For me, every day is a remarkable new adventure waiting to reveal itself. Whenever possible, I try to let my curiosity kick in. Will people in the future be doing the same things I’m doing today? If so, what things will change and what will remain the same?

If I ask the same question seven days in a row, I’ll invariably be taken down seven different paths.

For me, making the transition from sleeping to mindful-awareness is a blurry one. Dreams often feel more real than my reality, and the foggy moments where I drift in and out of conscious awareness, are often the most productive times of the day. 

I’ve grown to detest alarm clocks because they have a way of depriving me of those dangling gems filled with ideas, patiently waiting for me to harvest their treasures. In much the same way urgent deadlines, stressful projects, and demanding timeframes tend to disrupt my state of flow, any artificial form of disruption like alarm clocks is a sure fired IQ-dropper!

Even before I get out of bed, my curious nature starts to take hold and questions will begin to form. “Will people in the future still sleep on beds?” 

As soon as one question takes shape, a new one is already rising from the murky ashes. So what kind of technology will replace beds?

• How will we define our perfect sleep experience in the future?
• Will we float in the air?
• Will future people still need to sleep?
• Will someone invent instant sleep?

After pausing to consider the sleep issue, a few more questions begin to crystalize:

• Will we someday have our own hyper-individualized music playing in our heads, the right music, at the right time, at the right volume, every minute of every day, to enhance our state of mind?
• But if we start surrounding ourselves with this kind of perfection, won’t we start expecting life to be perfect, how will we deal with disasters and identify opportunities?
• If we strive for a life without stress, how will we cope with stress when it eventually happens, and yes, it will always happen?
• Squirrel! Did I just hear a ding coming from my squirrel inbox?

Every once in a while I get stuck in a contemplative mode and stall-out with a moment of introspection:

• Why am I, me, and why am I here at this moment in time?
• Do I have a greater purpose than to ask if I have a greater purpose?
• Why does God need humans?
• A description is not an explanation, so why do we keep missing the “why?”

Some questions were never meant to be answered. As I mentally peer into the abyss, more questions start to percolate.  I’m sensing a pensive inquisition coming so I head to the shower:

• Is there a faster way to get ready in the morning?
• How much time would I save if I invented the “instant shower of the future?” There simply has to be a more automated shower coming in the future? Maybe a “human carwash” device that soaps, lathers, scrubs, shakes, and dries all in under 60 seconds.
• Will it be possible to have swarmbots clean me in the future?
• >How many swarmbots are in the ideal swarm?

It helps to build frames around our understanding of the future!

Finding Focus

Wow, suddenly the whole swarmbot thing got stuck in my head. I start imagining a swarm of 10,000 tiny flying bots that digs under my covers and root me out of bed, and flying me into the shower:

• Since swarmbots will be able to dial-in the perfect spray and water temperature, how long before I can finish my “future shower” in less than a minute? What if I just want to be entertained with my steamy moments in the shower?
• Standing in front of my mirror, the swarm will dry me off, fix my hair, shave me, and then assemble themselves as my clothing.
• They’ll scan my mood sensors and instantly know what color and fashion matches my mood each day.
• How much will a swarm like this cost, and how will I go about programming it to mesh with my thinking

Now is not the time for answers, I’m in the midst of a rapid-fire question-binge. Swarmbots are both creepy and fascinating at the same time, and I needed to stay on this line of questioning:

• Are we going to have swarm dealerships in the future?
• How will we rate the quality, functionality, and usefulness of a swarm?
• Will we have the ability to talk back and forth to our swarms, or will it be a mind control thing?
• Will each swarm have a “queenbot” that’s in charge of the others?

I think a queenbot just flew into my brain as each new question was expressing itself in a buzzy form of swarm-play. I was imagining a queenbot dressed in royal clothing issuing buzzy commands to the other swarming bots.

• How many moving parts will an individual swarmbot have?
• Will the swarmbots of 2080 be dramatically better than the swarmbots of 2050? How will they change over time?
• Suddenly I began to imagine what it’d be like going to a swarm dealership in 2050 and having a slick-talking salesman pulling up 3D projections of tiny bots and explaining the value of the 25,000 year batteries, shell-morphing surface technology to stop bullets and lasers, and health-fixing processes designed to fly internally on the host and extract bad cells and viruses before they take root.
• How long before my swarm will be able to fly me to where I want to go, like superman, whisking me away in a spectacular fashion?

Early stage micro drones will seem awkwardly huge compared to later designs!

Digging Deeper

Closing my eyes, I tried to dig deeper. I felt an overwhelming need to ‘become one with the swarm. I started to think through some of the technical specs, who would develop the operating system, and the overarching business model. Would I own them, rent them, or just summon them when I needed them?

• How do I communicate with my swarm? Do I talk to it, gesture, point, wave, whisper, snap my fingers, or do they just know what I’m thinking? Mind controlled swarms would be sooo cool!
• Can I use my swarm to help someone who is injured along the road?
• Does my swarm have surge capability meaning that the number of bots in the swarm would multiply if needed?
• Would my swarm have the ability to “borrow” from nearby swarms in an emergency?

It occurred to me that these swarms would become some sort of super-extension of our body, our desires, and our personality. The same swarm used to help someone who was injured could also be used to bully, intimidate, steal, or hurt someone else.

• Will swarms be preprogrammed to shield our privacy, our patterns, our frailties, and our most intimate moments?
• If I see a friend getting bullied by someone else’s swarm, can I use my swarm to intervene?
• Will we have teenagers forming gangs with their swarms, using them to protect their turf and swarmbot takedowns?
• Can a silent “midnight swarm” be used to hurt, harm, or steal from someone else?

Most swarm research will likely be funded by the military. Since swarmbots do pose an obvious risk to national security, research dollars in this area will likely explode over the next decade.

• How long before we see our first soldier swarms?
• Will we also see sniper swarms, assassin swarms, decoy swarms, and bomb-dropping swarms?
• Will defensive swarms have the ability to EMP-blast other swarms out of the air?
• How long before we see countries signing ‘swarm disarmament treaties?’

Suddenly I had a vision that the robots we had imagined for our future will instead be swarms. Our thinking about delivery bots will likely be replaced by delivery swarms.

• Will swarms replace smartphones?
• Will swarms be able to talk to each other? Can one swarm “jam” the operation of another swarm?
• How fast can swarms fly? I’m thinking they may be here one moment and gone the next.
• How young can a child be before he or she owns, uses, and is protected by their own personal swarm?

How long before special ops soldiers can deploy their own swarms?

Final Thoughts

I often get asked how I think about the future, and what kinds of tools I use to bridge the gap between today and tomorrow. What I’ve described is one of many.

This “stream of consciousness approach” works fine for me but may not lend itself well to those who struggle with letting their imaginations loose.

For this reason I’ve developed an interactive strategy discussion process specifically designed to work with executive teams, board of directors, governmental groups, and a variety of other teams to help them work through everything from next-gen planning sessions to strategy discussions that may decide the fate of their industry.

If this is of interest to you, please click here, fill out the form and let’s schedule a time to talk. I’d love to hear more about what you’re working on.

How do you handle questions that you can’t answer?

If, in the future, you found yourself on a jury, and you were tasked with determining the fate of a heinous criminal (think Ted Bundy), and you had the option to either sentence him to lethal injection or total amnesia, which would you decide?

With total amnesia the brain is totally wiped clean and the person would have to learn how to walk, talk, and feed himself or herself all over again.

The reason this is such a challenging question is because it gets at the heart of what we value in human life. Do we place more value on the life itself or the personality that exemplifies it?

Personally, I find questions like this to be hugely valuable because they force us to rethink the way we make decisions and what our choices today will mean for the future.

So ask yourself, “how do you handle a question that you can’t answer?”

We all approach tough questions differently, with some of us searching Google, others turning to a smarter friend, others turning to algorithmic tools, and still others using some sort of formula to list everything we know in hopes of discovering unique insights about ourselves.

But in many situations, we simply run into questions where no answer exists. These are what we call unanswerable questions, and there are tons of them.

We’ve all heard questions like, “What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force?” or “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Yet, today’s technology is leading us into unchartered territory and the number of unanswerable questions is exploding around us.

Over the past century, we have made some astonishing leaps forward in science and technology. While this has given us the answers to questions our ancestors would never have believed we’d figure out, we still have many overarching questions that need to be worked on.

For this reason, I’ve spent the past few days jotting down some of the truly perplexing questions, most of which we may never be able to answer.

From the Beginning of Time

1. Why does anything exist? In the beginning there was nothing. How did something come from nothing?
2. How was the universe formed?
3. Why was it created, and why like this?
4. What existed before the universe?
5. Was there ever a time when nothing existed or has something always been in existence?
6. Are we alone in the universe?

The Concept of Time

7. At what point did time begin?
8. Did time exist before the universe was created, or did that come later?
9. Does time only flow forward or are there exceptions?
10. Will we ever be able to travel through time?

The technologies we create today will shape the world as never before!

Rethinking Physics

11. A thousand years from now, which things will be possible and which ones will not?
12. How big is the universe and is ours the only one?
13. What effect will too much screen time have on us as a society 50 years in the future?
14. Where does matter come from?
15. What exactly is gravity?
16. Why should we expect a universe full of chaos and randomness to be fair?
17. Is karma real or just a human construct?

Understanding the Earth

18. Is the Earth alive, as in a living, breathing organism?
19. If we could make a map of the inside of the earth, what would it look like?
20. Will it ever be possible to travel to the center of the earth?
21. What effect does the molten center of the earth have on the surface temperature?

The Singularity

22. What is the singularity and how will it affect me as an individual?
23. Will the singularity happen in my lifetime?
24. Will things be better or worse after the singularity?

Future Thinking

25. Where does the future come from?
26. Where does the “future” go after we experience it?
27. Can human nature be changed, and should it?
28. Are people more skeptical of people who claim to have answers or more skeptical of other skeptics?
29. Will we ever discover humanoid life on other planets?
30. What do you most want your future self to remember about you 20 years from now?
31. What will be the biggest human advancement on planet earth during your lifetime?

In many ways, our trepidation about technology can be healthy!

The Fine Art of Introspection

32. Where does an idea go when it’s forgotten?
33. Is there such a thing as inherently bad knowledge, or is all knowledge value neutral?
34. How much control do you really have over the course that your life has taken?
35. Why are you here, doing what you’re doing, at this very moment in your life?
36. Did you arrive at this point in your life because you subconsciously “willed it” or because you were destined to be here?
37. Does anonymity encourage people to misbehave?
38. Is it more or less difficult to be successful today?

Self-Examination

39. How will the world change if we develop an accurate way of measuring talent?
40. Is happiness a meaningful goal?
41. Is it possible to know what is truly good and what is evil?
42. Will the world be better off without “bad people?”
43. How would you know if time had been altered in some way?
44. Are there limits to human creativity?
45. Will we ever have a definable form of measurement for the concept of “truth?”
46. Is it possible for us as humans to comprehend the true depths of our reality and existence

Sensory Thinking

47. How many things can be “sensed” outside the realm of human understanding?
48. Will it ever be possible to “replay events” that happened in the past?
49. Do today’s technologies make global conspiracies more or less feasible?
50. Will the advancement of today’s technologies yield a net positive or a net negative result?
51. Will it ever be possible to communicate with people in the past or in the future?
52. Do people have a moral obligation to improve themselves?
53. If someone altered your memory, how would you know?

Government

54. Will the world be better off with relatively more countries or relatively fewer?
55. Will we still have today’s style of nation-state countries 1,000 years from now?
56. What forms of government will be better than democracy?
57. Should we gamify citizenship?
58. If people were given the option of starting a new country, what features, options or capabilities would make it more valuable than counties today?
59. Is poverty an inevitable part of every social structure?
60. If data scientists had the ability to accurately predict who was more likely to commit crimes in the future, how should society respond to that information?
61. Will it be possible for countries to operate without prisons in the future? Perhaps a better way to phrase this, what comes after prisons?

The most challenging aspects of technological advances are often things that we don’t expect!

Reinventing Society

62. Which major corporations will no longer exist 20 years from now?
63. Will we ever be able to download our brains onto a computer storage device?
64. Is there a limit to how smart one person can be?
65. If you could invent one thing that would have the most significant impact on the world, what would it be?
66. Should we terraform other planets if it means that we might be destroying undiscovered microscopic alien life?
67. At what point is a genetically enhanced human no longer human?
68. How long before human cloning becomes a viable option? What problems will it solve?
69. If the human race was put on trial by an advanced group of extraterrestrials, how would you defend humanity and argue for its continued existence?

Personal Health

70. Will we ever have an acceptable definition for perfect health?
71. Are people today more healthy or less healthy than 20 years ago?
72. What will the average life expectancy be 20 years from now?
73. How long before the average life expectancy on planet earth is over 100 years?
74. Will it ever be possible for someone to live forever?
75. What exactly makes us human?
76. Will we ever find a universal cure for cancer?
77. What exactly is consciousness? Are animals also conscious?

Cryptocurrencies

78. Will cryptocurrencies become a common form of currency in the future?
79. How long will it be before cryptocurrencies replace 50% of national currencies?
80. What comes after cryptocurrencies?
81. If and when will universal basic income become a reality?

Flying Drone Tech

82. Does the right to “bear arms” give me the right to own a drone that is armed?
83. How long will it take for Chicago to average 50,000 drones flying overhead on a daily basis?
84. How long before I can summon a drone to pick me up in front of my house and have it fly me to a destination three hours away?
85. What percentage of passenger drones will have fly-drive capabilities in 2040?

Driverless Transportation

86. At what age is it okay to put a child into a driverless car by itself?
87. What will the fastest form of transportation be in 2050?
88. Will people still own their own cars in the future?
89. How long will it be before 50% of the cars on the road are driverless?
90. Will all vehicles eventually become driverless?
91. In what year will we reach “peak” transportation?
92. Do we have a right to privacy in a shared driverless vehicle?

Artificial Intelligence

93. Will it ever be possible to know everything?
94. Will we ever have an ability to measure artificial intelligence the way we measure horsepower?
95. Do we run the risk of becoming too dependent upon artificial intelligence?
96. Since there is no such thing as a true game of chance, how long will it be before AI destroys our existing gambling industry?
97. Can a society exist without laws?
98. Should we develop ways to control emotions through technology?
99. How long before AI causes a collapse of today’s stock exchanges?

Unanswerable questions are the breeding ground for unintended consequences!

Final Thoughts

After thinking through these questions, perhaps the most interesting one of all is simply, “What does this all mean?”

The short answer is that all unanswerable questions are the breeding ground for unintended consequences.

While it is unlikely that we’ll ever face a robot insurrection, artificial intelligence does pose a number of troubling questions. Who’s responsible for the decisions an AI-managed system makes? How many AI-managed systems are too many?

All of these unanswerable questions need to be wrestled with, rethought, and reworked as every emerging technology forces us to reconsider the dangers that lie ahead.