The 2,000-Year Test A couple years ago my wife and I visited the beautiful Spanish city of Segovia located in the center of Spain about an hour northwest of Madrid. At the heart of the city, nestled close to its historic shopping district, are the iconic aqueducts...
34 Looming Issues between Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage and protect human ingenuity. For this reason, intellectual property has become a continually evolving form of public policy where...
How long before we reach peak ecommerce? Retail is rapidly evolving and many of yesterday’s storefronts no longer exist. Gone are the Woolco’s, Radio Shacks, Gottschalks, Casual Corners, Ben Franklins, Mervyn’s, Montgomery Wards, and Miller Outposts of a bygone...
Five Scenarios for a Techno-Apocalypse Over the past couple decades we’ve seen a number of spectacular tech failures. It’s easy to list things like MySpace, Google Glass, Pebble Watch, TiVo, Iridium, Napster, and even AOL as major business failures, but in each case...
The Power of Predictions: Fine Art of Creating Viral Predictions When is the last time you made a prediction that people paid attention to? Like many things in life, there are a number of methods and techniques that can be used, but the thought processes involved in...
The Coming Driverless Mobile Office Era: Seventeen Mind-Bending Examples Coworking spaces like WeWork may soon have a new kid on the block to worry about. Driverless technology will invariably open the door to a whole new era of non-commuting vehicles, and one of the...
Approaching the “empty pockets” lifestyle Throughout history people have been burdened by all the things they’ve had to carry with them, typically in their pockets, wallets, or purses. In the past, leaving the house was a checklist exercise for remembering all the...
Driverless cars, the hardest design problem yet to be solved is one that you’ll never guess For car designers, the rapidly approaching driverless era is giving them an entirely new set of design challenges to deal with. Over the past 120 years, cars have been designed...
The Inner Vision Theory: Three surprising ways it controls your future The three items that the human body comes into contact with most in life are the beds that we sleep in, the chairs that we sit in, and the shoes that we walk in. These are the primary friction...
“The People of Mars Have Spoken!” These are the critically important words that emanated from the first ragtag mars colony, the first of its kind in the known universe, in response to a number of concerns voiced by prominent people on earth. “The people of Mars have...
The Coming Era of AI-Enhanced Superhumans How many times have you wished a smarter person was leaning over your shoulder whispering the right answer in your ear? As I think about some of my own situations, a better response would have meant the difference between...
Future of Work: The New Age of Employment For the past century, the work of every car designer has focused on one central activity – driving! The art of creating the perfect driving experience has been extremely complicated, with humans coming in a variety of shapes...
Seven ways digital twins will affect your life in 2028 and beyond Recently I was given a behind-the-scenes tour of Siemens Robotics Lab in Princeton, NJ where they demonstrated digital twin technology on a self-organizing manufacturing process. For those of you new to...
52 Future Degrees Colleges Are Not Offering Yet I was thoroughly intrigued when I found out the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado was offering a degree in asteroid mining. Yes, the idea of extracting water, oxygen, minerals, and metals from an...
Using Drones to Eliminate Future Forest Fires In 2013, I proposed using drones to extinguish future forest fires. Admittedly, both the idea and the technology were crude, and proposing an idea like this is not the same as implementing a solution. During the first few...
11 Critical Skills for the Future That Aren’t Taught in School A few weeks ago a person who I hadn’t met before asked me what my superpower was. As an icebreaker at a networking event, this is a great question to get to know someone. However, since I had never been...
Insights On The Future Of Banking Is our current banking system doomed? When is the last time you set foot into a bank? While many of us have a love-hate relationship with our bank, where we love the people but hate the fees, we still tend to go there. According to a...
The Mannequin Vs. Model Showdown is Coming “If it weren’t for their glowing eyes, I would have sworn they were live fashion models dancing in the store window.”Moving smoothly to match the music playing in the background, each of the seven perfectly...
Mini Airports: Coming to a city near you As a futurist, I often get questions about flying cars. Well, the bad news is that we will never actually get to the flying car era that many have imagined, but flying drone taxis are similar and will prove to be far better....
20 common jobs in 2040 German industrial giant, Siemens, recently hosted an Innovation Day that I participated in at their Chicago design center to give thought leaders in the U.S. a first look at many of the cutting edge technologies they’re working on. The topics...
Creating the self-delivering package A couple years ago I was asked to keynote the 8th annual Turkish Postal Symposium in Antalya, Turkey on the future of the postal industry. This was a fascinating event where thought leaders from around the world gathered to discuss...
Is death our only option? Buying into the dream of immortality Imagine what it will be like attending the Olympics in 2248. Men and women competing in their respective sports will range in age from 16 to 212. The oldest competitor is now in his 38th Olympic...
Using AI to turn the Global Language Archive into the “Louvre of Languages” In 2012, I proposed the idea of creating a Global Language Archive. This was roughly the same time that the Endangered Languages Project was getting kicked off, which I’ll discuss in more...
Pushing the Envelope of Human Existence Having been born and raised on a small rural farm in South Dakota, I grew up with a very narrow perspective of the rest of the world. With only two TV channels and three radio stations to pick from, our news options were very...
Should we gamify citizenship? We live in a world filled with status symbols. Every well-written resume is chocked full of symbols of distinction ranging from academic accomplishments, job titles, published works, personal endorsements, memberships, patents, awards,...
Life begins at a billion moments When does artificial intelligence become real intelligence? And how do we define real intelligence? This is a question that AI experts and people in the tech community have been wrestling with for some time, a question that has led to...
100,000 new micro industries to be created over the next two decades Every major industry today was started as a micro industry. Everything from steel, to photography, oil, airlines, electricity, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and search engines all worked their way...
12 mind-blowing AI advances and 12 critical takeaways to put AI in perspective It was rare to find a tech columnist last year that didn’t make some reference to artificial intelligence. But it was also rare to find a writer who could clearly differentiate between the...
59 things you’ll be able to do on the cruise ship of the future that you can’t do today I always think that when I’m on a cruise I’ll be able to catch up on all the writing projects that I‘m behind on. But somehow that never happens. Every ship is full of distractions...
Five tipping points that show why our current banking system is doomed When is the last time you set foot into a bank? While many of us have a love-hate relationship with our bank, where we love the people but hate the fees, we still tend to go there. According to a...
Giving the future a ‘hole’ new perspective I often get asked the question, “How did you become a futurist?” When I get this question, I know that the person asking is secretly thinking that being a futurist is one of the coolest professions of all times, which it is....
Turbulent times ahead for cities: 63 looming issues Cities are in trouble. Never before have we seen such a massive convergence of technologies affecting cities as profoundly as we see today. Very few have looked at tech adoption rates as something to monitor. The...
Haptic Clothing: When our technologies become truly wearable The fashion industry is only now waking up to the potential of haptic clothing that offers wearers a form of kinesthetic interaction between their bodies and their clothes. The amount of communication that...
A peek into the scandalous future world of hyper-influence marketing Television producers have never been more in demand. With both Facebook and Apple recently announcing their own $1 billion budgets for creating original television content, the entertainment industry...
Our Newest Unit of Measure – 1 Human Intelligence Unit I’ve been closely watching the debate on artificial intelligence with people like Rodney Brooks saying it’s only a tool, and others like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking giving bone chilling warnings of how it could...
Weaponized A.I. – 36 Early Examples Of all the topics I’ve written about, this one scares me the most.Yes, artificial intelligence, one of humanity’s greatest achievements, can also unleash the seeds of our own destruction. Weaponized A.I. will range from...
Peak electricity and 17 seismic forces of change that will make you want to shift careers It happened in 2007. Ten years ago the trajectory for electrical use in America peaked and started down a different course, declining for reasons we don’t fully understand yet....
Freelancer College :: Blueprint for Disruption Parents often ask me what their kids should be studying in college. The answer, however, is never as straightforward as they’d like because college is not always a good solution. If a parent’s primary objective is for...
60 future crimes that don’t exist today Most of our heroes were rule breakers. Yes, virtually everyone that holds a prominent place in our history books was a rebel, rule breaker, and occasional criminal. No, I’m not saying these people should have been arrested, but...
We first started discussing this topic when I posed the question, “Will there still be RVs after we shift over to driverless technologies?” The answer came quickly, “Sure, why not?” But as we removed the driver from the equation it opened the door to a vast array of...
The Coming Meat Wars – 17 Mind-Blowing Predictions In November of 2015, I was asked to speak on the future of agriculture in Auckland, NZ along with some of the leading authorities on food innovation. One of the other speakers was Dr. Mark Post, founder of Mosa...
78 Skills that will be Difficult to Automate Recently my wife Deb and I were eating at a local sushi restaurant, watching the itamae (sushi chefs) carefully preparing each meal. In Japan, becoming an itamae of sushi requires years of on-the-job training and...
14 Fallacies of the Coming Robot Apocalypse Over the past few weeks I’ve come across a growing number of tirades warning us of the dangers of robots. If you were concerned about A.I. in the past, once it’s tied to a robot, the warnings seem to escalate to imminent...
25 Shocking Predictions about the Coming Driverless Car Era in the U.S. The night before my talk for the Texas Transportation forum in Austin, Texas, my wife and I were involved in a car accident. Since Uber and Lyft no longer operate in Austin, we were riding in the...
Inside the Mind of a Futurist – April 10-14, 2017 A little over two years ago I mentioned a new anticipatory thinking tool I’ve developed called “situational futuring.” It helps me gain better insight into the world ahead. Until now I hadn’t given too many...
Building the World’s First Graphene Superconductor Power Grid In 2002 when Dr. Bor Jang, a little know researcher in Akron, Ohio filed his patent for graphene, few people had a clue as to how revolutionary it would be. Certainly not the people at the Nobel Foundation...
Will My Future Self Be Disappointed in the Decisions I’m Making Today? – Excerpts from Epiphany Z On January 10, 2017, my new book, “Epiphany Z – Eight Radical Visions for Transforming Your Future” was officially released in bookstores...
Will Future Robots be able to give Birth to Their Own Children? At first blush, the notion of a mechanical robot giving birth to a baby sounds preposterous. But many of the technologies we use today started out as preposterous ideas at one time or another. Every year...
Bitcoin and the surprising “disturbance in the force” that will upend our financial systems In 1984, Congressman Jack Kemp introduced the “Gold Standard Act of 1984.” At the time, many people found it inconceivable to have anything more stable than gold to serve as...
Driverless Tech – 8 scenarios that show it to be the most disruptive technology in all history Driverless vehicles will be the most disruptive technology in all history. There may be more disruptive technologies on the horizon, but it is hard to imagine anything that...
A little over two years ago I mentioned a new anticipatory thinking tool I’ve developed called “situational futuring.” It helps me gain better insight into the world ahead. Until now I hadn’t given too many details about how it worked or how to apply it,...
Cracking the Code for the Future of Education This story started in 2012 when I was asked to speak at a TEDx event in Istanbul on the future of education. Several times throughout my talk I touched on the topic of teacherless education. After my presentation, I was...
At a recent International Copyright Technology Conference in Seoul, Korea, I gave a talk on the “Future of Intellectual Property.” Leading up to the event my research led me to conclude that today’s IP laws, systems, and processes are not designed to handle the issues...
How Virtual Reality will Transform the Future of News The year is 2026 When the police arrested the couple for human trafficking, a news drone was able to slip through the door and get first hand footage of the squalors the young girls were being held in. The same...
It all started with a conversation I had with the National Library of Greece a couple weeks ago. As they shared with me their plans for constructing a massive new National Library, a beautiful facility they hope to open next year, they started asking my thoughts on...
How Much are VR Broadcasting Rights Worth for NFL Football? 1994 was the first year that television broadcast rights for NFL football exceeded $1 billion. While currently earning between $5-$6 billion per year, the NFL currently has its eyes set on a much larger...
The Transformative Tech Playbook – Eight Emerging Internet-Sized Opportunities When it comes to innovation it’s always hard to point to that exact moment when an invention, contribution, or individual caused the course of history to change. But there’s something...
Imagine what it will be like attending the Olympics in 2248. Men and women competing in their respective sports will range in age from 16 to 212. The oldest competitor is now in his 38th Olympic competition, and young people have complained for years how hard it is to...
72 stunning things in the future that will be common ten years from now that don’t exist today How many things do we own, that are common today, that didn’t exist 10 years ago? The list is probably longer than you think. Prior to the iPhone coming out in 2007, we...
151,600 Every 10 seconds, another 17 people die In the time it takes me to walk across a typical stage for my talks, another 15-20 people will lose their life. 151,600 is the number of people that die every day in the world. Some die from old age, infectious disease,...
The Seven Deadly Sins of Machine Intelligence The year is 2028 and James Mathews has been summoned to appear in front of Winston III, the famous AI Judge overseeing an electronic courtroom, set up as a pilot project, but many have already dubbed it the justice system...
If you haven’t been paying attention, incidents like the shootout in Paris and the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando are increasing. Yes, we do have more crazed people with weapons, but we are also dealing with some foundational shifts away from existing systems for...
Creating the World’s First Neural Lace Network Elon Musk recently added a new twist to his vision for tech-related accomplishments by saying he was interested in creating a “neural lace.” For a little background, science fiction author Iain M. Banks first coined the...
Megaprojects Set to Explode to 24 Percent of Global GDP Within a Decade Gone are the days where people are impressed by projects costing $10-$50 million or even $100 million. We are witnessing an explosion in the number of $1 billion+ projects with some, like the...
The Warsaw School of Economics is the oldest, most prestigious, and top-ranked business school in Poland. Dr. Piotr Turek received his PhD in Economics there and went on to become a fellow futurist and new media expert in Warsaw where he works as a journalist,...
My wife Deb and I recently got back from a 10-day Princess Cruise through the Panama Canal, a fabulous experience, but one that could have been greatly enhanced with better technology on the part of the cruise line. To illustrate this point, on the 2nd day of the...
128 Things that will disappear in the driverless car era I started writing this column while I was in Manila, Philippines for a talk with UnionBank, one of the most innovative banks I’ve ever come across. Driving across Manila is often a painful experience with far...
There’s a big difference between what a person wants and what they need. On one hand we need healthy food, a good night’s rest, and decent medical care. But a little voice inside our heads has us craving dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s, an overnight stay at the Ritz...
At a recent visit to our local hairdresser, my wife and I were informed by the enterprising young lady that she was no longer selling her line of retail hair products. Filling out the monthly sales tax reports had simply become too onerous, and the profits too small...
Over the coming months the DaVinci Institute will be unveiling the world’s first Futurist Hall of Fame.As with other “hall of fame” efforts, this one will be dedicated to drawing attention to those who have contributed the most to our thinking about the future.To be...
It was a monumental event that no one noticed. Just before 1800 the number of people on earth had climbed to what was then believed to be an astronomically large number – 1 billion. While this was indeed a landmark event, the occasion passed without fanfare. The...
Will humans soon be battling for their survival against robots? Even though this has become a favorite Hollywood theme, the likelihood of that happening is nearly zero. Yes, we will have many clashes with human-controlled robots doing battle with other humans or...
Wael Ghonim was a young computer engineer working for Google in Egypt when he became a central figure in the events leading up to the Arab Spring in 2011. In early 2011, Wael created a Facebook page titled, “A Revolution against Corruption, Injustice and...
The 1,000-Revenue Stream Lifestyle In his famous poem, William Shakespeare begins with the lines, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” But what if that were true in more than just an allegorical sense? No, I’m not talking about...
The Future of Ignorance In 1901, Dr. Duncan MacDougall set out to discover if the human soul weighed anything. Working in the local old age home, he conducted a series of experiments where he weighed six patients on a precision scale both before and after they...
In the early 1990s, psychologist Robin Dunbar studied the social connections within groups of monkeys and apes. He theorized that the maximum size of their overall social group was limited by the size of their neocortex. Based on our neocortex size, Dunbar calculated...
2015 saw 42 new unicorn companies ($1B+ valuation) take center stage, the most ever, and a clear indication that the scalability of Internet will redefine the business landscape for generations to come. For this reason, no industries are safe, nor should they be. Many...
When was the last time you called a repairman to work on the mattress for your bed? At a recent hotel stay I found myself sleeping on a Sleep Number bed that seemed to adjust itself in the middle of the night. At times I’d wake up on a totally deflated bed and others...
In 2000 we entered the new millennium waiting to see if Y2K would destroy the world, but instead it was our over valued Internet stocks that caused markets to crash. The second Internet gold rush was just getting started when, in 2007, we watched our global financial...
I was recently honored to be a guest speaker at a conference hosted by Mark Wilkins, Kevin Kelly, and the good people at Stampede on the “future of the drone industry” in Buffalo, NY. While most businesses are taking a wait and see attitude with flying drones,...
Five-Part Sharing-Economy Solution to the Refugee Crisis A few weeks ago I was asked to appear on CCTV, the Chinese-American television channel for an interview about the topic of border walls. With the crisis in Syria deepening, affecting bordering countries and...
The Perfection Quandary I often wake up in the middle of the night with a big idea, something I’ve dubbed the grand epiphany. But as it turns out, very few actually fit into the “grand” category. Whenever they do, big ideas carries with them a heavy responsibility,...
Have you ever run across a situation so frustrating that you wished you could hire a “fixer?” Maybe it has to do with gangs moving into your neighborhood, or the local slumlord not willing to repair a dangerous situation, or a local politician taking bribes, or...
The Day the Banking Industry Died It was rather anticlimactic when it finally happened, but the front door simply failed to open. There was no “going out of business” sale, no press conferences, no people gathered around to claim what was theirs. Instead, this once...
When my oldest son Darby was 8 years old, he looked at his 3-year old sister, Shandra, and pointedly said, “She’s worthless! She couldn’t save anyone!” I was always amazed at this line of thinking because somewhere in his mind our primary reason for living was to save...
A robot does not kill someone out of fear, anger, or desperation. They kill because someone told them to do it. At least that the way it works with our current generation of robots. What comes next may be a different story. Normally, when we think about war, it has to...
In March of 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first online message that would eventually lead to the World Wide Web, it was similar to the first car leaving an inventor’s workshop. The highway system for cars started on horse and buggy trails and the Internet was...
Will Coworking Replace Colleges? When I first brought up the idea of coworking taking over colleges, it seemed like an absurd notion. But there is a secret reason that very few people are grasping. At first glance, the highly structured ivory towers of academia seem...
The Coming of “Peak Car” In what year will the number of cars in the world reach its peak and auto sales overall begin to decline? For most, it may be surprising to realize we’re already there in the U.S. Growing data shows many wealthy economies have already hit...
If it weren’t for their glowing eyes, I would have sworn they were live fashion models dancing in the store window. Moving smoothly to match the music playing in the background, each of the seven perfectly proportioned mannequins swayed to a carefully choreographed...
Engineering the Secret Engines of Off-Grid Living Having just returned from a trip to Alaska, it occurred to me that most of the 660,000 sq miles of this beautiful state will never be habitable until a more complete off-grid solution is found. In Alaska, they’ve...
The Future of South Korea When Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, took the stage at Edaily’s 6th World Strategy Forum on June 11th at the famed Shilla Seoul, his keynote about how he became an entrepreneur was very personal. With a comical flare for storytelling, he...
Creating Humanless Distribution Networks A couple weeks ago I was asked to speak at the 8th annual Turkish Postal Symposium in Antalya, Turkey on the future of the postal industry. This was a fascinating gathering of thought leaders to discuss next generation postal...
The Black Hat Robots are Coming It’s ironic, this whole effort to work so hard to make working obsolete, or in the case of artificial intelligence, the effort to think so hard to make thinking obsolete. But then it should really come as no mystery. Machines are far...
What are the odds that the job you’ll be doing 10 years from now doesn’t exist today? Turns out the odds are pretty high. According to a recent study by TheLadders, online job matching service, the fastest growing jobs are in user experience design, iOS and Android...
My friend, Peter Diamandis, likes to say, “The best way to become a billionaire is to solve a billion-person problem.” When I first heard this phrase, I had difficulty imagining what a billion-person problem looked like. A problem that affects a billion unique...
When the “Things” We Buy Know More About Us Than We Know About Them What if the things you were thinking about buying already knew you were considering a purchase? Much like going on a date, where the person you were dating wanted to look their best for you, what if...
Three Laws of Exponential Capabilities – Video (Click to see video) We are entering into a world where driverless vehicles will eliminate millions of driving positions; robotic systems will work relentlessly day and night eliminating millions of manufacturing,...
The Coming Era of Alternative Credentialing Earlier this week the DaVinci Institute became the first organization in the world to offer Microdegrees® to the graduates of the Institute’s coding school, DaVinci Coders. People who complete courses in Ruby on Rails,...
On a recent trip from Montreal to Denver, Air Canada managed to misplace my one piece of luggage. Since I travel extensively around the world, it’s rare that I have my bags checked, but this time they insisted because of the size of the aircraft. I reluctantly agreed,...
