Vic Grout's Blog

A short story in three parts Part Three: Ella Her name was Ella Mbaye, and she lived on the edge of what had once been a great forest. The forest was thinner now. The rivers ran hotter, and the rains came in shouts, not songs. She was twelve years old, home-schooled, under solar lamps when […]

A short story in three parts Part Two: Maen As we know, on the planet Orilen, there were no fossil fuels. Not because the Orileni were wise – at least, not at first – but because their world left no remnants of the past buried deep enough to rot into fire. No coal seams. No […]

A short story in three parts Part One: Serin On the planet Orilen, there were no fossil fuels. Not because the Orileni were wise; they simply had no choice. Their world, with its warm sapphire seas and forests of silver-needled trees, had never entombed the dead for long. Microbial life broke down the past too […]

A discussion of obstacles and attitudes towards ethical approaches to technology (A paper accepted for, but then withdrawn from, an international AI conference, when it became apparent that submissions were being reviewed by … yes, you guessed it … AI!) Download in PDF Abstract Technology ethics is a fashionable topic. In the past few years, […]

Well, we won’t name the conference (yet)! But it takes place this month, it’s a fairly standard ‘digital communications’ affair, with this year’s focus on AI (although not exclusively). So we submit a paper on AI Ethics … What happens then? Well, the paper gets accepted. Very quickly – which is a clue! So, that’s […]

Disclaimer: This is not a universal test for strong AI! Background Three and a half years ago, just as new AI techniques were clearly about to propel generative AI into the public domain, a post ‘“ERIC”: How a Bad Think-Thing Destroyed the World’ was published on this blog. There was a threefold purpose: The ERIC ‘Story’ […]

In previous posts, we’ve introduced the ESPELETIA dimensions (Ethics, Society, Politics, Environment, Legislation, Economy, Technology, International and Arts) and the ‘key drivers’ (AI, IoT, Big Data, Robotics, Communications and the ‘X Factor’). We now build this into a complete futurology tool for projecting into the future, and provide a complete set of documentation for research […]

The previous post introduced the ESPELETIA futurism tool. Here this is combined with key emergent and future technology drivers to deliver The Futurology Grid, a useful framework for practical futurism. The nine dimensions of the ESPELETIA tool are the coloured column headings in the table below. The details of each are as follows: These identify, […]

Over the decades, we’ve seen PEST extended to PESTLE to STEEPLED, but have we now got all the angles covered for practical 21st century futurism? Perhaps not. We’ve used the STEEPLED model before several times on this site, with some success. It’s undoubtedly a useful tool. But it’s not perfect: it’s time to recognise its […]

Well it’s been a while but the blog’s back on course! Thing is, I thought I’d retired but it looks as though I haven’t – for now at least! So, new posts and articles on the way. Maybe the book serialisation could even begin again at some point? Watch this space …