Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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The Year in Review
As 2025, the first year of this blog, winds down, an interesting exercise is to review our Future Bucket List to see what progress has, and hasn’t been made. Part of that review exposed a glaring hole in the list we first enumerated in early 2022: there is no mention of A.I., which really took…
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The Future is Fusion?
Fusion power has been one of those Future technologies that is always coming but never here. A.I. was in that category for quite a while too before it really broke out with ChatGPT in 2022. Quantum computing is also looking slightly more hopeful. Fusion itself has of course been a source of energy for billions…
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The Future was Friday
As promised, last Friday, December 12, 2025, we at the Art Authority Museum, along with Maria Nevelson and the Louise Nevelson Foundation, brought back a small part of what the world lost on September 11, 2001. In a ceremony exactly 47 years after the dedication of Louise Nevelson’s “Sky Gate, New York” at the World…
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The Future is Friday
As posted previously, “the best way to predict the Future is to create it.” That’s what we’ll be doing this coming Friday. With Apple’s help and support, we have, for a year-and-a-half now, been enabling people to “Step in the Future of Art” through the always open, always accessible Art Authority Museum. Especially on Vision…
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Happy Thanksgiving (Weekend)
Thanksgiving here in the U.S. is celebrated the fourth Thursday in November. It used to be the last Thursday, but was moved, by presidential proclamation, to make sure there was enough time for holiday shopping before Christmas. Now Thanksgiving is a whole weekend, and even into the next week, for that holiday shopping purpose: It’s…
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A more concrete Future
The late James Watson’s seminal one-page Nature article on the structure of DNA simply and modestly pointed to a Future that surpassed even its authors’ expectations. The much longer, more complex recent Nature article on quantum computing boldly predicts that its seemingly subtle accomplishments will ultimately have similar effects. Another recent Nature article, “Personalized gene…
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James Watson 1928-2025
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, has passed away. His research with Francis Crick and others culminated in one of the most important papers ever. The 1953 paper, published in Nature, is also one of the shortest ever. It begins and ends with two of the greatest understatements of all time:…
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The Future is indeterminate…
… and at times incomprehensible too. One of the more “far out” (or so we thought) items on our Future Bucket list was quantum computing. It’s also one of the more “technically challenging,” to put it mildly. A recent paper on the subject in Nature is entitled “Observation of constructive interference at the edge of…
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2010: Envisioning the iPhone, part 5 (the iPad)
In another example of “Predict, create, distribute (repeat),” Apple did it again in 2010 with the iPad. Very similarly to the iPhone, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in a Macworld San Francisco January keynote. January 27, 2010 to be precise. Although perhaps not quite the blockbuster of the iPhone (nothing has been), the iPad intro…
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The Old and the New
The art auction house Christie’s was founded in 1766. The Art Authority Museum was founded in 2024. Last week Apple brought the two together. In their press release announcing the new Vision Pro M5, Apple highlighted a few of the key apps on that Future-setting device. There are over 1 million apps available for Apple…
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