The Rise of Hypercycle in the Age of Terabyters In 2010, I made a bold prediction about the digital age. I wrote about a new group of people I called the “Terabyters.” I imagined them as folks who’d upload a massive 1 terabyte of data every day. At...
The Futurist’s Trilemma – Navigating the Uncharted Waters of Tomorrow In the ever-evolving landscape of modern society, the task of envisioning the future presents a challenging triad of dilemmas collectively known as the Futurist’s Trilemma. This concept...
The Dawn of Agricultural Drones: A Revolution in Farming is Only a Drone Call Away The face of agriculture is changing, not with the turn of a tractor’s wheel or the swing of a scythe, but with the buzz of drone propellers slicing through the air. What was once...
Acronym Blindness: Navigating the Alphabet Soup of Modern Communication Overuse of acronyms has created one of today’s greatest usability problems – Acronym Blindness! In an era where brevity is king and social platforms prize succinctness, acronyms have become the...
How Unusual Forms of Digital Assets Will Transform Our World by 2040 In the fast-paced world of digital technology, the idea of what constitutes a digital asset is changing rapidly. Beyond cryptocurrencies and digital art, we can expect to see many new kinds of...
AI’s Achilles Heel: Navigating the Blind Spots of Our Data As we embark on the fourth industrial revolution, one of the significant challenges we face is ‘blind spots’ in AI’s data. These blind spots, essentially areas where the AI lacks sufficient...
The Invisible Tug-of-War: Which Requires More Faith, Science or Religion? Imagine you’re at a football game. But this isn’t just any game. It’s a match between two big teams: Team Science and Team Religion. These teams are attempting to unravel the...
11 Thoughts on Designing Homes for 2040 and Beyond Our homes are more than just buildings; they are places where we grow, build relationships, and find comfort. As we project forward into the future, the concept of ‘home’ is set to undergo transformative...
The Devious People Problem: 12 Alarming Ways AI Can Be Used Against Us Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has long been painted as the bogeyman of the future. It’s a chilling narrative that has gripped the collective imagination: a world where machines become...
Leveraging AI Smart-Drones to Mitigate Active Shooter Threats and Ensure Public Safety In an age where headlines frequently reveal the unsettling reality of active shooter incidents, the collective consciousness of communities worldwide is grappling with underlying...
Curbing AI’s Potential Dark Side: A Case Study on Regulating AI Misuse Artificial intelligence (AI) is an incredibly powerful tool that has transformed countless aspects of our lives. From automating mundane tasks to revolutionizing industries and even helping...
Unleashing the Future: Extreme Scenarios of How Smart Contracts Will Alter the Course of History As we plunge headlong into the twenty-first century, an era hallmarked by rapid technological change, we’re constantly challenged to reevaluate and reimagine...
Swarmbots: Ushering Humanity into a Brave New Era or Opening Pandora’s Box? The 2019 action thriller “Angel Has Fallen” presents a chilling scenario that highlights the potential power of swarmbots. In this film, Morgan Freeman stars as the President of...
The Great AI Disruption: Six Startling Predictions That Will Shape Our Lives and Test Our Limits As we rapidly advance into an AI-driven world, our lives are becoming more intertwined with artificial intelligence in ways that were once the stuff of science fiction....
The Difference Between Human Creativity and Generative AI Creativity James and Sylvia, two talented artists, decided to collaborate on an art project that would explore the differences between human creativity and generative AI creativity. They chose to work on a...
The Rise of AI: Eight Scenarios for Living in an AI-Dominated Future The future is here, and it’s filled with advanced technologies that are revolutionizing every aspect of our lives. From shopping and dating to education and travel, the possibilities are...
Reinventing the Banking Industry: How Financial Institutions Must Evolve to Survive the Digital Revolution As the global banking system experiences increasing turbulence, a growing number of influential individuals have begun asking crucial questions about 2040 and...
In Search of a Morality Engine: Can AI and Humanity Truly Coexist? Is it possible to build a “morality engine” for AI without compromising the integrity of the artificial intelligence? It’s been a topic of ongoing research and debate among AI experts and ethicists....
The Crypto Revolution: How Five Significant Events Cemented the Need for a Decentralized Financial System For many supporters of cryptocurrencies, the key appeal lies in their ability to provide a currency and financial system that is open, borderless, decentralized,...
Solving the 10-Second Information Gap: On the Path to Building a Better Human Have you ever been in the middle of assembling something and realized that a critical piece of information was missing from the instructions? This information gap could be a small detail,...
ChatGPT’s Mind-Boggling Responses to Ten Unanswerable Questions In 2013, I wrote a column titled “10 Unanswerable Questions that Neither Science nor Religion can Answer.” For the past 10 years, it has been my most popular column, and I have developed a...
The Future of Education is beginning to take Shape Imagine getting up every morning and putting on a pair of smart glasses, or smart contacts, to begin your day. This simple act is what will link you to your digital twin, a twin formed around all the information you...
Top 10 Futurist Speaker Columns for 2022 It seemed like a good idea to close out 2022 with an overview of the ten most impactful columns of the year. The rating system we used was one where the editors at FuturistSpeaker.com all weighed in and decided which columns...
Can we Have Another Wave of Globalization Despite Ongoing Disruption? Fifty years ago, very few people talked about globalization. Cross-border travel was both difficult and expensive. Communication requires human translators. Transporting goods and services across...
In Case You Didn’t Get the Memo, the Nature of Work Has Just Changed COVID changed many things in our lives; not the least was the nature of work. While we’ve been busy figuring out if remote and hybrid work is here to stay, another more fundamental change has...
On the Road to Greener Concrete It’s rare that the opportunity to preserve resources, recycle resources, enhance quality, and improve cost efficiency all come together to deliver an important, improved product that the world uses in abundance every day. We live on a...
Bridging the Darién Gap, the Final Piece of the Pan-American Highway In 2015, I was speaking at a Quebec Transportation Authority event in Montreal on the future of transportation. The attendees included transportation experts from around the world, including...
The World’s Next Megaproject – Artificial Glaciers In the future, we’ll need to rely increasingly on technological breakthroughs to create systems that move water from where it is to where it needs to be and to get it there when it needs to be there....
Stress Testing Crypto – A New Era of Regulators is About to Begin I’ve always been bullish on crypto. Not necessarily as a short-term speculative investment strategy but because of its promise to accommodate many future aspects of personal finance. The industry...
We Didn’t Arrive Here by Accident A few months ago, my son Kyler asked me, “How many people do you think live their entire life without understanding what their purpose is?” My initial response was, “I’m guessing it’s around 98%.” After I thought about it a bit more,...
The Coming Era of Dynamic or “Living” NFTs Gone are the days of static non-fungible tokens, often referred to as simple NFTs. Next-generation use cases for NFTs are granting these blockchain-secured digital assets far more utility … and very soon, they’ll...
Eight Reasons Why the Future of Personalized Medicine will involve 3D-Printed Pharmaceuticals While I started talking about 3D pill printers nearly ten years ago, today we are seeing incredible breakthroughs in personalized medicine emerging along two fronts:...
How Will Elon Musk’s Tesla Pi Phone Get Us Closer to the “Ultimate Phone” of the Future? We can always count on Elon Musk to deliver, if not a new branch of technology, at least game-changers in existing technology. He’s not that into incrementalism and minor...
Will There Be Robotic Dogs in your Future? Using Question Mapping to Help Reveal the Future In this column, I’d like to demonstrate a strategic futurism technique I use called Question Mapping. It’s a technique I teach in our soon-to-be—re-released course, Future Like...
Hyper-Individualized Learning for a Hyper-Individualized Future Hyper-personalization is an AI, data-driven, machine-learning process that many of us are familiar with – if not by name, then by annoying experiences related to the online advertisements for products and...
The History of the Office … and Why it Matters for the Office of the Future Recently, I was listening to a podcast from Marc Andreessen, who commented that there were no headquarters for the Roman Empire since people back then didn’t really have a need for...
The Shifting Stage towards Non-Public Education COVID, politics, and Covid-politics spurred divisions and antagonisms between people and certain institutions, including K-12 education. As a result, education in the future will be different and likely more complex as...
The Extraordinary Economic Benefits of the Tesla Semi After 3+ years of delay due to pandemic-related supply chain issues, Elon Musk has announced that the first deliveries of the Tesla Semi will happen before the end of this year. This truck is still an...
America’s Rapidly Escalating Bathroom Crisis Over the past few years, I’ve spent countless hours driving through dozens of states on the east coast, west coast, southern states, and the Midwest. And none of these states have done a good job addressing the...
Smart Cities Using Streetlight Drones to Track and Respond to Gunshots There’s one specific use case for drones that I’ve been thinking about for the past decade, waiting for it to get implemented – active policing with streetlight drones using AI technology. Yes,...
Will AR Smart Glasses Replace Smartphones and Become our Personal Buddy Bots? When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, no one understood at the time how disruptive that device would be to existing technology. Now with rumors of Apple launching their augmented...
The Great Leveling of Geographic Pay Differences in Tech – Six Ways it Will Change our Future Until recently, there was a significant salary difference between, say, tech workers living in San Francisco and those in Des Moines, even though they may have been doing the...
Defining the 11 Core Building Blocks of Web 3.0 We’re reading and hearing a lot about “Web 3.0” these days. It’s an exciting concept, and this third generation of the Internet is delivering incredible functionality and utility. But what exactly does Web 3 encompass?...
The Next Giant Solar Flare is Unavoidable! Will it Bomb Us Back Into the Stone Ages? One night, a little more than a thousand years ago, Native Americans in North America were startled to see stars fade away as darkness into a dusky daytime long before morning. They...
Soulbound Tokens: The Building Blocks of Personal Identity for Web3 What is our real identity, and by that I mean the true, unedited us as opposed to the person we might hold ourselves out to be? Whether a person is religious or not, they tend to describe this reality...
Artificial Photosynthesis – Paving the Way for Startling New Forms of Sunless Agriculture While we won’t ever change the natural process of photosynthesis, we’re rapidly transitioning to an artificial form of photosynthesis that doesn’t require sunlight....
Thorium Reactors – The Future of Energy Broadly speaking, the primary energy sources globally fall into three categories: fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas), renewables (wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, biomass), and nuclear. Our future prosperity depends...
How Open Banking Will Redefine Tomorrow’s Transactions “Open banking” will soon be the backbone of our financial services landscape, driving consumer financial activity as well as financial institution service models. It will provide a level of convenience and...
Understanding the Long-Term Consequences of Weaponizing Our Financial Systems Can the future of war possibly be bloodless? We certainly seemed to be headed in that direction before Russia apparently dusted off a World War II playbook and sent ground troops into...
Self-Cannibalism and the Extreme Possibilities of Cell Cultured Agriculture As an avid researcher, I’m constantly tuned in to progress being made on the stem-cell-derived meat front. We’re still very much on track for widespread production and consumption, given the...
Is a Cashless Society a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? During the 1980s and 90s, I owned a couple of Baskin Robbins stores which were mostly cash businesses during that era. On its way to our commercial bank account, the cash got counted a minimum of seven times: during...
The Emerging Crypto Micropayments Industry In 2015, I wrote a column, “Going Beyond Micro-Payments to Nano-Payments” where I talked through some of the possible uses for tiny micropayments far smaller than anything possible today. Like others, I assumed...
The Ukraine War is Paving the way for Robotic Warfare in the Future Throughout history, nations have sought to achieve a technological military advantage. Strong nations have stayed strong by being the first to develop breakthrough munitions (from fire and gunpowder...
The Day that Passwords Died (It’s coming soon, really!) If there was ever a reason to celebrate, it will be the day we no longer need passwords for secure logins and access to websites and apps. For the vast majority of people, passwords have become the bane of...
Deurbanization Part 2 – Ten New Predictions While some of my columns are global in nature, this one is focused primarily on the U.S. even though many of these trends may be applicable to other areas of the world. I first wrote about deurbanization in February of...
The Future of Crypto Ecosystems and their Mainnets “These are the times that try men’s souls!” Over the past few days, I’ve heard several people use this Thomas Paine quote! A crash in cryptocurrency prices has wiped away countless billions in value over the...
Drone Delivery: A Massive Huge Industry Coming Soon to a Doorstep Near You The path to the future is really many paths, each moving in fits and starts with rapid progress along some and unexpected but ultimately explainable delays along with others. In 2015 I looked...
Creating a Code of Ethics for Artificial Intelligence For more than 50 years, scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians have been exploring and perfecting advances in artificial intelligence (AI) while the average person was in the dark about the details and actual...
How Many of Today’s Cryptocurrencies Will Still Exist in 2040? A few days ago, I was listening to episode 597 of the Bad Crypto Podcast and it was rather insightful listening to how Joel Comm and his co-host Travis Wright randomly picked cryptocurrencies from listings...
Nine Ways Autonomous Transportation will Impact Real Estate It won’t be long until we see major breakthroughs in the number of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on our roadways – both for on-demand passenger travel as well as for product delivery. AV technology is improving...
Inventing the College Equivalency Scale There are many ways to absorb the information required to earn the equivalent of a college degree, but it’s only possible to get official college credentials by attending an official institution of higher education. The average...
Democracy Vs. Autocracy: What does the Future Hold? The war in Ukraine hasn’t concluded as of this writing, and victory for either side has yet to be determined. But regardless of how this tragedy turns out, to the surprise of many people worldwide, the bulk of...
Creating New Countries in the Future will be Challenging at Best Would the world be better off with relatively more countries or relatively fewer countries? Are the countries we see across the world meeting the needs of the world and their citizens? Should we...
How much will my metaverse real estate be worth ten years from now? We’re starting to see metaverse real estate companies and developers coming out of the meta-woodwork, but everyone seems to have that lingering question in the back of their mind: Is this a good...
How to Run a Cooking School in the Metaverse While it’s already possible to run a virtual reality (VR) cooking school in the metaverse, one that demonstrates a three-dimensional Julia Child approach to preparing food, there are several emerging technologies that...
Are We Alone? The Fallacies and Misguided Thinking behind the Drake Equation The Drake equation was formulated in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake, an astronomer and astrophysicist, for purposes of beginning the process of quantifying the number of civilizations that might...
When the Dark Web meets the Metaverse What will you be able to do in the Metaverse that you can’t do in real life? Not much, according to metaverse promoters. And as can be expected these days, there are plenty of people who would like to push the boundaries. Given...
Four Laws for Managing the Laws By my count, the U.S. currently has more laws than any country at any time in history. Well, that’s not true – the part about “my count.” No one could possibly count all the laws on the books across the U.S. It’s not surprising, then,...
Power Beaming Satellites: A technology that can Completely Change the World … and we’re Close! The idea of wireless power was first explored by Nikola Tesla over 120 years ago. We’re probably fortunate that his concepts weren’t fully implemented back then,...
Nine Unintended Consequences from our Approach to COVID If it feels to you like we’re currently living in a new world with a new version of the future than we envisioned three years ago, you’re not alone … and I think you’re right. To put it mildly, many things...
The Impending Collapse of the US Income Tax System The IRS has a lot on their hands right now. The backlog of tax returns they’re facing is staggering thanks to staffing shortages, the need to administer COVID stimulus payments over the past two years and child tax...
When NFL Football moves into the Metaverse A few years ago, I wrote a column titled, “How Much are the VR Broadcasting Rights Worth for NFL Football?” I described how in the near future we would safely attach several cameras around players’ football helmets, and...
My Dinner with Leonardo DaVinci – Living Forever in the Metaverse The Metaverse not only gives us the opportunity to explore new places and move across a metaverse landscape, but it will also allow us to move about in metaverse history to experience life in the...
Should we Gamify Citizenship in the Metaverse? Four years ago, I analyzed the benefits, downsides, and challenges related to creating a citizenship rating system that would document a person’s value to society. And we further discussed the topic in a recent podcast...
Private Space Stations: The Future Portals for Private Space Commerce and Tourism The future of space research and development is tied to private enterprise – specifically private space stations. Now that government-funded programs have proven basic concepts about...
Next Up – Decentralized Venture Capital Combine ABC’s Shark Tank, crowdfunding, and decentralized apps using blockchain technology and you have a pretty good idea of the concept behind decentralized venture capital (DVC) markets also referred to as venture DAOs...
57 Jobs of the Future In hindsight, it’s easy to see that in nearly every generation, innovation impacted job markets and employment trends. It’s not news that human workers are replaced by new technology and that, fortunately, new technology spurs the creation of new...
What Happens When We Lose Control of AI? You’d think it would be difficult to find something that Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Andrew Ng, and Vladimir Putin all agree on, but here’s one: All agree that artificial intelligence (AI) comes with inherent risks...
Smart Contracts are Here and They’re Getting Smarter In a recent podcast interview, Max Galka, CEO of Elementus.io (a “search engine for non-private blockchain”) explained the fundamentals of blockchain-based smart contracts using a travel insurance policy as an...
Using the Transformative Nature of Bitcoin to Understand Our Future Lately Bitcoin and the blockchain have been occupying more and more of my attention and I recently found myself watching Andreas Antonopoulos’s excellent talk “Introduction to Bitcoin:...
The End of the Internal Combustion Engine Two recent developments will speed up the world’s transition to all-electric cars … and the demise of automobile/light vehicle internal combustion engines (ICE). At the recent COP 26 conference in Glasgow, more than 100...
Are we heading towards a Technological Singularity? No one would argue that technology is progressing at a rapid pace. Blockchain, virtual reality, 3D printing, autonomous transportation – it’s difficult to keep up with developments in these and other breakthrough...
DAOs: Paving the way for Boss Less Businesses and Organizations of the Future Blockchain technology is continuing to transform fundamental institutions. We saw this first with cyber currency and related financial systems, then with art and entertainment, and now you...
9 Dimensions of “What’s Next” for the Great Resignation Nearly every organization I work with or interact with is desperately trying to staff up. They’re not necessarily growing; they’re just trying to get back to pre-COVID staffing levels because the pre-COVID demand...
Play to Earn Gaming is Creating a Whole New Breed of Unicorn Startups We’re seeing new opportunities to create monetary value based on blockchain and cyber currency. Crypto mining is one way, of course, as “miners” stack computers to create block equations that are...
The Race to Find the Killer App for Quantum Computing Our world is complex, and the state of matter surrounding us is rarely as clear-cut as we tend to think. Physical matter, nature, choices, etc. are not always definitive with respect to location, amounts, accuracy,...
Twelve Technologies Destined to Change Our Future If you ask ten different people what were the most important inventions in all history, you’ll likely get ten different answers. Here’s one pretty good list from National Geographic that would be hard to...
Introducing the New and Improved Woolly Mammoth… Well, Sort Of Over the last few weeks, there have been a number of news articles about the plans of tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church to revive the Woolly Mammoth. They recently received...
The Future of Asteroid Mining Never say never. That’s one principle of futurism that proves itself time and time again. Driverless vehicles. Citizen travel in space. Robots. Global currencies. Alternate universes. Mars exploration. At some point in history, each...
The History of the Metaverse The metaverse is the collective assortment of byte-based alternatives to features of the physical, atomized world. The metaverse is in our future with or without our permission. We’ve taken too many steps in that direction already to stop...
3 Secret Applications that will Cement NFTs Role in the Future We looked at Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs earlier this year in the context of their place in the art world. That raised a lot of questions for some readers so it’s time to look at the bigger picture, if...
Will We Be Living in the Metaverse? If you’ve been zoning out or raising your eyebrows when you hear references to the “metaverse,” it’s time to pay attention. It’s here. Well, at least pieces of it. As we speak, worlds are being created in cyberspace. They’re also...
Our Lab Grown Future I’ve previously written about lab-grown meat. And as we hinted at in that piece, we should think far more expansively about these kinds of lab processes. In fact, I can see incredible breakthroughs in the not-too-distant future with the...
Ghost Kitchens – Rewriting the rules for the global food industry At first glance, the emergence of “ghost kitchens” may not seem to be an earth-shattering trend. Other equally foreboding terms for this industry include “dark kitchens” and “shadow kitchens.” But...
16 Startling Predictions about the Future of Banking and Future of Cryptocurrency We’re seeing a lot of predictions about the future of cryptocurrency, but most of them have to do with their price, finding ways to mine them using less energy, and the possibility...
The Race to Invent the Auto Electric, Auto Recharging Highways of the Future Several major automakers have recently announced they intend for 100% of their vehicles to be all-electric within the next two decades. That’s terrific and remarkable. Electric vehicle (EV)...
Self Watering Soil – The Single Greatest Breakthrough in Agriculture in the Past Century It’s not exactly “self-watering” farming but it’s close. A research team led by Dr. Guihua Yu at the engineering school at the University of Texas in Austin have developed a...
Industrial Meat Growing Facilities Coming to a City Near You We just can’t get enough meat it seems. The numbers and trends are staggering. Meat production doubled between 1988 and 2018. By 2050 it will have doubled from 2008 levels to 570 million tons. The average...
Making Plans to Visit the World’s First Space Hotel When will we see the first space hotel? Some would say we have the prototype right now at the International Space Station (ISS). Astronauts working there have their own phone booth-sized sleeping quarters with...
Should We Move Towards “Rewilding” Our Cities? When it comes to outdoor space, we tend to think in terms of urban vs. rural and natural settings vs. city boundaries. “Natural,” though, is the default, dominant state of our planet. If we leave a suburban...
