All those Damn Laws! Over 18 Million Laws in the U.S… and climbing! How many laws are affecting you as you’re reading this today? If you think you know the answer, I will tell you you’re lying, and there is a law against lying about how many laws there are. I really...
Living the Life of Bubble People and Unlocking the Next Phase 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...
Blueprint for a Makers District The demise of local retail stores has been painful to watch. Empty storefronts and weed-infested parking lots are gut-wrenching symbols of community decay. So if I told you there was an immediate way to turn this around, would that...
The Great Cow Epiphany and the Six Immutable Laws of Information Recent comments by Vint Cerf, vice president of Google and one of the founding fathers of the Internet, about the long-term viability of our data has many wondering what will happen to our digital...
Three Great Machine Learning Paradoxes I installed my Nest Thermostat a little over a year ago. This “learning” machine was billed as being able to study the habits of people and adjust the settings to optimize both temperature and energy usage. But ever since then...
Going Beyond Micro-Payments to Nano-Payments If a billion people each gave you a tenth of a cent, you would have $1 million. Over the past few weeks I’ve become enamored with the power of financial friction. This could involve everything from adding a tenth or...
Four Rules for Game Testing Our Way to a Better Future At a recent video game tournament in Denver called ClutchCon, I was moderating a panel discussion on the future of video games, and we got into the topic of leveraging the time and energy spent playing video games...
37 Critical Problems that need to be Solved for Drone Delivery to become Viable It all started when Toni, one of our staffers working on our flying drone workshop, asked me a simple question. She asked, “Since I live in an apartment complex, if I order something to be...
Technological Unemployment and our Need for Micro Colleges Business owners today are actively deciding whether their next hire should be a person or a machine. After all, machines can work in the dark and don’t come with decades of HR case law requiring time off for...
12 Emerging Trends that Everyone Missed at CES < Every year that I attend CES in Las Vegas I reach a point of sensory overload. It’s not just from all the people, lights, noise, and smells, but an overload of product strategies and emerging trends for the coming...
What Comes after the Nation State? – Fractal Governance In the beginning life was simple, just land and people. No borders, no restrictions, and no governments breathing down everyone’s neck. Over time, cultures formed around a common language and geography...
Top 10 Most Influential Columns in 2014 Over the past year we’ve delved into a variety of different topics on FuturistSpeaker.com and naturally some have been more popular than others. Sometimes it’s the headlines, other times the graphics, but in the end it’s the...
My Conversation Last Night with Adolph Hitler No, it wasn’t exactly what I had planned. The year is 2026, and what began as a simple quiet evening at my local library, culminated with me coming face to face with one of the most reviled men in all history. As I entered...
The Coming Era of Mega Systems, Part 1 – Transportation Let me begin with a couple questions. Question #1: The U.S. has two countries that touch its borders – Canada and Mexico. But what is its third closest neighbor? While most would probably look at the island...
Introducing the Maslow Self-Actualization House For the past several months I’ve become enamored with the idea of creating a self sufficient, connectionless home. Not only is the home off-grid, creating it’s own power, heat, and air-conditioning, but also it’s own...
What Industries will produce the First Trillionaires? A few weeks ago I got into a discussion with some friends centered around this question. “What, in your mind, will be the most powerful entity in the world 100 years from now?” As we look around us today, it’s easy...
Modern Day Grandstanding and the Future of Getting Noticed On a recent trip to Amsterdam, I had a conversation with Axel Rüger, Director of the renowned Van Gogh Museum about what it was that made Van Gogh so famous. Was it his talent, the fact that he cut off his own...
101 Endangered Jobs by 2030 Business owners today are actively deciding whether their next hire should be a person or a machine. After all, machines can work in the dark and don’t come with decades of HR case law requiring time off for holidays, personal illness,...
Extreme Graphene and the Coming Super Materials Gold Rush In 2004, scientists Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov from the University of Manchester, used adhesive tape to lift a thin layer of carbon from a block of graphite, and placed it on a silicone wafer. Graphite is...
You will be a different person by the time you reach the end of this article Whatever happened to that young child you were not so many years ago? As a baby, life was all about eating, sleeping, and dry diapers. Even though you are learning new things quickly, not...
Disrupting Healthcare – When Devices Replace Medicine Doctors today are constantly selling. No, it didn’t start out that way, but a system has evolved that richly rewards members of the physician’s food chain if sales continue. These sales include the selling of...
Computing’s Next Big Transformation – Semantic Intelligence I had great difficulty completing this column. This is partly due to the complex nature of the technology and partly because its implications may indeed be so far reaching that I’ll sound over-reaching...
Should Robots Have Their Own Bank Accounts? The year is 2027 and Winston, a newly born house-bot charged with doing a number of domestic chores including cleaning, meal prep, laundry, and building maintenance, has been programmed to not only perform the work, but also...
Seven Reasons Why the Value of Human Life is Increasing Exponentially What’s the value of a human life? For some of you this is a very disconcerting question because it attempts to put a dollar value on a person, something we value in far different ways. But that is...
192 Future Uses for Flying Drones The thought occurred to me that mounting a video projector to a flying drone could give it unusual capabilities. My first idea was to use it for special effects at a concert or major indoor event. But a device like this could also...
When it comes to jobs, why is this time different? In 1964, and open letter was drafted and sent to President Johnson, warning him of the coming Triple Revolution. The letter was composed and signed by 35 members of the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,”...
← Previous Post Next Post → Establishing the Central Bank of Bitcoin The year is 2024. It seemed like a piece of nostalgia to open a new bank account and get a free toaster, but this wasn’t any ordinary toaster, and it certainly wasn’t any ordinary bank. The...
The Future Library – A Liquid Network for Ideas At a recent conference on the “Future of Libraries” put together by the American Library Association at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, I proposed a rather unusual mission for libraries, that of becoming...
2050 and the Future of Infrastructure Much of the world around us has been formed around key pieces of infrastructure. Most see this as a testament to who we are as a society, and part of the cultural moorings we need to guide us into the future. In general,...
All Information, Ever Created, is Still in Existence The date is July 14, 1986. Herbert Benson wakes up early, goes down to the kitchen and makes himself a peanut butter sandwich. This is a seemingly trivial incident that happened nearly 30 years ago. How do we know...
When Everyone Becomes Blackmailable On a recent driving trip, my wife and I became immersed in the audio version of one of Tom Clancy’s last novels titled, “Threat Vector.” Without giving away too much of the plot, a Chinese super-geek villain has hatched a plan to...
The Laws of Exponential Capabilities When people like Google CEO, Larry Page, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and X-Prize Foundation CEO, Peter Diamandis, talk about us entering into a period of abundance, there has been a natural tendency to assume we’ll be entering into a...
The Growing Dangers of Technological Unemployment and the Re-Skilling of America In March, when Facebook announced the $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift, they not only put a giant stamp of approval on the technology, but they also triggered an instant demand for...
Disrupting Government – Why Countries Will Soon Have to Compete for their Citizens In 2002, Roger Ver was honing his entrepreneurial skills by selling products on eBay. It was in the aftermath of the Twin Towers disaster when one of his products called “Pest Control...
‘Situational Futuring’ and 44 Mind-Stretching Scenarios to Learn How to Use It Last week I got into a discussion with a friend about the concept of self-contained water. If you think in terms of picking up a bottle of water, only without the bottle, you get the...
Artificial Intelligence will be Crashing the Stock Market in 3, 2, 1… A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking opened the world’s eyes to the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), warning that it has the potential of outsmarting humans in the financial markets. But few...
Six Radical Trends Redefining the Hotel of the Future A few nights ago, I arrived at a very nice Radisson Blu Hotel in Minneapolis for my talk on the “hotel of the future.” My client was the good people on the Board of Carlson & Rezidor Hotels, the group...
Will there be Swarmbots in Your Future? Imagine stepping out of the shower in the morning, and rather than reaching for a towel, a swarm of thousands of flying drones will surround you and begin to dry you off. A few seconds after drying your skin, the same swarm will...
How Long Before I Can 3D Print a Replacement Body for Myself? A couple weeks ago I turned 60. I remember how old 60 was when I was a kid, and now I’m here. As a person who spends a lot of time asking “what if” questions, constantly thinking about extreme...
Launching the Whole Earth Genealogy Project Some of us get bitten by the genealogical bug early in life, others a bit later. But there are few of us who haven’t been haunted by the question – where did I come from? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. So...
The Next Great Space Race – Space-Based Power Stations Earth’s appetite for power continues to grow. Since the 1960s, power consumption has quadrupled around the globe, with many countries opting to build large oil and coal plants to meet the demand. But for Japan, a...
Betting on Your Future Self Every day we wake up different. Moment by moment, our lives are changing. Much like a strobe light with flashes of memories jumping through our minds we randomly recall where we’ve been. It happens something like this: …and then I woke up...
Disposable Houses When it comes to doing something first, and winning the technology race, there are typically no official forms to fill out, no rulebooks, no judges, and certainly no deadlines. In fact, when it came to using 3D printers to print an entire house, a...
The Singularity and Our Collision Path with the Future Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, has predicted that we will reach a technological singularity by 2045, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge is betting on 2029, a date that is ironically on the...
Which Requires More Faith, Science or Religion? For the past several months I’ve been wrestling with this topic, and how to discuss it from a centrist viewpoint. In an era where the science vs. religion debate has become an increasingly polarizing issue, we see both...
The Great Barrier Backlash My wife Deb and I just returned from a weeklong trip to South Korea where much of our travel inside the country involved riding on the high-speed KTX Train (Korean Transit eXpress) from city to city. The train is designed for speeds up to...
162 Future Jobs: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Yet Exist Last week I was speaking at an event in Istanbul. As usual, once I landed at the airport, I made my way to the customs area where I was greeted by no fewer than 1,000 people in line ahead of me. Long lines...
The Next Bold Step in Transportation: Personal Rapid Transit Systems Throughout history, speed has been synonymous with greatness. In sports, those who ran the fastest were heroes. In times of war, those with the fastest chariots, ships, planes, and weapons had a...
Passing the Fortune Cookie Test Yesterday my wife Deb and I had lunch at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants, and afterwards we’re given the typical fortune cookies that come with the bill. Jokingly I broke open the first one and asked, “I wonder if it’d be...
A Journey into the Land of Epiphany I’ve always loved ideas and I think it stems from the fact that I’ve had so many to choose from. But it wasn’t about the sheer number of ideas I got to play with. Rather it was finding that one truly remarkable gem, the golden...
Creating the God Globe In 1998, a column I wrote for The Futurist Magazine took issue with the state of computer displays. Viewing the vast and growing Internet through a little square box on our desk was, in my opinion, the equivalent of watching a baseball game...
Why the Tiny Home Movement May Not be So Tiny Most of us hate feeling cramped. We hate being stuck on a crowded plane, stuck in congested traffic, and wading through packed concert halls. We like to be able to stretch out, get casual, and relax, but we can’t do that...
The Disruptive Nature of the Sharing Economy: Finding the Next Great Opportunities Many of us suffer from a sinister and often contagious disorder, something I call just-in-case disease. We own toolboxes full of tools, just in case we need to fix something. We have...
Nature is Not Human-Centric At a recent event I posed the question, “Is the intelligence of nature greater than the intelligence of humans?” After pondering this question, the audience responded with a mixture of “there is no intelligence in nature,” and “nature is...
The Quantified Self, the Great College Killer Who are you as an individual? As part of a family, you are measured by your domestic life and the relatives closest to you. As a prospective employee, you are evaluated by your skills, talents, and knowledge. As part of a...
“2014 will be the year the ’quantified self’ goes mainstream.” Those were the words Silicon Valley prodigy Marc Andreessen used in a recent article to describe changes about to happen to American healthcare. The ‘quantified self,’ also known as lifelogging, is a trend...
Top 13 ‘Futurist Speaker’ Columns in 2013 2013 has been a year of considerable change for both me and the rest of our team at the DaVinci Institute. While most of what you see here on Futurist Speaker is about my research, thinking, and philosophy on the...
When Thomas Edison died he left a gaping hole. He was credited with inventing everything from the electric light bulb, to the phonograph, to the movie projector, to the stock ticker, to the motion picture camera, to the entire movie industry. He lived during an age of...
33 Dramatic Predictions for 2030 Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history. By 2030 the average person in the U.S. will have 4.5 packages a week delivered with flying drones. They will travel 40% of the time in a driverless car, use a...
Technology’s Threat to the Future of Sports – Part 1 Recently I returned from a trip to Seoul, Korea where I was asked to speak at the Global Sports Marketing Forum on the “future of sports.” This event was part of a series being planned to draw attention to the 2018...
When Wasting Time becomes a Crime Every time I delete spam from my inbox, I feel a tiny piece of my life flitter away. Sitting needlessly at stoplights, or watching the minutes tick away as I wait in some line, or being forced to fill out yet another form, our...
Where do great ideas come from? More importantly, where do they go? Recently my wife Deb came up with a rather comical phrase to describe her occasional memory lapse, referring to it as her “photogeriactric memory.” A quick Facebook post later and she had released...
Optimizing Evil Would the world be a better place if Adolph Hitler never existed? While many people will argue over who exactly was the worst of the worst, with names like Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, Nero, Osama bin Laden, Attila...
Have we reached peak employment? 24 future industries that will lead to an era of super employment! It’s easy to spot signs of desperation in people’s eyes. With unemployment rates at persistently high levels and young people unable to find jobs from one year to the...
Competing for the World’s Largest Infrastructure Project: Over 100 Million Jobs at Stake Elon Musk and Daryl Oster, competing for what could become the world’s largest infrastructure project When Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk, mysteriously leaked that he was...
Introducing Synaptical Currency Theory – Assigning Value to Brain Capital What has been the hardest problem you’ve had to solve in your life? As I step you through this question, just focus on the ones where you actually found a solution. For some of you, this...
Yesterday my wife Deb and I took a tour of the amazing Queensland Library in Brisbane, Australia and were thoroughly impressed with both the size and scope of their facility. With an aggressive plan to archive the history of Queensland, the library has preserved...
The Future Favors the Bold – 8 Backcasting Scenarios for Understanding the Future Did you hear about the spy who was caught stealing huge amounts of data by hiding it in the DNA of his skin? Officials couldn’t find any trace of the information on him so they...
Trimming the Fat – Introducing the Lean Micro-College Model for Education Last year the DaVinci Institute launched a computer programmer training school, DaVinci Coders, and one of the key people we tapped to be one of our world-class instructors was Jason...
Life as a Teenager in 1994, 2014, and 2034 – What a difference a generation makes! – Part 2 Our teenage years have always been a time of great awkwardness, super hormones, and bad decision-making. But lately these years have moved even further down the path of...
How Long before a Driverless Car Wins the Indianapolis 500? In 1997, IBM staged a history-making competition between World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov and their own chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. Fourteen years later in 2011, IBM staged a similar competition...
Tapping into the Waterways in the Sky With all of the water we have in the world, only 2% of it is fresh water. To make matters worse, only one-forth of all fresh water is accessible to humans. Until now, the entire human race has survived on 0.5% of the available...
Life as a Teenager in 1994, 2014, and 2034 – What a difference a generation makes! – Part One How quickly we forget. Events of 20 years ago seem like a distant memory, but 1994 was the year when Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, O.J. Simpson...
Agriculture the New Game of Drones A few days ago the people in Deer Trail, Colorado made national news with a proposed ballot initiative to allow hunting licenses to shoot down flying drones. Deer Trail would charge $25 for drone hunting licenses, and the town would...
Consider the following scenario. In 2035 a heinous criminal escapes in the city of Dallas, Texas and the local police department acquires a court order to conduct a thorough search of the metro area. Within 15 minutes a fleet of twelve surveillance drones is deployed...
The Great Freelancer Movement: 8 Reasons Why your Next Job will be a Project By 2025, over 75% of the workforce will be comprised of Millennials, a group many refer to as the Facebook generation. That’s just over 11 years away. For big corporations this should come as...
Inspiring a Better World Ahead, the Museum of Future Inventions What images come to mind when you think about the future? Do you think about near-term futures with 3D printers, driverless cars, and robotics, or do you think about more distant futures of space travel,...
Preparing Our Minds for Thoughts Unthinkable: The Future of Colleges and Universities If you haven’t noticed, there’s a massive battle brewing in academia. No it’s not just a battle between MOOCs and traditional education. What’s at stake is nothing short of the...
Every Disaster Has a Beginning: In Search of Anomaly Zero In 2012, when 15-year old Jack Andraka’s uncle died of pancreatic cancer, he decided to look into it. He found that the current test for pancreatic cancer was over 60 years old, cost over $800, and wasn’t very...
Introducing the Fully-Automated 24-Hour City Fifteen years ago I found myself stranded in the small town of Faith, South Dakota. It was 3:00 am in the morning and my car was out of gas. To give you a better idea of my predicament, this tiny town of 400 people was...
By 2030 over 50 Percent of Colleges will Collapse In 1791 when Mozart died, his 29-year-old wife, Constanze Weber, was forced to earn a living, so she began selling her late husband’s manuscripts and turned the former messy paper scraps lying around the house into a...
In Search of Humanity’s Prime Directive A thousand years from now, what is it that the human race will need to have accomplished? Yes, I realize that this is a huge question and many of you reading this are living paycheck-to-paycheck worrying about who’s going to win...
Proposal to Eliminate Forest Fires Completely Over the past few days I’ve been listening to news reports about the devastating fires burning in Colorado. Record heat, high winds, low humidity, and large amounts of beetle-killed trees have created “perfect storm”...
Who Controls the Education Industry? Let’s first start off with a different question. “Who controls the bread supply in London?” This was the opening question that Jonas Eliasson started with in his TED talk titled “How to solve traffic jams.” As it turns...
Portrait of a New Radical: Hyper-Transparency and the Coming Radicalization of America Over the past few days I’ve been wrestling with a very troubling thought. It started with the simple question, “Ten years from now, anyone who is frustrated with those in power,...
The End of Theft What does it mean to “own” something? I’m sure there are legal definitions, but most of us believe that once we purchase an item, we own it. Our relationship with that object shifts from ogler to owner in the blink of a cash register transaction....
Hi, I’m a robot, and I’m here to take your job In September 1989, GE Chairman Jack Welch flew to Bangalore, India for a breakfast meeting with an Indian delegation that included Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. The purpose of his trip was to sell airplane engines and...
The first time I rode on a Segway, I was confused. Even though I loved the experience, I couldn’t quite figure out how it would fit into my life. It wasn’t going to replace my car and it certainly wasn’t a substitute for my bicycle, so what exactly was it? When it...
The Urgency of Purpose and the Forward Movement of Failure As a futurist I spend much of my time tracking failure. Why failure? Because they are the unforgiving anchors around which society changes directions. In the U.S. we are now witnessing a record number of...
How Google Glass will Disrupt the Hearing Aid Industry? Hearing aids are for old people. At least that’s what I thought when I was young and invincible attending rock concerts far louder than they should have been. Even though I still have most of my hearing...
Downloadable Personalities for Your Computer Fifteen years ago in an article I wrote for The Futurist Magazine, I made the prediction that once we had talking computers, we would soon have downloadable personalities to create a more human-like experience. I went on to...
Monitoring People from Space: The Good the Bad, and the Ugly In the late 1980s, I was an engineer working as part of an IBM team to build a mobile satellite command and control center for monitoring missile launches from space. This contract was part of Regan’s “Star...
Piercing the Field of Knowability As a futurist, I’ve always been interested in our relationship with the future. But lately I’ve become obsessed with understanding more about the dividing line between the present and the future. I constantly find myself asking...
Credit Banks, Testing Centers, and Micro-Credits – Missing Elements of a Future Education System A couple years ago I was on a weekend outing in Vail, Colorado and ended up attending a kayaking tournament taking place on the Gore Creek in the heart of town....
10 Unanswerable Questions that Neither Science nor Religion can Answer A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome-shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up...
Should We Revive Extinct Species? Like many others, I’m a fan of TED Talks and a Feb 2013 talk by Stuart Brand titled “The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?” has caught much of the world off guard. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this topic, biotech is...
We have Officially Entered the Drone Era Yes, drones have been around for a long time and the military has already committed countless billions to drone R&D, but when a U.S. Senator dedicates 13 hours to filibuster the topic of drones, it signals far more than a...
The Half-Life of a College Education Last week I went through the process of analyzing how much of what I learned in college that I’m still using today. This ended up being a difficult thing to assess and quantify. While most of my undergraduate coursework was focused...
Fastest Way to Create New Jobs? Automate Them Out of Existence! Last week I was speaking at the MD&M West Expo in Anaheim, California on the “future of manufacturing.” With over 2,000 manufacturing exhibitors filling the convention center, there was no small...
Our Alarming Culture of Pill People and Future Trends in Healthcare How many pills do you take on a daily basis? According to a 2010 study by Colorado State University, about 68% of American adults take multivitamin supplements. At the same time the average American...
