Top-10 DARK FUTURES Talks (part 2)

In the top-10 DARK FUTURES talks we look back at 5 years of running the now legendary event that some people call ‘the Black Mirror of TED Talks’. Here’s part 2 of 2 (part 1 here).
In June 2014 four friends met up for dinner and drinks on a patio in Vancouver, BC. They were Nikolas Badminton and Kharis O’Connell (old friends from UK days), Ryan Betts (UX Designer, drummer) and Nick Black (CEO of Intensions, Researcher). As the evening went on conversion delved into sharks eating Internet cables in Thailand, how VR and AR changes everything, and how as humans bleed data that betrays us. Just a few months later Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker and Researcher, hosted the first DARK FUTURES.
To celebrate this year’s event in San Francisco (1st year!), Vancouver and Toronto, we wanted to share our top-10 DARK FUTURES talks. These are in no particular order. Here’s the first 5 talks in that top-10 and you can seen the first 5 here.

Dark Impact by Kristy O’Leary

When we look into the darkness the solutions we need will be revealed. Pipelines become water transport systems, the tar sands become the land and water remediation laboratory of the globe, global migrants become environmental engineers planting as they move, refugee camps become circular-economic cities, corporations become impact machines – leaving ‘it’ better than they found it with each dollar that lands in their coffers. Cataclysmic events must be the clay from which we craft elegant solutions. We are going dark.

LIFEAFTER by Andrew Howell

What does the future have in store for life’s greatest eventuality? Opening with an assessment of society’s current attitudes towards death, and continuing with an exploration into possible opportunities for life after life, let’s explore what’s on the horizon for physical and mental death.

Dragons and Fireflies by Liz Mars

It’s common knowledge that differences in financial resources cause health and life expectations and outcomes to diverge. While always problematic, this tendency raises especially pressing questions as ingenuity pushes medical technology forward. Meanwhile, progressive ecological degradation (including climate change) and negative trends in everything from nutrition to work threaten to scale back what is available and probable for the impecunious. We may be on the cusp of an era of ‘dragons’ and ‘fireflies’ — i.e., a sharp demographic distinction between those who live centuries, and those who live a few decades.

3D Printing, what will you make? by John Biehler

When new technologies first get introduced, there are always those that find ways to use them for dark purposes. In this talk, we’ll explore examples of this in a few different industries.

DARKNESS, The Future of Freedom

Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker, author, and researcher. He wows audiences with keynote speeches on the impact of exponential technologies including: Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality; Work Productivity; Hospitality and Travel; The Sharing Economy; Autonomous Transportation; Smart Cities; Education; The Future of AI integrated with Life and Business; and Predictions for humanity from 2018 to 2030, and beyond. Here he looks into the dark side of the deep web, and how the internet today is more scary than that can ever be as it plays a role in all of our lives.