That’s exactly what London-based tech company Umbrellium has designed: the Starling Crossing is an interactive crosswalk that responds dynamically to its environment.
And it could be the future of how we interact with our cities.
by Tracey Follows, Founder/Director of the Female Futures Bureau
Jennifer Gidley is a former President of the World Futures Studies Federation (2009−2017), a UNESCO and UN partner and global peak body for futures studies scholarship, she led a network of hundreds of world leading futures scholars and researchers from around the globe. An adjunct Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS in Sydney, futurist, author, psychologist and educator, Jennifer is a prolific author of dozens of academic papers, serves on several academic boards, and most recently authored Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures (Springer, 2016) & The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017).
Tracey: I spoke to Jennifer about her perspective on Female Futures.
The book The Human Race to the Future, by Daniel Berleant (published by the Lifeboat Foundation) has just been released in its 4th and newest edition. As a special promotion the book, jammed with over 300 pages of information, will be priced through December at just $1.23 (1−2−3) for the e-book version on Amazon.
“Eventually such systems may not require conscious input to capture and respond to shifting user preferences, though user intervention might still remain an option. The notion of ‘virtual’ fails to accurately describe such a world.”
At a conference attended by the company’s 36 partners at its headquarters in Hangzhou, executive chairman Jack Ma announced it would set up the Alibaba Poverty Relief Fund, with the money to be donated over the next five years.
Jack Ma says commitment to poverty relief was inspired by Deng Xiaoping.
“We’re at a stage now where the next 10 or 20 years are the time we become a spacefaring civilisation,” he says. “From then on, our future is guaranteed as a civilisation. The moment we get to the moon and Mars and start to exploit the resources in the solar system is the moment we become essentially immortal as a civilisation. Because we won’t just be confined to one planet that we can damage any more. Now is the time we do that.”
Professor believes we will become a spacefaring civilisation in the next 10 or 20 years, and thereby guarantee our future forever, as long as we don’t do anything stupid like ‘having a war in the Pacific’.
