It was last Monday I heard it, but Neil Gaimans inspiring lecture for The Reading Agency is still on my mind. Read it here: readingagency.org.uk/news/blog/neil-gaiman-lecture-in-full.html. Or if you havent time to read it all, consider these nuggets: • According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. • Once in New York I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons - a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth - how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten and eleven year olds couldnt read. And certainly couldnt read for pleasure. • I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved of Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed? Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 07:46:18 +0000
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