Kate Baucherel's Blog

What do you want to know about blockchain and crypto? I have re-started posting two-minute blockchain and crypto bites to my YouTube channel, the Blockchain Hurricane. In the past I’ve covered some of the blockchain basics – busting the jargon, discussing wallets, exchanges and keys, addressing good security practices, and occasional comments on current events and hot topics.

Since re-launching, I’ve received some great questions that I’m gradually getting into the can. I’ve looked at crypto taxes, payments technology, public and private blockchains, and there are new episodes lined up on tokens, NFTs, the Travel Rule and more. Go take a look – these really are two-minute videos – and if you have a burning question, contact me through this website or on LinkedIn and I’ll be sure to answer it on YouTube.

New answers drop every Thursday – subscribe now.

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As a scifi author as well as a strategy consultant, extrapolating and imagining the future is a big part of my day to day activity. A few thoughts on this blog in May – Think like a Futurist to Survive – spawned deep discussions with Sunderland Software City’s Innovation specialist and digital afterlife researcher Gavin Vaughan and Culture and Code’s John du pre Gauntt. We dug deeper into the need for businesses to plan for entirely new things and prepare to pivot in the face of challenge and opportunity. These lengthy chats resolved themselves into our Panel Picker idea for SXSW 2025 – and we need your help to bring it to the programme!

Building a Business Strategy for 2050

Business success requires a futurist mindset – everyone is a futurist now. Emerging technologies enable collaborations and business models previously unattainable. New capabilities are changing how we strategize and prepare our digital legacy. Join emerging tech strategist and sci-fi author Kate Baucherel, AI creator John du Pre Gauntt, and speculative designer and digital afterlife expert Gavin Vaughan to explore how to navigate rapid technological change at multiple levels. Discover the keys to survival that can help you seize opportunities and prepare for a very different world of 2050.

Does this resonate with your experience and your hopes and fears for the future? Please follow the link to upvote, share and comment – we are happy to answer any questions in the discussion section. See you in Austin, 2025!

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Thursday 2nd May saw the second of The Digital Commonwealth‘s Mansion House Summit series. I’ve known the people behind this since they were delivering high quality journalism and events through CryptoAM, and James Bowater, Darren Parkin and the team have made The Digital Commonwealth a bigger and better version of what came before. It’s well worth following the news and views they publish on the basis of journalistic integrity alone, which can be found wanting in this industry. And with the Mansion House series, they seem to have created something rather special.

Speakers were a truly global mix, representing innovators, bankers, professional services, policymakers and projects in the UK, UAE, Zambia, Tanzania, Malta, Gibraltar, Switzerland, and the USA among others. Loretta Joseph, who consulted on the creation of The Commonwealth’s Virtual Assets Model Law, out-commuted everyone by flying in for the day from Australia. There was a high level of expertise and detail on the stage, a willingness to share knowledge and experience, and speakers laid down a number of challenges and action points for those in attendance.

1. Listen to the crowd

Professor Luis Franceschi, Assistant Secretary General of The Commonwealth, talked of the ‘social thunder of inclusion and financial growth.’ In the same way that MPesa transformed access to financial services in Kenya in the early 2000s, so we see the rapid rise of the use of digital assets and crypto rails in payments and cross-border transactions. People are voting with their wallets and the grass roots drivers of emerging economies are being stimulated. Developing the Virtual Assets Model Law for the 56 Commonwealth countries responds to the social thunder and provides protection and risk mitigation for consumers and innovators.

2. Participate in consultations

If emerging technology industries do not respond to requests for expertise, regulators will not know how to act in the best interests of business and consumers. Elise Soucie, Director of Global Policy & Regulatory Affairs at Global Digital Finance, urged everyone to respond to consultations. “There are no stupid questions,” she said, underlining the fact that good policies based on effective collaboration drive product development and growth.

3. Engage with regulators

Engagement is as much about education – in both directions – as it is about policymaking. Regulators are focused on day to day and systemic risk and they need the industry perspective to recognise innovation. The Financial Promotion rules are a good example of where engagement was low and the industry outcomes were therefore poor, said Akash Sharma, Senior Policy Manager, Bank of England. Sharma also expanded on the innovator’s journey through the Digital Securities Sandbox, the gradual process of allowing a business to scale and lifting limitations as it meets milestones and eventually graduates to the real world as a fully regulated entity.

4. Focus on end user services

Viable businesses have well served end users. It doesn’t matter what technology is being used under the hood, as long as the problem is being solved. Emmanuel Young is Community Manager of World Mobile, a Decentralised Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) providing internet access to remote communities in Africa. He was passionate about the importance of good end user services in maintaining a stable revenue source and, in the process, onboarding users to a crypto ecosystem. Technology becomes the facilitator of social development rather than an end in itself.

5. Call out bad practice

There is still a perception of high risk among bankers and insurers in particular when dealing with any business that touches the crypto ecosystem. Too many legitimate and successful companies have found themselves with their banking services withdrawn or insurance cover headaches. The blanket treatment reflects the bad practices that still linger – pumping tokens, hyped airdrops, security breaches, and projects that have no discernible benefit other than to make money for the founders. As industry leaders we are perfectly placed to ask questions, help peers, and be open to learning things ourselves that raise the overall bar.

 

This was an excellent day and I have no hesitation in recommending The Digital Commonwealth’s next Summit in the series on 14th June, whose focus will be around AI and Cybersecurity.

Image credit: Benjamin Arthur for The Digital Commonwealth.

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Last Wednesday, May 1st, saw my formal book launch at the headquarters of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, featuring a fabulous Ask Me Anything fireside chat. Having questions fired at me from all angles is something I thrive on. It keeps me on my toes, makes me consider my knowledge critically or present it in a new context, and shows me where I need to focus my research to find out more. We ranged over topics as diverse as the writing process, challenges for regulators, and the ever-changing policies of banks where crypto is concerned. These are some of the key questions and takeaways from the Ask Me Anything session.

Centralised regulation vs global activity

The greatest challenge for regulators around the world is that the rules which have governed financial services provision in the past have been found wanting with the emergence of a new asset class that brings with it new types of providers and services, new risks, and global influence. The rapid evolution of technology has left some regulatory bodies behind. Over the past decade, businesses and innovators in the crypto industry have chosen their headquarters carefully in an effort either to seek regulatory clarity and legitimacy, or to flee from it. Jurisdictions that rose to the challenge as soon as it was presented, including Gibraltar, Malta, the Swiss canton of Zug, and the states of New York and Wyoming, have reaped the economic rewards of growing businesses.

The use of crypto assets and crypto technology is becoming more widespread, particularly in emerging economies where they offer greater stability and better financial services than incumbent banking systems. Consistent regulation is therefore needed to protect consumers and support innovators. There are challenges, of course. Individual regulators have different perceptions of risk, and the regulatory tourism continues as firms find it near impossible to register with the UK authorities or face the unpredictability and inconsistency of US regulators. But increasingly global bodies seek to bring different jurisdictions into harmony, including the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

The FATF anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism funding (CTF) rules have helped in the drive to harmonise legislation. These measures must be adopted by all FATF countries by September 2024, and initiatives such as the Virtual Assets Model Law adopted by the 56 Commonwealth countries earlier this year will help emerging economies to meet the deadline.

My takeaway from this Ask Me Anything question was to dig deeper into the drive to harmonise regulatory approaches, and as ever, the universe delivered. At The Digital Commonwealth‘s Mansion House Summit the following morning, the Assistant Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Professor Luis Franceschi, and Policy Advisor Loretta Joseph discussed the Model Law in satisfying detail.

The secrets of writing

There were several question about the craft of writing, and the way that your mind becomes attuned to the topic cannot be understated. Whenever and whatever I am writing, I become more sensitive to relevant information that slews through the world. Headlines leap out from the screen, social feeds deliver new insights to follow up with deeper research, and the timing of world events and conference sessions, like the Summit last week, is uncanny. For example, during the month when I was writing (as opposed to the months of planning before, and subsequent months of peer reviews and proofing) the judgements in the cases of US vs Binance Holdings and US vs Sam Bankman-Fried both dropped at the perfect time to be included in the book.

One of the things that surprised people was that writing is not always a linear process. You can’t edit a blank page, as they say, so write something – anything! If that something ends up at the start, the end, or half way through chapter three (fiction or non-fiction) it doesn’t matter. Having a structure helps, but even that can change – I switched a couple of chapters around in Getting Started with Cryptocurrency because the flow of the story was clearer.

Where to draw the line

With any writing you have a deadline, so there’s a point at which you have to stop. In a book there are also things that may be too much in flux to go into fine detail in a publication that still needs to be relevant two, three, five years down the line. One of the Ask Me Anything questions was around the current issues with banking for individuals and businesses that are active in crypto. There are too many examples of accounts being closed, leaving people high and dry, because crypto activity is currently treated as a blanket risk. We see the same problem with insurance policies excluding crypto activity. It is a genuine problem but one that I hope will begin to recede as banks and regulators learn the ropes and understand exactly where risk lies and how it is mitigated.

If you know a banker, or a regulator, or just someone who wants to understand the landscape of digital assets and blockchain, I can recommend a good book…

“Getting Started with Cryptocurrency: An introduction to digital assets and blockchain” out now from BCS Publishing.

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How do we and our businesses survive and thrive in this rapidly changing world? For generations, humans have had time to stop, think and adapt to change. It took a more than hundred years to move from the first steam engines, Stephenson’s Rocket pulling a passenger train, and the rise of industrial scale manufacturing to the first glimmers of electricity in workplaces and homes. By 1960 the global north, at least, was connected to the grid. The next fifty years took us through the digital age, Moore’s Law governing the march of processing power, and the nascent internet spawning the World Wide Web.

Now we don’t have the luxury of time. The last 15 years have seen a Cambrian explosion of technology. In 2010 we couldn’t have ordered an Uber, because our phones couldn’t tell the driver where to find us. 10,000 Bitcoin could have bought you a couple of pizzas. The rise of the machines in public consciousness was still a long way away although all the applications we bundle under ‘AI’ were building under the hood. That all seems a long time ago. Founders of 2010 expected the digital status quo to hold through scaleup, but saw success or failure based largely on their luck of catching the right digital wave and their ability to pivot quickly. It’s not getting any easier, and to survive we have to adopt a new mindset as we head inexorably towards the next paradigm shift in our world. We have to think like futurists.

1.  There are no stupid questions

We can’t know everything, and even the best of us will make mistakes we were not expecting. Taking just one sector as an example, in blockchain and crypto there are too many projects that have been impacted by basic errors in smart contracts, custody of treasuries, consensus mechanisms, and business planning. Things slip through the net because we are human, not omnipotent. Compound this across all the innovations that are slewing through the world and we see the scale of the challenge.

Collective knowledge is the only way to survive, and this cuts both ways. Don’t be offended if someone questions your knowledge. Don’t assume that someone else knows what they are doing, regardless of how well respected they are. Never stop learning.

2.  Understand the basics

When the world is spinning like a carousel, being grounded at the centre brings clarity. Education for everyone from practitioners to business decision makers and investors should start here. For blockchain and crypto, the basic properties of transparency, immutability, consensus on system state, speed of value transfers, ownership of digital things and trust in the honest ledger do not change. The technology evolves, of course. But to take a prosaic comparison, we might have all the clever accounting systems in the world but everything comes back to double entry. Forgetting the basics (ahem, Horizon) is infinitely damaging.

3.  Start with the problems

Technologies are developing so fast that leading with the latest fad is going to backfire if you don’t catch the right lucky wave. Defining a problem means that when everything changes – and it will – then new opportunities and tools can be grasped to refine and improve problem solving. Change is not restricted to new technology features, of course. The environment we work in is changing too, whether that’s responding to regulatory requirements or addressing sustainability and climate impact.

4.  Invest intelligently

Real problems whose solutions deliver an economic benefit should be the focus of investors. The bright lights of pumping tokens and fast payoffs are still a distraction, and there’s a pressing need for change. Giving, say, Silicon Valley kids a new way to invest in early stage start-ups in the hope of finding unicorns is not a societal problem that much of the rest of the world would recognise. Industry leaders are in the right position to step up and educate investors, fulfilling their returns targets with long term, sustainable growth.

5.  Follow the threads of innovation

Faced with the daily information overload, it’s easy to panic and think that you’ve missed something in the noise. But the noise fades and the message you need to hear will emerge. It’s okay to take a break. After all, we don’t just want to survive. We need to thrive and build. Education is not about absorbing everything you hear. Learn to identify the structure and consistent threads of innovation that weave through this era of disruptive, transformational change. They will show you the path to our possible futures and the opportunities they offer.

Think like a futurist: read expert visions in the short story anthology “All Tomorrow’s Futures” out now from Cybersalon.

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It’s a momentous week in the world of crypto. Today, 17th April, my new book for BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is released. The early reviews have been humbling –

Getting Started with Cryptocurrency is a must-have book for early explorers and seasoned professionals alike…

… a gem in the crypto literature landscape

… an excellent primer which uses clear and accessible language to explain many of the key concepts behind cryptocurrency and blockchain

You can grab your copy from Amazon, or direct from BCS if you’re a member. You’ll also be able to pick up signed copies from me at the official launch at BCS on 1st May, at The Digital Commonwealth’s Mansion House Summit on 2nd May, and at similar events through May and June.

Obviously this is the most important thing happening in crypto this week… but wait. Bitcoin is also up to something, counting down to a change in its rhythm that happens every four years. Welcome to the Halving.

What is the Halving?

Each time a block is added to the Bitcoin blockchain, the miner who confirms its addition and cryptographically secures the block receives a reward. This is the way in which new coins are added to the overall supply. When Bitcoin was created, each confirmed block earned its miner 50 Bitcoin. However, the software is programmed to only ever release 21 million Bitcoin, and therefore the block reward gradually reduces over time.

At block 210,000, the reward halved to 25 Bitcoin (28th November 2012)

At block 420,000, the reward halved to 12.5 Bitcoin (9th July 2016)

At block 630,000, the reward halved to 6.25 Bitcoin (11th May 2020)

We are expecting to reach block 840,000 between midnight on 19th April and 1am on 20th April, give or take a few minutes and a flurry of confirmations. That’s when the block reward halves automatically to 3.125 Bitcoin.

What’s going to happen?

The halving causes something of a shakeup of the ecosystem each time. The profit margins for miners can be cut to nothing, which is why this time we have seen mining data centres repurposing some of their hardware to process Generative AI algorithms instead of Bitcoin block algorithms.

There is usually a lot of price volatility over the following months that cascades through the other crypto assets in the market. Volatility, of course, means down as well as up. Crypto is classed as a high risk investment for a reason. Bitcoin is not immune to world events, and it responds to demand and supply pressures like any other asset. For investors it will be an interesting time.

We’re also expecting to see something of a shift in the behaviour of miners. As revenue halves, people seek to minimise costs to prop up the bottom line. Using renewable sources instead of fossil fuels becomes a more attractive proposition. There are challenges – for example, blocks need confirming 24/7 but the sun does not always shine. However, if this halving pushes more miners down the road of sustainability, it’s a win for crypto as a whole.

Remember – mining, using energy to process an algorithm for blockchain security, is exclusive to Bitcoin and a handful of smaller chains. Ethereum moved away from that system in 2023 and all more modern blockchains have developed different methods of building a cryptographically secure chain that do not use energy (other than in hosting the distributed ledger on multiple nodes, as every blockchain must). However, Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency that started everything, and its market dominance continues. I’ll be watching at midnight on Friday to see block 840,000 added to the chain.

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As Bitcoin wobbles backwards and forwards in a volatile market, it seems to have very little in common with “money” – pounds, euros and dollars – despite the ‘currency’ moniker we gave it all those years ago. Short term values are frothy for many reasons, largely related to regulation and supply. The halving of the Bitcoin block reward, expected some time on 20th April, will, yes, halve the volume of Bitcoin added to circulation when each block in the chain is cryptographically secured. On the other hand, there is the possibility that Bitcoins confiscated a decade ago from the Silk Road dark marketplace will soon be released, increasing the circulating supply. And over all of this hang macroeconomic conditions and regulatory actions against exchanges in the US.

But pulling out from the noise and taking stock of Bitcoin, as the first and most decentralised crypto asset, does it merit the designation of a currency after all?

What is money?

To be considered as money, a commodity must be a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account.

What that commodity is, however, can cover a multitude of things. Gold coins of antiquity were money because they were made of a rare commodity that could be used to save and to pay for things, and could be tallied in a ledger. Paper promissory notes tied to the gold standard had the same qualities but were representative of the commodity, not actually made of it. Fiat currencies, what most of us use now, are not linked to gold reserves but have their value conferred by government, the economy and fiscal policy. To add yet another layer of complexity, we use day to day a mixture of private money – electronic ledgers kept by our commercial banks – and public money in the form of bank notes, the basic money supply.

Going back to the three properties of money, can something like Bitcoin be added to this list?

A store of value

Bitcoins can be saved, stored and retrieved by their owner, and they are usable when they are retrieved. For safe retrieval, whether your horde is gold coins in a buried chest or crypto assets in a cold wallet, it’s important to keep the treasure map or the private key safe from compromise or loss. When any commodities are stored, or course, their relative value to the real world will change, whether that is inflationary pressures that we experience with fiat currency or macroeconomic and speculative impacts. Bitcoin, therefore, is as much a store of value as central bank currencies or scarce commodities like gold.

A medium of exchange

In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz traded ten thousand Bitcoin for two pizzas. This marked the first known exchange of Bitcoin for real world goods, although the FAQ section of the Bitcoin website a year earlier advised anyone who wanted to obtain some to “Find a bitcoin owner and sell her something – MMORPG equipment, IT support, lawn mowing, dollars or whatever you can trade with her.” For the growing number of people who hold crypto assets (around 12% of the global adult population at the last count) Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are accepted in payment for goods and services, particularly where this involves cross-border transactions. They can also be used in payment of taxes in some jurisdictions, including parts of Switzerland. Bitcoin is definitely a medium of exchange.

A unit of account

Bitcoin gave us the ultimate honest ledger, a cryptographically secured audit trail of transactions. It is at its very heart a unit of account.

It passes all three of the tests of money, as do many of the high volume, liquid, fungible crypto assets that followed it. We won’t be using it to buy our coffee on the high street, but it has paved the way for digital money of the future.

Pre-order “Getting Started with Cryptocurrency: An introduction to digital assets and blockchain” out on 17th April from BCS Publishing.

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Digital identity is one of the most potentially transformative applications of blockchain. Having an official identity is the gateway to everything we take for granted. Without one, we would struggle to access government services and education, jobs and financial services. As the paperwork for all of these moves inexorably online, the quest for reliable digital identity is underway. This brings with it an opportunity to establish an official identity for the estimated 1.5 billion people in the world who still don’t have one, but also exposes some real challenges.

Digital identity initiatives

The Recommendation on the Governance of Digital Identity, adopted by the OECD Council in June 2023, encourages countries to develop and govern digital identity systems as digital public infrastructure. There have been blockchain-based digital identity projects running for years among different countries and agencies, and some of these are being proven at extraordinary scale.

In Estonia, the X-Road Data Exchange Layer has been managing all aspects of public life and identity almost since the inception of blockchain, including the e-Estonia ID. A number of other countries have adopted the X-Road ecosystem including Finland, Iceland, and parts of South America and Asia.The World Food Programme’s Building Blocks initiative was launched in 2017. It runs on a permissioned Ethereum chain adapted for humanitarian needs, including a zero-knowledge identity system. It’s processed over 25 million humanitarian transactions since its inception.India’s Aadhar decentralised identity system, run by the Unique Identification Authority of India, has issued around 1.3 billion cards to citizens to help them access online services. For some, this was their first identity card.Stumbling blocks

Developing digital identities presents challenges, not least that systems are fragmented and therefore not interoperable on either technical and political levels. A refugee receiving a digital identity from Building Blocks cannot port this to the country in which they eventually settle. Technical complexity, cybersecurity risks, and concerns over data protection loom large. There are also cultural considerations – some countries have been comfortable with national identity cards for decades, while others recoil at the idea despite having to produce passports, driving licences and other evidence of identity at every turn.

Could private initiatives unite global citizens under a single identity? That is the vision of Sam Altman’s Worldcoin, aiming to “provide universal access to the global economy no matter your country or background”. The technology secures iris scans with Zero-Knowledge proofs (ZKP) that confirm a digital wallet is linked to an encrypted scan, but without identifying which scan that might be. Launched in July 2023, it claims to have registered four million ‘unique humans’ but its path has not been smooth. Data is a valuable resource and some countries including Hong Kong, Kenya, South Korea and more recently Spain and Portugal have banned data collection. Concerns include whether Worldcoin can resist leveraging its registry, and whether users have actively consented to the use of their data in different ways. More worryingly, with a financial incentive of 25 Worldcoins for an iris scan, there is an incentive to spoof the system. Videos have been found on Tiktok with full instructions on how to do this. The unique humans database may not be as reliable as Worldcoin might hope.

Digital identity is the holy grail of blockchain, and we are on the road to achieving it, but the journey is going to be long.

Pre-order “Getting Started with Cryptocurrency: An introduction to digital assets and blockchain” out on 17th April from BCS Publishing.

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DAOs – Distributed (or Decentralised) Autonomous Organisations – feel like a great way of putting power back in the hands of a community. They are recognised as having huge potential for social impact – the World Economic Forum has described them as ‘nascent and aspirational’ – and there are huge sums of money held in DAO treasuries, estimated at $25 billion in 2023. But there are deep-rooted problems with DAOs. Here’s a sample of the challenges they face.

Smart contracts are not infallible

The first ever DAO managed to showcase this key risk before its untimely demise. Launched in 2016, The DAO was a shared investment community that was developed to distribute funds to worthy applicants and divide the returns between investors. It was remarkably popular – around 14% of all the Ethereum in circulation at the time was invested in the project. However, a critical flaw in the smart contract allowed a hacker to drain invested funds straight out of the treasury, and all the founders could do was watch. The impact on the Ethereum ecosystem was so great that a special smart contract was deployed to suck all the funds back from the thief and return them to the investors. This resulted in a hard fork between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic – you can see it at block 1,920,000, if you’re interested.

Lesson one: get those smart contracts checked, checked and checked again. You can’t change them once they’re running.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee

Communities are not very good at timely and objective decisions. There are plenty of limited companies who started out as co-operatives and soon realised that a decision-making structure that involves everyone can mean missed opportunities and conflicts of interest. There’s a reason why in public life we start with the Parish Council and work up to government, deferring to our representatives. When DAOs are drawing up their governance structure, making votes advisory rather than binding on the operation of the business, and creating a two-tier structure for decision making, could avoid a world of pain.

Because community decision making is so tricky, DAOs may also have a tendency to be a little more centralised that we might think. A recent report by Web3 company De.Fi highlights risks including hidden owners (in 6.8% of DAOs) and single wallet controls (in 38.2% of DAOs).

Lesson 2: It’s hard to balance operational effectiveness with community decision making and secure decentralisation.

With great power comes great responsibility

A formal corporate structure protects decision makers and shareholders and sets out clear roles, rights and consequences for actions. A DAO, whose membership may be scattered across multiple jurisdictions, does not have that formal guidance and getting the governance structure right can be a minefield. There’s a real danger that token holders who participate in decision making by voting could inadvertently form a partnership and become personally and legally responsible for the outcome of their vote. For the creators of the DAO, what happens if a coalition of malicious actors uses their voting power to change the direction of travel of the organisation?

The goal for every DAO should be creating a strong governance structure that meets all its operational needs and protects its creators and its members. This is a huge undertaking and is one of the reasons why DAOs are seen as a vehicle for the future, not something that has yet been proven at scale.

Lesson 3: Governance is not an afterthought. Assume the worst and plan accordingly.

DAOs are set to be a significant part of our future and are already underpinning DeFi operations and helping a growing number of social impact projects to crowdfund and distribute support and aid. But the challenges of effective decision making and the dangers of getting it wrong are very real. To scale DAO activity, we need to develop strong, effective and transparent governance structures, and ensure that anything automated is audited and watertight. If we get it right, the opportunities for society and the rewards we can reap will be immeasurable.

Pre-order “Getting Started with Cryptocurrency: An introduction to digital assets and blockchain” out on 17th April from BCS Publishing.

Image by Chang Zun Shi from Pixabay

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I was delighted to be asked to contribute to the new Cybersalon anthology “All Tomorrow’s Futures – Fictions that Disrupt.” Published this week, this book is bursting with visions of the future from experts in their respective emerging technology fields.

The five themes cover justice, energy, finance, health and education, taking new angles on the way emerging technologies and the people who use them might impact our lives. The most accurate predictors of the future are science fiction writers, as futurist, quantum computing and Artificial Intelligence expert Whurley reminded us at his South by Southwest (SXSW) panel last month. Extrapolating today’s emerging technology into fiction exposes the utopian and dystopian possibilities and picks up on things that may never have been considered by inventors and advocates. Books like All Tomorrow’s Futures help societies and their leaders to go into the future with their eyes open.

This collection has been praised for its ‘eerily plausible narratives’ and the lesson that the way we relate to new technologies as humans is the key to surmounting challenges they present. Discover these visions of the future – and let me know what you think of my contribution, House of Cards. Find it on Amazon, or order copies right here from my website or at upcoming scifi and comic con events.

“All Tomorrow’s Futures – Fictions that Disrupt” will be available direct from me at Unleashed Gateshead (7th April) and SciFi Scarborough (20th/21st April).

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