

Iain Sinclair tries to be funny, Zaha Hadid tries to clam she's seen it already, but Tony Travers' understated summary seems closest to the mark. (It's odd how 2030 doesn't have the ring of the future that 2010 did in 1990; I blame the millennium.)

Will Wiles scanned a magazine supplement late last year, and now the Observer has gone back to the original authors to follow up their predictions with what actually happened.

An annotated, free, online version of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline. I've only really read the nuclear chapter so far but that one alone is good stuff.

"If we are serious about curbing climate change, what would actually help? More people in cities, lots of nuclear power stations and lashings of GM crops, urges Stewart Brand. Unless green activists embrace the benefits of all three, they are not part of the solution, but part of the problem." A review of his new book in the Guardian.

"The Observer devoted its colour supplement to speculation about what London might be like in 20 years - in 2010" and Will Wiles has preserved it so you can compare it with what came to pass. For example: "The second vision... mostly consists of the removal of things that they don't like [such as] 'high-rise housing' in general." Well, not entirely wrong. "Mostly, these are replaced with open space." Um.

Interesting. Depressing. Hopeful. Well worth reading.

"'You believe that there are dangers if we fool ourselves into believing the AI myth?' 'It is likely to accelerate our progress towards a dystopian world in which wars, policing and care of the vulnerable are carried out by technological artefacts that have no possibility of empathy, compassion or understanding.'"

"Dunlop's Speedaway applications research has covered a proposed link between commuter train terminals north and south of the Thames. Photomontages, right and opposite, show the Speedaway crossing the new London Bridge."

An article from September 1968 about the two planned trainsets for high speed rail from Washington to Boston. Acela still pays the price for the failure to lay new track forty years ago. Choice quote: "A single rail track [has] been shown to have the same hourly passenger capacity as 24 lanes of expressway auto traffic."

Chris Heathcote on London Bus, TfL, and the future. It's persuaded me to install the app; I pride myself on being autistically dorky about journey planning but the London bus network is too big to hold in your head. (Conversely, I can't see why anyone would pay for a Tube map on a phone.)

oh, and Jamais Cascio. "So tired of all the darkness in our lives / With no more angry words to say / Can come alive / Get into a car and drive / To the other side."

"What will change everything?" Some themes, from the headlines: climate change (especially melting ice caps); augmented minds and IT-led learning; extra-terrestrial intelligence; nuclear weapon use (in various ways). There's also a general "biological engineering" theme, but that's harder to pin down. Lots to delve into, for the interested. (I wish they'd put each response on its own page, though.)

"I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on."

"These days, science can be stranger than science fiction, and mainstream literature is increasingly futuristic and speculative. So are the genre's days numbered?" Speaking of 'speculative', I do wish they hadn't let Atwood off the hook so easily, but then I do get grumpy. There's more on the web than in the magazine, and it all seems to be free (usually NS have a paywall), so that's good, at least.

Bruce Sterling's... well, maybe not his... keynote to the Austin Game Developers Conference a couple of days ago. Or something. You'll work it out. The line about MMORPGs is very good. Go on, read it.

A (very nicely presented, albeit paged) transcript of a speech Stephen Fry gave on Wednesday about the future of the BBC and public service broadcasting more generally. Via speechification, but I get much more out of reading not hearing.

Are technological civilisations curtailed by the lack of cheap energy, and is that what's going to happen to our civilisation? It's not a new thought, as I note, but it's good to see it getting coverage.

Thoughtful piece on Subversion's (corporate?) future in the distributed VCS world. "We need to focus on making Subversion the best tool for organizations whose users need to interact with repositories in complex ways"

Lovely poem about being watched over by AIs, Culture-style. I wonder if Ryman would dismiss this as an adolescent fantasy, too? It probably is. That doesn't stop it being seductive.

"If the world's future lies in scientists' hands, the answers are unlikely to come from the UK unless we reverse decades of political neglect, argues Nobel laureate Harry Kroto"

Tall buildings and the future London skyline

Proposed 2016 Tube map. Also includes trams and some overground service. As used by the BBC, with alterations, on its story about the tube map being a design icon, despite it looking awful compared to the current map. (PDF)

kottke waits to be spoonfed the future