Futurist Blog

The insurance industry exists as a tool for mitigating the costs and damage associated with a single incident occurring for an individual or organization. But this is nothing new. The Babylonians developed an early form of insurance that was...

Scarcity is defined as an economic condition that arises when people have far greater wants than the available resources. Most often we think about the limited supplies of natural resources, but it includes far more than that. As an example, in...

For colleges and universities, the great age of experimentation is now upon us. Last week, Harvard and MIT announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities. The Minerva Project recently announced it will become...

As a Futurist, people often ask me how many of my predictions have come true. I find this to be a rather uncomfortable question. It’s uncomfortable, not because my track record hasn’t been up to par (actually, a high percentage have come true),...

Over the past couple months I’ve become enamored with watching my two-year-old nephew Mikaia learn the letters of the alphabet, colors, and numbers. Even though he doesn’t have them all perfect, he’s scoring in the high 90% when we quiz him...

Working with many early stage inventors, I often have the privilege of seeing some truly remarkable inventions and innovations. A few days ago I was shown a technology that snugly fits into that remarkable category, one that has the potential to radically transform...

All the way back in March of 2004, working in his laboratory at the University of Southern California in San Diego, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, was working with a new process he had invented called Contour Crafting to construct the world’s first 3D printed wall. His goal...

The super-connected nature of the Internet is giving us a far different "opportunity landscape" than ever before in history. Unlike the painstakingly slow 400-year period between DaVinci’s drawings of flying machines and the Wright Brother’s first flight, development...

In the late 1980s, I spent some time as a mainframe programmer at IBM. Conversations around the water cooler often had to do with some of the cryptic code written 2-3 decades earlier, buried deep within the system, that was incomprehensible to what anyone was writing...