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.

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 it was a matter of failing forward. Each of these products influenced the next generation of technology and paved the way for far better efforts that followed.

Few people remember that the Panama Canal started out as a world-cringing disaster, with the French Company spending over $287 million and causing more than 20,000 deaths, before throwing in the towel and filing for bankruptcy. Again, this set the stage for a far more successful effort led by the U.S. that followed.

But what happens when we no longer fail forward? Or what if there are too many failures all at once?

We are more dependent on technology today, than ever before in history. And it’s rather obvious, as this trend continues, that we will use more technology in the future than we do today.

As our reliance on technology increases, we are finding a parallel increase in the number of possible breaking points associated with it. So more things can go wrong.

Technology today is light-years ahead of any policy or laws designed to govern it. This means that we can’t rely on government to protect us.

Along with potential catastrophes, we are extending far beyond the safety nets of any well-governed society. This makes some form of impending disaster a near certainty.

Even though our ability to auto-manage and auto-govern our actions will improve, the error potential will grow even faster.

So what will a techno-disaster look like, and will it rise to the level of a “techno-apocalypse?” Perhaps!

Are we destined to face a techno-apocalypse?

Modern society is fixated on the concept of progress, where all tech advancements are first viewed through a positive lens even though the balance scale of plusses and minuses may tilt more in a harmful direction. This kind of tech-blindness may be helpful at times, but will likely mask the downside lurking behind the glad-handers and well-wishers.

Our ability to sense and monitor change should reduce the risk of things like global pandemics, ecological collapses, nuclear wars, major asteroid impacts, and climate change. But, in my mind, the greatest risk we face will be deviant human behavior. Only this time it will be turbo-charged with technology.

These deranged individuals will transition from criminals to super criminals over night! Naturally this opens the door for things like:

• A large data-destroying viruses unleashed on today’s businesses.
• The odds of being threatened and blackmailed online will rise to nearly 100%.
• Major governmental systems will be disabled or destroyed.

And we still run the risk of disasters beyond our control such as:

• A large solar flare, with its associated EMP blast, that could bomb us back into the stone ages.

Even with countless system to protect against it, the biggest problem will be loss of control over our own money and wealth. As safety and peace of mind erode, we run the risk of deteriorating into a survivalist society where all semblance of trust is broken and we only care about ourselves and our families.

Five Scenarios

For me, it’s far easier to understand something when it’s framed out in short scenarios. Scenarios, in this context, are brief cause-and-effect stories about one possible version of the future.

To set the stage, these five scenarios focus on devious people causing failures at key inflection points. One failure will often cause a cascade effect that grows far beyond the initial problem.

1. Extreme Privacy Failure

While radical transparency advocates live happily in a false meme world, thinking that if we all know everything about everyone that we will create a much safer society. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

When we know everything about our neighbor, it means we also know their credit card numbers, bank account number, and passwords. When this happens, we quickly lose our ability to “own things,” and ownership is a foundational right that the modern world is based on.

So when Cambridge Analytica used their psychometric scientists to rummage through people’s personal computers via their accounts on Facebook, they not only uncovered incriminating data, but also stealable assets and re-assignable forms of personal wealth.

For those truly intent on creating a new world order, perhaps using a Marxist form of wealth distribution, it becomes easy to imagine a backdoor approach like this to rewrite the “ownership code of humanity” which would lead to a very chaotic and dysfunctional world ahead.

2. Global Airport System Collapse

The busiest airports in the world are Atlanta, Beijing, Dubai, and Tokyo. If a series of well-orchestrated tech incidents were planned at any of these airports, it would cause a huge ripple affect across the entire global air transportation network. Whether it starts as waterhole attacks that alters traffic control systems, some form of Gatwick-like drone chaos, or a series of well-placed explosives, the shutdown of a single airport will have serious implications.

A confrontation like this could rise to techno-apocalypse level if the disruption is not easily remedied and if it has the potential to be duplicated quickly across multiple airports.

Air transportation is a complex global system based on multiple dependencies. Even though it’s by far the safest of all forms of transportation, at its core is a system based on trust. As you might imagine, trust is a hard thing to quantify and even harder to rebuild once its lost.

3. Dismantling a Major Tech Company

The world has become very dependent upon a few key companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Alibaba, to name a few. It’s entirely possible for a well-focused effort, using an array of sabotage tactics to both disable and destroy one of these linchpin companies.

We live in a world where virtually anyone is blackmailable. Since we all care about someone or something, the right threats made by the right entities, at the right time, can make nearly anyone vulnerable. This is especially true for corporate executives where great power can leave them exposed in unfortunate ways.

By focusing on uniquely positioned individuals and nuanced impact points, radical groups can start dismantling the digital services we’ve all become very dependent on, without anyone noticing until its too late.

4. Dark Web Militia

Most of the major problems in the world today can be traced back to a few key decision-makers who are very wealthy and powerful. This is true for most of the world’s pollution problems, destruction of the rainforests, human trafficking, organized crime, and much more.

Using the dark web to recruit an army of super hackers, the Dark Web Militia could launch a series of relentless cyber attack on these folks.

Recruiting people for this cause will be relatively easy because they can remain anonymous and the organization’s goals are easy to rally behind. Using a promo campaign filled with righteous anger, vilifying each of these individuals to a point where they no longer seem human, a series of attacks gets staged to destroy the lives of each of these so-called bad actors.

In this situation, the unintended consequences of ruining these people’s lives becomes a Pyric victory. In addition to taking down the culprits, a number of significant businesses will collapse, forcing countless jobs lost, and the collateral damage will end up being far worse than the original problem they were attempting to solve.

5. Fort Peck Incident

Twenty years ago I published a disaster scenario about a team of terrorists that blew up the huge rolled earth dam in Ft. Peck, Montana. As it collapses, the dam’s 23 billion cubic meters of water begins to barrel through the Missouri river valley, quickly overloading its capacity, setting the stage for it to wipe out five more major dams downstream.

In just a day and a half, a massive wall of water will leave an unbelievable trail of destruction over three thousand miles long as it rips through the center of the United States. Not only is there damage, but the country is also literally cut in half with virtually no ground transportation, data lines, or power lines remaining between the two halves. This trail of devastation will leave over 15 million people homeless and thousands missing and presumed dead. Major power plants will have been destroyed, and restoring power to the whole country will be a long time in coming.

With this single act of destruction, nearly every person on the face of the earth is somehow affected. Five Federal Reserve banks will be destroyed. Thousands of major companies will have been demolished. The stock market, domestic and international, will be thrown into total turmoil. Many insurance companies will simply fold up because the losses are too great. World food supply systems are thrown into disarray, and critical water supplies, sewer systems, and a number of other essential services we take for granted will take years to repair.

Will a techno-apocalypse be this dismal?

Final Thoughts

Most theories on the techno-apocalypse tend to be based on some form of the singularity.

The technological singularity, based on the theory that exponential advancements will lead to the creation of an artificial super-intelligence, will abruptly trigger runaway tech advancements, resulting in unfathomable changes to humanity.

According to this theory, a rapidly upgrading intelligent agent, such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence, will enter a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation upgrading even more frequently, causing an intelligence explosion, resulting in a powerful super-intelligence that will, qualitatively, far surpass all human intelligence.

The idea of a “singularity” was first mentioned in the 1950s by John von Neumann, an early computer scientist, polymath, and physicist. Over time the idea of a singularity was repeatedly mentioned by some of the world’s top scientists including a book titled “The Singularity is Near” written by Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil.

More recently, a number of leading thinkers including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk have issued dire warning about the consequences of the singularity with a general AI shedding the bonds of human control and essentially destroying humanity.

As I read through these scenarios and their accompanying warning, I’m still left with the fundamental question of “Why?”

Even though we, as humans, represent an infinitesimally small life-force in the universe, we still have some overarching forms of logic at play, and having AIs imbued with things like motivation, purpose, and intentions still doesn’t make sense to me.

Yes, I understand how the creation of a super A.I. technology can lead to one of us triggering the “mother of all mistakes.” But when technology takes over, then what?

As always, your comments and feedback are encouraged. Please let me know your thoughts.