Today is Day Zero of the Intel Developer Forum, where I’ll be on two panels regarding futurism and science fiction. I’m also very pleased to announce that one of my stories, “Photographic Memory,” is now available in The Tomorrow Project Anthology: Imagining the Future and Building It.
“Photographic Memory” is a story inspired by two things. The first is this piece by Jennifer Kahn for the New York Times, called“Can You Call A Nine-Year-Old A Psychopath?”. When I first read the article, I found myself wanting to write a story about the camp Kahn describes. However, I had no way to extend that idea into the future. I put the idea aside, until Brian David Johnson (who I’ve worked with before) contacted me about participating in the Tomorrow Project, and connected me to the work of Margie Morris on “relational computing.” This was a way for me to take that delicious premise (kid psychopaths! at camp!) into the future (ubiquitous computing!).
Anyhow, to find out more about the Tomorrow Project and the logic behind it, I suggest you check out this piece at Forbes:
The idea is to imagine the future, specifically as relates to technology and how people use it, create plausible scenarios that might actually come about as technology develops, and then figure out how to make them happen. The practical part of the exercise involves proposing how Intel can target future products for these applications, which, upon conception, live only in the realm of science fiction, but which can be brought about in real life by focus and effort over, say, a decade.