Tomorrow, the 2nd Dresden Future Forum starts. We are looking forward to impressive speeches and lively discussion. More than 300 guests are invited to discuss the life in the digital world. During the morning speeches, the topics globalization of markets and innovation will be elaborated. In the afternoon sessions, the focus will be put on the Future of the Internet. Experts of that field will speak about upcoming technologies and their impact on human lives.

This week, the German magazine Spiegel has published an interview with Jaron Lanier in which he warns of the impacts of collective intelligence. Despite some positive effects of the Internet like openness, the rapid and anti-evolutionary development of information technologies is a critical aspect in the digital world. Tim O’Reilly, on the other hand, favors in a recent blog post on his O’Reilly Radar blog, the idea of “harnessing collective intelligence” by Web 2.0 services. In this blog entry, he distinguishes this term from user-generated content.

These controversial viewpoints alone let us expect a lively discussion at the 2nd Dresden Future Forum. For all of you, who cannot attend the forum personally, we will blog about the speeches live. After the forum, you can watch the webcasts of the speeches on this website.