One of the too-many-hats I wear is that of historian. We can learn so much about the future if we look back (short-term or long-term) and reflect. Trite but true, we are our history. So listening to MIT's Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte's Ted Talk was a unique happy moment, as he eloquently reveals how predicting the future comes out of an extension of knowledge of the past. Also interesting is to watch how what we think of as new is old--and previously dismissed as unrealistic.

I hope you take the 20 minutes to listen to his talk. It helps frame the past, present, and future of technology that we live and breathe as arts managers, techies, and artists. Less about our current situation, it opens up where we might be in the future. What opportunities are you seeing in the arts-making or arts-management field if his predictions are true? What about the world of our audiences? Where will the artist-audience-organization cycle intersect technology in the future? Please post your thoughts for a hopefully interesting discussion of our future as we here at AMT Lab continue to work through the opportunities and struggles of technologies of our present.

Enjoy! Nicholas Negroponte's Ted Talk

Brett Crawford

Executive Director, AMT Lab