Degrees of Freedom

Karl Schroeder divides his time between writing fiction and analyzing the future impact of science and technology on society. He is the author of nine novels and has pioneered a new mode of writing that blends fiction and rigorous futures research: Crisis in Zefra (2005) and Crisis in Urlia (2011) were commissioned by the Canadian army as research tools. Karl holds a master’s degree in strategic foresight and innovation from OCAD University in Toronto.

• Response to “Degrees of Freedom”

  Written by David Guston
  Co-Director, Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes; Director, Center for Nanotechnology in Society, Arizona State University

  As a scholar, the questions that this story raises, if this were a real technology, would be: “What exactly is going on in the software, in the intelligence that sits behind the system? How is it programmed such that we can read the Dorians with such subtlety and guide ourselves to a decision?”

• The Future of Agriculture

  The question is what synergistic technologies can we deploy to halt and then reverse the effect of human agriculture on the land? And, what would Earth look like if agriculture were offloaded, either to vertical farms or, in Gerard K. O’Neill’s vision, to orbital farms?

  Karl Schroeder
  Science Fiction author and foresight analyst
  Read the conversation >>

• Mathematics of Gamification

  Foursquare Data Scientist Michael Li talks probabilities, integers and Bayesian Smoothing.