I watched this Perimeter Institute lecture by Freeman Dyson. In particular his comments about conventional American opinions about the impact of dropping the H-bomb on Hiroshima in precipitating surrender in WWII. He suggests it was due to concerns about the fall of Manchuria - which Japan had invaded in at the begining of the war 1939.
The other part that was interesting was the application of "Moores Law" which is the law of just about everything concerning electronic components (volume goes up by factor of 100 and the cost falls by factor of 100 every decade) to Genome Sequencing. [The Human Genome Project started 20 years ago cost $1bn and took 10 years , could now be done in a month for $100,000 and in 10 years will cost $1,000 and would take a day.] This means smaller, smarter cheaper computers as toys for 3 yr-olds and are - against our expectations - user friendly. He finally mentioned Von Neumann and Norbert Werner who contributed to software systems development.
The consequence of this is that in 2000 it became cheaper to collect information than understand it so we have been drowning on the flood of information and it is only going to get worse. [Jim Glick - information history, theory and flood. Our function now it to create "islands of meaning" in the flood of information. This applies to art, science and literature - all kinds of creativity.]
[This lead to another 1,000 year futureology forecast.]
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