How do you green the suburbs?

The bright green mantra, when it comes to the built environment, is that cities rule, suburbs drool. Cities are more (energy) sustainable, resilient, cultural, diverse, better for your waistline, surprise you with presents on your birthday, and so forth. Suburbs, conversely, are bastions of excessive consumption and insufficient sophistication, filled with McMansions and McDonalds, and are probably hitting on your spouse behind your back. My preferences actually align with that sentiment, but I've become troubled with the green urbanization push. The issue of the future of suburbia isn't as easy as simply telling people to move to cities.

Gentle question: when you convince the masses of people living in the ring suburbs to move back downtown, what happens?

(a) Everybody gets a place in the city, and a pony.
(b) Prices for places in the city shoot up, even in "down and out" areas, driving out low- and moderate-income current residents, and stopping all but the higher-income suburbanites from returning. Without any ponies at all.

Encouraging people to move from the suburbs closer to their place of work in the city because it's actually cheaper (when you include transportation) only works when nobody else does it. Once everybody -- or even a lot of people -- gets that bright (green) idea, the combination of increased demand and limited availability drives up prices. As big as cities may be, there are lots of people in the 'burbs. It may be possible to build more housing within the urban core, but you have one guess as to which neighborhoods are likely to be the ones knocked down to make way for new high-rise condos.

We're already seeing the reverse of the old "white flight" trope, where middle-class whites abandoned cities for the suburbs. Gentrification (with the artists as the "shock troops," we're told), re-urbanization, even "black flight" to the suburbs upset the conceptual models of the built environment that remained dominant in the US for the last few decades. Cities are back... and the suburbs may be abandoned to the low-income.

Everywhere? No. Overnight? No. An important trend? Very much so.

Why? Because figuring out how to make suburbs sustainable is increasingly an act of environmental justice. The displaced urban poor and middle-income will be even less able to afford the energy, transportation, and health costs of environmental decline.

We need to figure out how to upcycle the suburbs. It may involve traditional green ideas such as mass transit and bicycles; it may involve something a bit more complex, like a specialized version of LEED for neighborhoods.

But we need more innovation than that. Not just technology -- while cheap solar building materials wouldn't be bad at all, the real innovations in resilience and sustainability will come in the realm of policy and behavior. Society and culture. Not just the physical infrastructure, the connective sinews of communities. Metaphorical language is all we have now to describe it, because it hasn't yet been invented.

But here's the golden hope: the first one(s) to figure out how to do this, how to make suburbia sustainable and to do so at a breathtakingly low cost, will win the world. Because, as much as China and India and South Africa and Brazil are hot to get their hands on their local iterations of the 1950s American Dream -- a house, two giant cars, and a TV in every pot -- they'll be desperate to figure out how to afford it pretty damn soon. They'll be looking for this same elusive model, and will pay well for it.

The Fermi Paradox -- if there's other intelligent life in the galaxy, given how long the galaxy's been here, how come we haven't seen any indication of it? -- is an important puzzle for those of us who like to think ahead. Setting aside the mystical (we're all that was created by a higher being) and fundamentally unprovable (we're all living in a simulation), we're left with two unpalatable options: we're the first intelligent species to arise; or no civilization ever makes it long enough. The first one is unpalatable because it suggests that our understanding of the biochemical and physical processes underlying the development of life have a massive gap, since all signs point to the emergence of organic life under appropriate conditions being readily replicable. The second one is unpalatable for a more personal reason: if no civilization ever survives long enough to head out into the stars, what makes us think we'd be special?

But I think there might be a third option.

(Warning: the rest hidden in the extended entry due to extreme geekitude.)

Continue reading "Pondering Fermi" »

Discussions of the implications of the augmentation of our biological bodies with prosthetic technologies can be found quite readily in the esoteric discourses of self-described transhumanists, social theorists, and bioethicists. One might be forgiven for imagining that it's less-common among sports fans, more concerned with the latest scores and statistics. But the cover story of the current ESPN Magazine, "Let 'Em Play," not only explores the bigger issues surrounding the integration of augmentation in our culture, but (as the article title suggests) adopts a clearly pro-prosthetic perspective. Given the sports panics around doping, this isn't just enlightened, it's brave.

This isn't just a story about Oscar Pistorius, although his aborted effort to reach the Olympics -- shut down not because he wasn't good enough, but because the International Association of Athletics Federations feared that he'd soon be too good -- is clearly a catalyst for the story. The story's author, Eric Adelson, looks at a cross-section of prosthetic enhancements, some allowable, some not, and notes that this wouldn't be the first time that international athletics shied away from an advance. In many cases, reality forced athletics culture to change:

Every organized sport begins the same way, with the creation of rules. We then establish technological limits, as with horsepower in auto racing, stick curvature in hockey, bike weight in cycling. As sports progress, those rules are sometimes altered. The USGA, for instance, responded to advances in club technology by legalizing metal heads in the early '80s. In Chariots of Fire, the hero comes under heavy scrutiny for using his era's version of steroids: a coach, at a time when the sport frowned upon outside assistance. So if we can adjust rules of sports to the time, why not for prosthetics?

This story has emerged at a crucial time for augmentative technologies. We have, simultaneously, passionate laments on television and in the halls of Congress about steroid scandals in baseball, and a rapid proliferation of cognitive enhancing drugs in schools and in the workplace. For a moment, it seemed like the Western reaction to enhancement technologies would mirror the US schizophrenia around recreational drugs: widespread use alongside widespread condemnation. With the Pistorius story, and the growing recognition of the diversity of prosthetic technologies, we may not be able to so easily categorize such enhancements as "good" and "bad," "acceptable" and "unacceptable."

That this is happening in the world of sport is even more important than its timing. As long as arguments about augmentation and prosthetics remained focused on emerging bioscience, abstract notions of "human dignity," and imagined scenarios of war between the enhanced and unenhanced, most people (to the extent they were even aware of the issues), would see them as pointless irrelevancies or, worse still, science fiction. But with the epicenter of the dilemma a cultural arena that cuts across social, geographic and political divisions, arguments about augmentation and prosthetics will be inescapable. ESPN isn't a niche sub-culture; it's a common language.

For those of us who have been talking about the emerging questions about the role of augmentation technologies, "Let 'Em Play" (along with its two companion pieces, "The Disadvantage Advantage" and "Anything You Can Do...," a photo gallery of augmented athletes), offers a useful, powerful, and above all meaningful framing of the issue for people who might not even be aware that there is an issue.

(Disclaimer: A producer for ESPN Magazine interviewed me several months ago on a related topic, and the conversation drifted into these particular issues. I'm not cited in the article, but I wouldn't be surprised if lots of people at the magazine are wrestling with this subject.)

I have one thing to say: depopulation is not a global warming strategy.

Here's what leads me to that (seemingly obvious, but apparently not) observation.

We know these to be true:

• Early Bright Green: "It is when man shall have discovered the means of restocking the sea and of controlling its supplies that his "dominion over the fish" will be perfect. The power to deplete, which so far marks the utmost limit of his advance, is mere tyrrany. Dominon should embrace a more benevolent sway, and to that end no doubt the efforts of science and the might of law will presently join forces."

From The Sea-fishing industry of England and Wales: A Popular Account of the Sea Fisheries and Fishing Ports of Those Countries F. G. Aflalo 1904

• Hegemonic Games: As the US global hegemony declines, the mainstream view is that China will move into its place. I don't think that's likely, but China will certainly rival the US as a sub-hegemonic actor. The fun's already begun, in fact, as demonstrated by Chinese soldiers patrolling Zimbabwe streets alongside Mugabe's troops:

Chinese troops have been seen on the streets of Zimbabwe's third largest city, Mutare, according to local witnesses. They were seen patrolling with Zimbabwean soldiers before and during Tuesday's ill-fated general strike called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). [...]

One eyewitness, who asked not to be named, said: "We've never seen Chinese soldiers in full regalia on our streets before. The entire delegation took 80 rooms from the hotel, 10 for the Chinese and 70 for Zimbabwean soldiers."

See also here. This is going to be messy.

• Green Games (the fun kind): Jon Lebkowsky has a piece in the Austin Chronicle entitled "The Serious Play in Saving the World," building on the South-by-Southwest panel he ran in March. It's a strong piece on the state of green gaming, and both its potential and challenges. The article focuses on Pliny Fisk, who joined me on the SXSW panel, and his efforts to find an intersection between sustainability and gaming.

Fisk has been considering how you could use real-world data in virtual environments to model what he calls EcoBalance, the name of a board game he proposed in 2000, where "participants plan land uses at a settlement or regional scale according to the footprints required to balance natural resource supply and sync functions (i.e., natural capital) with human life support needs."

EcoBalance could evolve to be something more than a board game via Fisk's interest in digital convergence – increasingly realistic, detailed visualizations; fatter storage and faster CPUs; growing broad adoption of personal digital systems including mobile devices; and powerful support for in-world interactivity in massively multiplayer environments like Second Life.

As I note the quote Jon used, there has not been a better time for the emergence of a green game. In fact, I think that if the ancient planet model SimEarth could be re-compiled for current hardware, it could be a minor hit -- and a major one if the graphics & simulation code could be updated, too.

(Apparently, SimEarth can be downloaded from Abandonia.com -- if anyone gets it running, let me know!)

• The Global Suburb: The suburban dream spreads around the world.

"Every year, we add 60 million urban residents on Earth," Stanilov says. "The countries most susceptible to embracing the American model are particularly those with a booming economy and an emerging class of affluent residents and consumers really eager to embrace the American lifestyles. They don't want just the house but the whole package, the three-car garage, the mall, all of that."

For many developing nations, however, the suburban ideal is stuck in circa 1980: a sea of lookalike single-family homes and shopping malls on the edge of the city. It's a model that many Americans increasingly are rejecting.

Suburbia is the logical result of economic growth in regions where density=squalor. System-focused enviros can't eliminate the pathologies of suburbia without both meeting the needs it satisfies and reinventing density.

• Jargon of Note: RUMINT: Rumor level intelligence.
BOGINT — bogus intelligence
To the Right/Left of the Boom: the time before or after a bomb detonation, as imagined on a timeline. Emergency response crews usually work to the right of the boom, i.e., afterwards; bomb disposal crews usually work to the left of the boom.

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it's all about saving the Earth.

It's not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.

That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central to the rhetoric, the memetics of environmentalism. Most environmental discussions focus on ecological dynamics, with references to human beings typically limited to enumerations of the various insults we've visited upon the planet. Given the degree of culpability we bear for the current state of the planet, this is entirely appropriate.

But the rhetorical focus of environmentalism on the planet obscures the fact that what human beings have done to the Earth pales in comparison to past disasters hitting our world, from massive asteroid strikes to super-volcano eruptions killing off 90+% of the Earth's species. In fact, over the course of our planet's lifespan it's experienced every form of (non-human-engineered) apocalypse on the Eschatological Taxonomy up to Class IV -- in comparison, humans have yet to unleash even a Class 0 Apocalypse. And in every case, the Earth has recovered, and life has once again flourished.

We sometimes make the conceptual mistake of thinking that the way the Earth's ecosystem is today is the way it will forever be, that we've somehow reached an ecological end-state. But even in an eco-conscious world, or one devoid of humans entirely, natural processes from evolution to geophysical and solar cycles would continue. The Earth's been at this for a long time, literally billions of years; from a planetary perspective, a quadrupling of atmospheric carbon lasting 10,000 years (for example) is little more than a passing blip. The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere or how many toxins we dump into the soil and oceans, given enough time the Earth will recover.

But human civilization is far more fragile.

Human civilization could not withstand and recover from the same kinds of assaults the planet itself has shrugged off in eons past. We remain entirely dependent upon myriad Earth services and systems, from topsoil and clean water to carbon cycles and biodiversity. Activities that undermine those critical services and systems quite literally threaten the survival of human civilization. The fundamental resilience of the Earth's geophysical systems simply means that, when we ignore our effects on the planet, we're simply making ourselves disposable, just another passing blip in the planet's long history.

In trying to minimize the harmful impacts of human activities upon the global ecosystem, environmentalism supports the continued healthy existence of humankind.

To me, this too is entirely appropriate. Despite its many flaws, I'm a big fan of human civilization. I marvel at our capacity to organize matter and information, at our ability to learn from mistakes and pass that learning down to subsequent generations. Civilization -- writing, cities, trade, the whole lot of it -- makes us unique on this planet and, as far as we can tell so far, in our part of the universe. Destroying that through malice or negligence is the worst form of crime, and the height of tragedy.

Part of a focus upon civilization, however, is the recognition that we do not exist in isolation, that we are dependent upon an enormous variety of complex systems. As a result, our continued existence requires the continued success of those systems. In order to save ourselves, we have to minimize actions which damage and disrupt the environment.

Like any social movement, environmentalists argue over tactics and goals, and some eco-activists will disagree with my characterization of the purpose of environmentalism. But the reality is that -- at least with current technologies -- there's nothing that we can do to truly put the planetary biosphere at existential risk. It will recover from what we now do, albeit in a different form than today. But what we can do is so violate the integrity of the planet's ecosystem that the Earth can no longer support us.

Critics of environmentalism often claim that eco-activists hate humans, that we value the Earth more than we value ourselves. With very few exceptions, nothing could be further from the truth. Environmentalism is fundamentally about making sure that human beings, and human civilization, can continue to thrive on our home planet for centuries, millennia to come. Environmentalism, in its demands for respect for nature, ultimately demands that we respect ourselves.

Happy Earth Day -- and Happy Civilization Day.

At one point during the multiple days of futures workshops held over the last week, one of my colleagues asked me where I'd learned to facilitate groups. After confirming that he thought I was doing it well, and wanted to learn more (as opposed to wanting to know what to avoid), I told him, and he was a little surprised. You might be, too.

Dungeons & Dragons made me a professional futurist.

Not the subject matter, of course. For the uninitiated, Dungeons & Dragons (hereafter D&D) is kind of like World of Warcraft, with elves and wizards and inappropriately violent people with heavy swords, all in a vaguely medieval setting. The big difference between D&D and WoW is that D&D isn't played on the computer; it requires you and a handful of friends to sit around a table that's covered with sheets of paper, stacks of books with embarrassing covers, and dice. Lots of dice. The other big difference is that D&D emerged in the 1970s, and WoW is totally a ripoff. But I digress.

For the most part, when I played D&D in the 1980s, I served as the "dungeon master" (DM) for the games -- that is, the guy who came up with the stories, managed the games, and threw various hazards at the players. It's not an easy task: the three to five players sitting with you have to run their individual characters, but the DM has to be everything else in the world, and has to make sure that the story moves along fast enough to keep the players interested but carefully enough that the players don't feel railroaded. That role taught me a couple of things that still shape my thinking.

The first is the art of world-building. Although the current version of D&D (as well as the various other surviving non-computer role-playing games) includes a pre-made world in which to play, back in the day we didn't have pre-constructed settings with collections of conflicts and lore and a lengthy backstory, and we liked it. We had to make our own worlds. And if they were to be interesting settings for narrative play, they had to be detailed, internally-consistent, rich with history and key driving forces, and open to players creating novel strategies to deal with seemingly world-shaking threats.

The last part is especially important. The art of world-building isn't the same as the art of story-telling. Stories focus on the characters, and have a strong narrative arc. World-building creates the environment in which the player's characters exist, and offers hooks and platforms upon which the players can, collaboratively, create their own stories.

The parallels here between world-building in D&D and scenario construction for futures work should be obvious. Scenarios have to be detailed, internally-consistent, rich with history and key driving forces, and open to "players" -- that is, the strategists and citizens reading the scenarios -- developing their own strategies of operation. In this case, however, futures scenarios involve the emergence of nanomanufacturing or disruptive climate change rather than the emergence of wizard-kings or disruptive undead hordes.

The second lesson from D&D is the art of invisible guidance. This is where the facilitation skills come into play -- the goal of a DM (facilitator) is to get the players (participants) to follow a particular story-line (strategic argument) and reach a given end-point while making the players (participants) feel as if they'd arrived there naturally. As a facilitator, standing up and telling the participants what they should be understanding and deciding is worse than ineffective, it's counter-productive. Similarly, when a DM gives the players no choice but to accept a quest or follow a path, players often end up pushing back.

Why not just let the players or participants follow where their interests lead? Ideally, that would be wonderful, but both facilitators and dungeon masters have real-world limits on time. If an organization is paying me for seven hours of futures consultation, I had better make sure that what I produce by the end of the day is something that the organization finds worthwhile and appropriate. If a group of friends is going to take a full night out of a busy week to get together and play a game, I had better make sure that they have fun during that session, and feel like they've progressed.

The trick, then, is to make sure that the participants and players move towards an end-point I have in my head without me telling them what that end-point will be. I don't have a checklist for this; for me, it's a style or practice that emerged out of years (a few decades, really) of on-the-job learning. One element that's certain: I always let the participants & players follow tangents for awhile before nudging them back towards the intended narrative. In nearly every case, this provides a better context for the ensuing conversation/game-play.

Obviously, running a D&D game and facilitating a futures workshop have numerous fundamental differences, and I don't want to make more of the comparison than is warranted. But I am at the same time quite convinced that I wouldn't be able to do what I do today without the experience I've had playing these sorts of games. I suspect that, in a variety of important ways, the kinds of thinking and practices encouraged by those games are precisely those that have enormous value today: open-ended strategy; an embrace of the unexpected; and a fundamental reliance on asking "what if?"

Because I'm in meetings all week...

• Going Around in Circles: What's the secret to improving fuel efficiency, cutting emissions, and saving gas money? Don't turn left. At least, that's how the UPS routing software does it. No, really:

Time studies led UPS to discover that avoiding left-hand turns would save time, conserve fuel, reduce emissions and reduce the potential for accidents. UPS managers (who for years planned routes by physically driving each one and plotting on maps) began experimenting with their routes to see if right hand turns would increase efficiency. It worked. For decades, UPS has designed routes in a series of loops with as few left-hand turns as possible.

Janice had a good question when I told her of this: if you're in a vehicle with auto-stop (like a hybrid or a growing number of high-mileage regular cars), how much of a difference would routing like this make?

• Sterling on Spimes: As usual, Chairman Bruce gives good rant, this time at the "Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign" conference in Potsdam at the end of March. It's about a 40 minute talk, but worth checking out.

Excellent new term coming from his talk: meta-medium -- a new medium that embraces a variety of ostensibly unrelated earlier media. Example: the mobile phone.

(Paraphrasing Bruce) Mobile phones are a "meta-medium" - they eat practically everything. phone. camera. web browser. video gaming. fax. radio. gps. pedometers. barcode readers. car keys. etc.

(Via Posthuman Blues)

• The Copyfight Moves to Space: Patents killed an off-course communications satellite last week.

The AMC-14 comsat didn't quite make its geostationary orbit when launched in March, falling into a survivable but non-useful orbit. The owners understandably wanted to try to salvage it, given the success of earlier satellite rescues involving flinging the satellite around the moon. Bad news:

...a plan to salvage AMC-14 was abandoned a week ago when SES gave up in the face of patent issues relating to the lunar flyby process used to bring wayward GEO birds back to GEO Earth orbit. [...] SES is currently suing Boeing for an unrelated New Skies matter in the order of $50 million dollars - and Boeing told SES that the patent was only available if SES Americom dropped the lawsuit.

Industry sources have told SpaceDaily that the patent is regarded as legal "trite", as basic physics has been rebranded as a "process", and that the patent wouldn't stand up to any significant level of court scrutiny and was only registered at the time as "the patent office was incompetent when it came to space matters".

So let me get this straight: Boeing has patented orbital mechanics?

Whenever I talk about the participatory panopticon, one issue grabs an audience more often than anything else -- privacy. But the more I dig into the subject, the more it becomes clear that the real target of the panopticon technologies isn't privacy, but deception. We're starting to see the onset of a variety of technologies allowing the user to determine with some degree of accuracy whether or not the subject is lying. The most promising of these technologies use functional magnetic resonance imaging -- handy if you're conducting a police interview, perhaps, but not likely to be built into a cell phone any time soon. But it turns out that there's another emerging system for discovering deception, one that's not just potentially portable, but also offers the tantalizing possibility of determining if someone lied long after the fact.

Ron Brinkmann is a visual technology expert, author of The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, and an occasional Open the Future reader. He recently blogged about a set of emerging, very experimental lie-detection technologies relying on images. One takes advantage of observations of so-called "microexpressions," a real phenomenon where micro-second changes in our facial expressions correlate to our feelings about what we are saying. The other takes advantage of changes in skin temperature around the eyes, looking for a brief flare-up of heat that correlates with stress. Rather than reiterate Ron's post, I suggest you go read it.

I want to call particular attention to an observation he makes late in the piece, however, because I think it's worth careful consideration:

But enough about the future. Let’s talk about now. Because those last few video/audio analysis techniques I mentioned raise a particularly interesting scenario: Even though we may not have the technology yet to accurately and consistently detect when someone is lying, we will eventually be able to look back at the video/audio that is being captured today and determine, after the fact, whether or not the speaker was being truthful. In other words, even though we may not be able to accurately analyze the data immediately, we can definitely start collecting it. Infrared cameras are readily available, and microexpressions (which may occur over a span of less than 1/25th of a second) should be something that even standard video (at 30fps) would be able to catch. And today’s cameras should have plenty of resolution to grab the details needed, particularly if you zoom in on the subject [...].

Which brings us to the real point of this post. Is it possible that we’ve gotten to the point where certain peoples - I’m thinking specifically of politicians both foreign and domestic - should be made aware that anything they say in public will eventually be subject to retroactive truth-checking… Because it seems to me that someone needs to start recording all the Presidential debates NOW with a nice array of infrared and high-definition cameras. And they need to do it in a public fashion so that every one of these candidates is very aware of it and of why it is being done.

(emphasis in original)

There's no question in my mind that, when these lie-detection systems become seen as good enough (which does not mean 100% accurate, of course), people will start using them to go back through video recordings looking for microexpressions. Politicians offer an obvious set of initial subjects, but I suspect our attention would shift quickly to celebrities. I wouldn't be surprised to see the technologies adopted by activists, especially if we're in an age of going after environmental or economic criminals. Finally, once the systems have come down in price and increased in portability, we'll start pointing them at friends and lovers.

What then? It's hard to believe that cheap, easy-to-use, after-the-fact applicable lie-detection systems won't be snapped up. But do we really want to know that sometimes when spouses or parents say "I love you," their microexpressions and facial heat say "...but not right now..."? Imagine the market for facial analysis apps as add-ons to video conferencing systems for businesses or the home. Video iChat, now with iTruth!

Arguably, the only thing worse than this kind of technology getting into everybody's hands would be if it only got into the hands of people already in power.

Information is power, but so is misinformation. People who lie to achieve some outcome have very real power over the people they've lied to. The capacity to identify those lies, even after-the-fact, can undermine that power. This won't be an easy transition; the technological rebalancing of the political system is already underway (as shown with blogs, YouTube, and the like). Any efforts to pull back from this shift will be met with resistance, anger, and worse. And they will undoubtedly be on the record, like it or not.

Neologisms coming to mind during the Institute for the Future Ten-Year Forecast event (Updated):

• "Mesh-to-Mesh" -- social network applications, like Twitter, structured as overlapping peer networks. Living in the space between one-to-one and many-to-many, mesh-to-mesh networks serve as a medium for discovering & creating new network connections, and bridging otherwise distinct communities. This one emerged as I was thinking about Twitter.

  In brief, questions and responses to someone on my Twitter who's part of one community (say, eco-bloggers) are visible everyone on my Twitter list, across the full array of represented communities. If they aren't already linked, they'll only see my half of the conversation, but (in my experience) speaking directly to someone often leads to some folks on my network becoming part of theirs. Mesh-to-mesh networks are likely to be strongest when there's moderate overlap: too much overlap and they become functionally identical networks; too little overlap and call-outs and links to the alternative networks happen too infrequently. Mesh-to-mesh can have the intimacy of personal links and the diversity of a mass discussion.

• "Planet-to-Peer" -- an interactive environmental information network allowing for both monitoring and (when appropriate) manipulation. A green sousveillance system with feedback. This one emerged during a small group session led by David Pescovitz, covering eco-monitoring technologies; he'd asked me to describe how some of these networks might work, and by way of explanation I offered "they're planet-to-peer systems."

  (update)
  

• "Adaptive Optics" -- not a new term, but a new use. Optical metaphors are commonplace in consulting, with talk about "lenses" and "prisms" almost a requirement. In thinking about cognitive or cultural lenses for understanding a rapidly changing environment, the term "adaptive optics" came to mind. In reality a technology for dealing with a rapidly changing visual environment (such as turbulence in the atmosphere), the metaphorical version would be systems for dealing with a rapidly changing foresight environment.
  

If and when more new phrases bubble up during the event, I'll add to this post.

(Photo by Alex Pang)