The Laws of Transparency Can you feel the layers being lifted? Transparency is entering our lives in unusual ways and much like having individual veils lifted from a multi-veiled garment; we are now seeing the world around us with far greater clarity. At the same...
Charting a New Frontier for Colleges and Universities The great reset has not yet finished its resetting process, and colleges are moving quickly into the crosshairs, with government funding, grants, and student loans all harder to get. With a mindset steeped in...
Embracing Our Inner Cyborg The emerging market for smartphone peripherals is set to explode It recently occurred to me that I was pulling my iPhone out of my pocket several times an hour to check information. Over the past few months I‘ve become very self-conscious...
12 Laws of the Future For several decades now I have been contemplating our relationship with the future. Many of my colleagues think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future. On occasion you can hear me uttering phrases...
The Coming Transparency Wars A report issued Tuesday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety boasted of the fact that red-light cameras were responsible for a significant drop in highway fatalities at the intersections where they were posted. With this one...
Curiosity-Driven Education “If a teacher can be replaced by a machine, they should be.” – Arthur C. Clark In 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra embedded a computer in a wall in a slum in New Dehli, connected it to high speed internet and left it there. Kids in the...
My Weekend with the new All-Electric Nissan Leaf I looked over at my clock and saw that it was 3:19 am, a time when most people would normally just roll over and fall back to sleep, but I was wide awake. And from past experience, I wouldn’t get tired again for 2-3...
Connecting the Physical World with the Digital World through Apps We are witnessing an explosion of apps for our handheld devices. When Apple introduced their iPhone SDK (software development kit) on March 6, 2008, no one had a clue about the tectonic plate-shifting...
Eight Great Explosions in Video What will it be like to watch television in 2030? Having just returned from four days at the famous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I am spending the next couple weeks sorting through the vast array of products I came across,...
The Future of the Cruise Industry Designing cruise ships today to meet the wants, needs, and desires of future generations Having just returned from a holiday cruise on the Mexican Riviera, I became intrigued with the prospects for this behemoth industry, and the...
Global Elections Over the past month I have hosted a series of meetings to discuss the topic of global elections. The purpose of these discussions was to help expand our understanding of the topic. I also truly believe that someone will begin to produce global...
Introducing the Slashcasters Slashcasters, a new breed of pitchmen for the digital age of retail I was recently asked to do the keynote talk at a retailer conference in Orlando, Florida speaking on the topic of what the future of retail may hold. At one point in the...
Where the Books Used to Be Last weekend I spent a couple days in the very impressive city of Carmel, Indiana, just north of Indianapolis. My hosts for this trip were Wendy Phillips, Director of the Carmel Clay Public Library, and her husband Greg, a Senior Business...
The Headless Organization “The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense,while substance has an affinity for income” – Dee Hock, former CEO of Visa Disintermediation is a term that sprung to life in the mid-1990s...
Business Colonies: A study of structure, organization, and the evolution of work Business Colonies: Matching talent with pending work projects The average person that turns 30 years old in the U.S. today has worked 11 different jobs. In just 10 years, the average...
City of the Future – Part 2 Building Culture, Striving for “Divine Context” As we start to understand the way people connect with their local communities in the future, we begin to see a growing need for central gathering places to help drive...
Reinventing Humanity by Reinventing Time Humans think about the underlying systems we use for keeping time in much the same way that fish think about water. We simply don’t. The numbers on the clock are a constant reminder of our daily schedule, where we should be,...
The Future of Philanthropy Former Citigroup Chairman Walter Wriston once said, “Capital goes where it’s welcome and stays where it’s well treated.” Philanthropy has traditionally been the interface between wealth and need. It gives pride to the wealthy,...
Familiarity Contraction Principle The first time a person gets into a car and drives to some place new, the discovery process causes a heightened sense of awareness and the perception that time has slowed down. Each subsequent trip to that same destination involves...
City of the Future – Part One Great communities are founded on great ideas. At the same time, our most admired communities become a magnet, attracting the brightest minds. The relational effect is clear: Bright minds make a community great, and great communities...
Eight Fundamental Drivers Controlling Our Future As a futurist I spend much of my time searching for failure points. Why failure points? Because they are the unforgiving anchors around which society changes directions. In the U.S. we are now witnessing a record number...
Power of 10 Interface Information at the speed of need The distance between information and our brain is getting shorter. Twenty years ago if you had access to a large information base, such as the Library of Congress, and someone asked you a series of questions, your...
Interview with Ukraine’s InvestGazeta I often get interview requests from newspaper and magazines as they probe for a better understanding of the world ahead. However, the request I received two days ago was a bit unusual. On Monday, I received an email from...
Prize Competition #1: The Race to the Core Over the next year I will be proposing a series of eight major prize competitions, competitions designed to pit the countries of the world against each other in a series of extraordinary tests of skills and abilities. Only...
The Fall of Book Publishing: The Rise of New E-Book Business Models Experimenting Our Way to Success – Reinventing Publishing Models Amazon revolutionized book reading in 2007 when it introduced its Kindle book reader. Within the past three years, the explosive...
Turmoil Ahead for Housing Consider the following scenario. Over the next few years, several major cities in the U.S. will begin to impose a ban on all new residential and commercial construction. With populations declining in numerous metro areas, they will worry...
Reinventing Sales Tax As a general rule, extreme levels of complexity take a significant toll on society. The price we pay for complexity is far greater than the money involved. With upwards of 90,000 separate taxing districts in the U.S. sales tax has become an...
Privatizing Libraries Expanding our thinking about the notion of corporate-run community libraries Consider the following scenario. Two years from now in November, you find yourself walking into a voting booth to decide on the fate of your local library. The issue you...
The Alternative Transportation District Short video clip about the opportunities associated with creating an alternative transportation district. Recorded at the Plan Fort Collins event on March 3, 2010 Over the past few years I have been carefully watching what has...
Where is My Flying Car? First things first. Before we can have flying cars, we will need to go through the era of flying delivery drones Imagine yourself in 2030, 20 years in the future, sitting in your living room watching your favorite show on a 3D holographic...
The Urgency Paradox As people live longer, some aspects of life are beginning to slow down Tick, tick, tick. For virtually all working people, there is a clock ticking in the background. Tick, tick, tick. Much like the rhythm of a beating heart, the sound of time...
The Future of Libraries: Interview with Thomas Frey Libraries in the future will come in many different formsNOTE: The following is a reprint of an interview that recently appeared in American Libraries MagazineWithout consulting a crystal ball, Thomas Frey, executive...
The Coming of the Terabyters A new breed of worker, equipped with uber-geek data-capturing tools,are about to usher in a whole new information eraRecently I was preparing for a talk on the future of money, a talk I have given many times in the past, and I became...
Next Generation Literacy “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read & write,but those who can’t learn, unlearn & relearn.” – Alvin Toffler So what is literacy?The first time I listened to an audio book I...
A Country of 90,000 Governments The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. During normal economic times there is plenty of money to go around, but now every city, state, county, parish, township, and special...
Maximum Freud A few thoughts on “Maximum Freud”In 1972, I was young engineering student at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. One of the first courses I was required to take was a short-course on slide rules. For those of you who don’t know...
Addressing the Problem of Addresses When Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans the US Post Office was faced with a major dilemma. For countless centuries, the modus operandi for the post office was to deliver mail to a location, and the individuals who lived...
Systems Thinking and the Future of Education Short video clip on “Systems Thinking”recorded at the Plan Fort Collins event on March 3, 2010 A recent article in iLibrarian explained it this way.Online education seems set on its course to overtake traditional colleges...
Competing for Status 32 accomplishments that will give you the influence of a college degree “Does being smarter make you happier?” This was the question I posed to the audience at a recent DaVinci Institute event, hoping to gauge their reaction. I found it...
Ghost Towns of the Internet When today’s data goldmines becomes tomorrow’s data carcassesIn 1859 the tiny community of Tin Cup, Colorado got its first taste of gold fever. A tiny amount of gold was all it took for prospectors to start poking around with hopes of...
The Day that Google Died It was a frenzy of activity as workers scurried from office to office, making their final checks, gathering books, papers, and personal belongings. Many were still stunned over the announcement that Google was closing its doors. The final...
The Great Bank & Credit Card Backlash The smell of corruption is offending more than few nostrilsRecent attempts by Congress and the Federal Reserve Board to curb the excessive fees being charged by credit cards, banks, and finance companies have resulted in a...
10.) Trends to Watch in 2010 – The Coming Explosion of Single Use Devices In the end, its less about the device and much more about the interfaceOver the past couple decades the World Wide Web has been growing by leaps and bounds with huge amounts of new data...
9.) Trends to Watch in 2010 – TV-Internet Convergence Virtually everywhere you look there are video screens. You see them in bars and restaurants, on elevators, in the back of taxis, and on airplanes. Even most cell phones have now have video screens. Some are...
8 Trends to Watch in 2010 – Alternatives to Incarceration In a country that claims to be the land of the free, the number of people under the control of the U.S. corrections system has exploded over the last 25 years to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31...
7 Trends to Watch in 2010 – Colleges Face the Perfect Storm After looking at all the signals, there is no other way to describe it. Colleges are under attack. Several legs of the financial stools upon which they are sitting have been kicked out from under them,...
6 Trends to Watch in 2010 – The Turing Test for Avatars The recently released James Cameron thriller Avatar has set an entirely new standard for moviemaking, and in the process has given us a visualization of what the evolution of the avatar may lead to. The...
5 Trends to Watch in 2010 – Bookless Libraries . Many people regarded the September 2009 headline, “Cushing Academy Goes Bookless” as more of a curiosity than a serious trend. The way Cushing Headmaster James Tracy put it, “Instead of a traditional library...
4.) Trends to Watch in 2010 – The Personal Mobility Explosion The Audi Snook – concept vehiclePay close attention, there is a revolution brewing on the personal mobility end of the transportation spectrum.Nothing symbolizes personal freedom more than our ability...
3.) Trends to Watch in 2010 – Forced Entrepreneurship One of the overriding forces in 2010 will be the financial pressures stemming from the recession. The recession will not be ending anytime soon because Washington is too focused on the wrong issues, and the...
2.) Trends to Watch in 2010 – The Coming Legal Marijuana Era With the hippie generation moving into the seat of power, many of the hard-line arguments for keeping marijuana on the same banned substance lists as heroine and cocaine are fading into the history books....
1.) Trends to Watch in 2010 – The End of Golf Golf has hit a brick wall, a veritable trifecta of bad luck. Rest assured, golf won’t be going away anytime soon, but the current industry slump is only the beginning of a much larger trend.When you combine the fact...
iTunes U – The Rise of the 800 Pound Guerrilla In April 2009 Stanford University announced that its iPhone Application Programming course had broken the 1 million download mark from the Apple iTunes site. And it did it in record time – less than seven...
The Future of Colleges & Universities – Part Four NOTE: The following is the fourth in a four part series title: The Future of Colleges & Universities: Blueprint for a Revolution Most of us have great difficulty translating ideas of what the future holds...
The Future of Colleges & Universities – Part Three NOTE: The following is the third in a four part series title: The Future of Colleges & Universities: Blueprint for a Revolution Even though learning technologies will ascend to the realm of the virtual...
The Future of Colleges & Universities – Part Two The College Experience NOTE: The following is the second in a four part series title: The Future of Colleges & Universities: Blueprint for a Revolution Colleges and Universities carry with them considerable...
The Future of Colleges & Universities – Part One The Future of Colleges & Universities: Blueprint for a Revolution NOTE: The following is the first in a four part series title: The Future of Colleges & Universities: Blueprint for a Revolution A...
The Coolest Profession on Earth – Next Generation Agriculture Future agribusiness professionals will be some of the most highly skilled people on earth, and the envy of the executive classWhen people think of farming, they typically conjure up images of a...
The Hornet Nest Theory An atypical test for spotting financial system failureIn nature, the Asian Giant Hornet is a predator that feeds off bees with the goal of obtaining the honey bee larvae. One of these hornets can kill as many as 40 honey bees per minute. It...
When Smart Grid Meets Smart Home Way back when guys were sporting white leisure suits and “mod” hair styles, I enrolled in my first programming class. In 1973, programmers were introduced to the far less glamorous world of FORTRAN working with machines that churned...
Future Trends Report :: 8 Key Trends Affecting Our Future If you are feeling left behind by all of the changes happening around us, you’re not alone. In this week’s Future Trend Report we are finding that there are currently nearly 90,000 local...
The Museum of the Future Just mention the word museum and a myriad of images come to mind. Folks line up for blocks for a King Tut exhibit. Visitors swarm extravagant nanotechnology and human anatomy displays. Static displays have been the bread and butter for years....
Top 8 Future Trend Report According to Wikipedia, “futurology is the philosophy, science, art and practice of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. Futurist studies seek to understand what is...
Empty Playgrounds: Global Populations in Decline Many countries are asking, “Where have all the children gone?” In the next sixty seconds 245 babies will be born worldwide. India and China alone will add 36 and 29 respectively. When numbers such as these...
The Future of Influence The changing nature of super influencers and their evolving impact on the world around youClergymen, columnists and teachers have it. Even butchers at grocery stores have it. What they do is hold your attention better than most and engender...
The Coming Wave of Entrepreneurship “The economy’s greatest hope may be in its aspiring entrepreneurs” Traditionally it could be predicted that for every 100 people who join the ranks of the jobless, seven will attempt to start a business. Some find...
Declaring War on Human Death No person should ever die… EVER! Is that our goal? Is that the direction we are headed in? Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil is convinced an end to disease and possibly death by trauma may be here in a matter of decades. He’s taking...
The Future of the Avatar Next generation gaming is not for the faint of heart Life is a game. Every day we find ourselves in the middle of the game, involving the work we do, the people we hang out with, and the social structures that surround us.But who exactly...
Capturing Real Human Intelligence Next Generation Thinking Machines Artificial intelligence in the past has been a top-down exercise of simulating the actions and behaviors of people. Given the wide range of decision-making processes that the average person uses in...
When Our Data Leaves Us Naked Will the convergence of search technology and RFID chips improve our lives or forever put us in a fishbowl for all to see?Findability Vs SpyabilityHas this ever happened to you?Over the years, my eyes have grown progressively myopic. I...
The Global Infrastructure Bank Thinking beyond the limits of our current systems Creativity is coming from unusual places these days. I snipped this from David Levinson’s blog post dated Feb 13, 2008, one of the earliest mentions of this topic (http://bit.ly/ma1Ur): …...
Altering Our Dependencies… one snip at a time My granddaughter, Dez, and I rarely see eye to eye. But we have a relationship where we are heavily dependant upon each other I’m a bit like film director Robert Zemeckis who co-wrote the screenplay Back to the...
Dr. Seuss, the Grandfather of Nanotechnology Long before the physics of nanotechnology, a dreamer’s dream sparked the world’s imagination Known to most by his pen name, Dr. Seuss, Theodore Geisel lived a life in a magical world populated by unusual...
Seven Predictions for the Coming Age of Micronations NOTE: The following article is a reprint of the cover article I wrote for the May/June 2009 issue of The Futurist Magazine. On a recent trip to the Middle East, I was granted the opportunity to speak at the Leaders...
Future Libraries: Once a Refuge, Now They Mean Business Establishing new relevancy standards amid a sea change of technology options and budget constraintsTraditionally a quiet place for lovers of books to unwind, libraries are a place for serious students to escape...
Creating the Ultimate Small Storage Particle Creating the Ultimate Small Storage Particle When will we reach an endpoint? The answer (after the jump) will surprise you “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so...
Watching the Income Tax System Implode When it comes to our tax systems, we are living in caveman timesIn the movie The Day After Tomorrow, survivors stranded in a library are easily persuaded to burn the multi-volume IRS Tax Code to stay warm. In this fictional...
The Last Bastion of Scarcity When laws of supply and demand are replaced with scarcity and abundanceScience fiction has long dreamed of a post-scarcity society, and it’s become quite common to hear discussions about transitioning from a world of scarcity to a...
The Future of Agriculture Can better food create better people? Will a better food supply lead to healthier, stronger, better thinking people? This is exactly the premise that is driving many of the advances in farming today. To understand agribusiness in the future,...
When Systems Collapse Rethinking our current systems andhow to make them functional once againThe panic that we hear coming from Wall Street and the halls of Washington, DC is not the typical panic associated with a recession. Instead, it is the seldom heard sounds of...
Future Libraries: Nerve Center of the Community Ever since the people of ancient Nineveh began storing and classifying their books nearly 3,000 years ago, libraries have been hallowed and largely unchanging bastions of learning. But in the information age, libraries...
Carnage for Dubai’s Creative Class When policies and systems devastate innovationCars are being abandoned in record numbers at Dubai International Airport. The dust-covered Mercedes and BMW’s at the Dubai International Airport is a tell-tale reminder of...
The Virtual Country The Virtual Country Six Possible Scenarios for the Creation of Viable Virtual Countries The Internet, while still in its infancy, has created borderless economies, that are confusing the issues of power and control, and even the sovereignty of...
Ten-X Stimulus Projects Separating the wheat from the chaff as we invest in our futureAs we begin the process of thinking through the places where we can insert the electrodes and shock new life into the global economy, I would propose a new way of reviewing...
The Library of the Future Series: Part 3 – The Electronic Outpost As a public entity, libraries have been evolving. No longer are they the book-centric institutions of the mid 1900s. But the changes we’ve seen to date are only a tiny fraction of the changes we...
Fourteen Future Trends for Business in 2009 and Beyond Global shifts will cause a new social order to emergeAs I started pulling my notes together for 2009 trends, I instantly became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of changes currently in the works. The number of...
Owning Your Own Country The world is in for some radical changes ahead. Hold on tight, we are in for a wild ride.Building islands, selling them as autonomous countriesOn a recent trip to Dubai, I spoke at the prestigious “Leaders in Dubai” forum along with...
Libraries of the Future Where great ideas happen, and people have the tools to act on themTen years ago, many in the tech elite were predicting the demise of the public library. Little did they understand that libraries are living, breathing organisms. Much like...
A definition states what a word or concept means, while a description identifies properties or qualities of things. Both of these answer the question, “What?” However, to fully grasp a difficult concept, we need an explanation. An explanation answers the...
Nanotech and the Precautionary Principal The Precautionary Principal and the shifting onus of responsibilityThe future will be neither as good as some would lead us to believe, or as bad as other would have us think. But it is the onus of responsibility that becomes...
Thinking in Eights “Beyond the known, lies the future”Very often the work that I do is in groupings of eight, and you are probably wondering what the significance is of the number eight. Have I always been tormented with an “eight” fetish? Is...
Understanding the new realities of economic developmentThe USPTO is hiring. In fact they are doing a lot of hiring, over 1,200 new examiners every year, and they still can’t keep up with the deluge of new patent filings.But while the number of patent filings has grown...
The Opposite of War is Not Peace The weirdness of future of wars will make us wishwe were dealing with knives and swords againIn 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order forbidding the assassination of any foreign head of state. This order was issued when...
The Future of Retail The coming demise of the retail storefront Last week my wife Deb and I were relaxing at a new shopping center in the Denver area. Along the sidewalks a series of speakers cast a rather pleasant musical backdrop to the shopping experience. At one...
A Study of Women Inventors Although Growing in Numbers, Today’s Female Inventors Still Only Account for Around 10% of the US Inventor Population What name springs to mind when you say the phrase “famous female inventor?” If you’re having a...
Ten Rules for Bootstrapping Your Business When the going gets tough, the tough go bootstrappingWalk a Mile in These Bootstrapped Shoes.In much the same way nature operates, the world of business operates in fluid balance with money serving as its breathable oxygen. As...
Living Forever Cryonics and our ongoing effort to build the ultimate life-extension toolboxNo person should ever die…. EVER!Is that the direction we’re headed?There are many reasons why people die, yet these reasons may all disappear as we develop fixes...
The Search Command Center The Library of the Future Series:Part 2 – The Search Command CenterAs a child, it was embarrassing to ask for help. I didn’t want people to think I was the “dumb student”, and I especially didn’t want to be the one asking dumb questions...
