Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

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Anticipating the Future through Knowledge of the Fiction in Social Reality

November 17th, 2011 in Category: Future Design

I was the keynote speaker at the conference on "Das Wissen der Zukunft" ("Knowledge of the Future") that took place at the University of Vienna on November 4-5, 2011. These are the lecture notes for my speech.
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Jean Baudrillard and Doomsday: On Louis Arnoux’s “Catastrophe Warning” Discourse

August 25th, 2011 in Category: Ecology, Energy, and the Environment, Jean Baudrillard

After a summer break lasting the month of August, I now start the new academic and business year with this major critique of the work of Louis Arnoux.
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General Patton Memorial Museum

June 30th, 2011 in Category: Museum of the Future, War & Peace

I felt that the General Patton Memorial Museum, and especially the "Ed Hastey Military Vehicle Park" next to it, has some elements embodying the basic principle of the "Museum of the Future" as I conceive it.
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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Robots

June 23rd, 2011 in Category: Robotism

I will now outline a programme of 7 concrete near-term steps that a large robotics manufacturing company should take on the road towards introducing robots-slash-androids to the consumer public.
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Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids

June 21st, 2011 in Category: Marshall McLuhan, Robotism

There are two ways of thinking about robots or androids, distinguished by the different associations evoked by the two terms robot and android. We want to synthesize the two perspectives.
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I am physically in Las Vegas, Nevada, but I am really in Venice, Italy

March 31st, 2011 in Category: Architecture, Quantum Culture

The reality of what Las Vegas architecture has achieved exceeds the intentions of the casino hotel owners. Venice is no longer restricted to its physical location in the region of Veneto in northern Italy.
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Morality in Europe Today

February 5th, 2011 in Category: Music, University of the Future

There is a crisis of liberalism in Europe today. Liberalism and radicalism need each other. It is not a question of giving up one for the other, as so many activists and intellectuals in our history unfortunately did.
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Die Bibliothek der Zukunft auf Video

October 27th, 2010 in Category: Future Design, Library of the Future

Presented at the Wikipedia Critical Point of View Conference in Leipzig, Germany, Sept. 26, 2010
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Beaubourg, Quai Branly, and the Simulacrum of Jean Baudrillard, by René Capovin

October 23rd, 2010 in Category: Architecture, Jean Baudrillard

"Quai Branly is a remake of Beaubourg, in a different field of art. Whereas Beaubourg is a perfect institution in the field of modern art (as Baudrillard himself explicitly says – the first part of my essay is dedicated to his famous 1977 article on Beaubourg), Quai Branly is a perfect institution in the field of 'primitive art'."
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Die Bibliothek der Zukunft – The Library of the Future

October 20th, 2010 in Category: Future Design, Library of the Future

The concept of libraries as they are is in many ways obsolete. I am speaking about university libraries, public libraries, and online libraries. Recently, I looked closely at the websites of about 150 university libraries, primarily in the USA, but also in the UK, Australia, Germany, and other European and Asian countries.
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The Car of the Future

October 10th, 2010 in Category: Car of the Future, Donna Haraway, Future Design, Gregory Bateson, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, Real/Virtual Reality

In November 2008, Alan N. Shapiro was invited by Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany to speak about his ideas about "the car of the future." He spoke in front of an audience of people from the Human-Machine Interface Dept. and and the Infotainment Dept. This text was written as accompaniment to that presentation.
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“All Our Yesterdays”

August 29th, 2010 in Category: Library of the Future, Time Travel

Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy beam down to the planet Sarpeidon, the only natural satellite of a star, Beta Niobe, which is going to explode as a supernova in three-and-a-half hours. Enterprise sensor scans indicate that there is no intelligent life remaining anywhere on that world.
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“Shore Leave”

August 9th, 2010 in Category: Real/Virtual Reality, Theme Park of the Future

With the exhausted crew of more than four hundred and thirty people in dire need of quality leisure time following months of especially strenuous missions, advance landing parties scout an uncharted Earth-like world in the Omicron Delta region of space to ascertain its degree of holiday suitability.
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The Car of the Future, folding study, by Nick Pugh

August 5th, 2010 in Category: Car of the Future, Future Design

Visualisations by the virtuoso concept artist-designer Nick Pugh.
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The Car of the Future, alternate modes, by Nick Pugh

August 5th, 2010 in Category: Car of the Future, Future Design

Visualisations by the virtuoso concept artist-designer Nick Pugh
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