Thomas Frey's Blog, page 36

The Great Mannequin Vs. Fashion Model Showdown

If it weren’t for their glowing eyes, I would have sworn they were live fashion models dancing in the store window.

Moving smoothly to match the music playing in the background, each of the seven perfectly proportioned mannequins swayed to a carefully choreographed set of moves designed to draw attention to the clothes they were wearing.

The eerie feeling that they were watching me as much as I was watching them was not a mistake. They were indeed looking at me.

In fact, each move was being used to carefully assess my reaction on a millisecond by millisecond basis, morphing body proportions, adding and lowering height, making nipples more or less visible, altering the hue of eye shadow, and transforming the smile from pouty disinterest to happy engagement with mesmerizing precision.

When I caught myself drooling I knew that they had touched a nerve. As seconds turned into minutes, I realized that each of the mannequins were competing for my attention.

Being a guy who always hated being asked to go dress shopping, and even offering to take a beating rather than have to experience anything like that ever again, I was quickly changing my mind.

Obviously they knew I wasn’t going to buy woman’s clothing, but the longer my gaze was held by theirs, I wasn’t so sure.

It was only around the 18-minute mark that I realized a large crowd had gathered next to me. The mannequins hadn’t managed to convert me from casual observer to active buyer so they were now working on other people in the crowd.

With women, it was amazing to watch how the mannequins morphed into an almost exact replica of the person looking at them. But it was a better version of them, something they would aspire to become.

Almost on queue the mannequin would flash a knowing blink and ladies, in what could best be described as a hypnotic-like trance, would reach for their phone, click on the “purchase” button, feel absolutely nothing as they had their body scanned, and leave knowing full well that a perfect fitting outfit would arrive at their home within an hour or so.

No longer the passive ornaments used in today’s retail stores that merchandizing experts hope, at best, to garner an occasional fleeting glance, these mannequins were destined to serve as stand alone sales agents, never requiring a coffee break, sales commission, health insurance, or even an encouraging thank you.

Welcome to the world of interactive mannequins, the life-sized body models endowed with ample enough technology to make even the nerdiest of nerds stand up and pay attention.

Mannequin factory in Turkey

“Mannequinology” - The Early Years

Initially designed to support the arts, mannequins have been an integral part of human culture for centuries. However, the path of stationary mannequins has been on a collision path with other forms of tech like animatronics and robotics for a long time.

Animatronics had its roots as far back as 1515 when Leonardo da Vinci designed and built the Automata Lion to impress the King of France. Over the centuries that followed, a number of ingenious self-operating devices, or automata, were built paving the way for such notable advances as Sparko, The Robot Dog, featured at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the Enchanted Tiki Birds first making their appearance at Disneyland in 1963.

Animatronics paved the way for Honda and their teams developing humanoid robots in the 80s. In 2000 Honda introduced ASIMO, a cute little walking talking robot-person that raised the bar significantly, and gave us a whole new understanding of what machines were capable of.

Since then, humanoid robots have become an integral part of our culture, appearing in newscasts, television shows, and movies on a daily basis. It is no longer uncommon to see a robot giving a TED talk, a TV interviewer asking a robot about its work life, or having robot dancers taking center stage at the Consumer Electronics Show.

But until recently, mannequins have remained little more than a plastic or wood stand-in for the human body. Commonly used by artists, tailors, and dressmakers, most of us think of them as little more than ornamental figures used to display the latest fashions.

Animated mannequins at Jean Paul Gaultier Exhibit in New York

The 2013 Jean Paul Gaultier Exhibit

In late 2013, French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier unveiled a stunning exhibit at The Brooklyn Museum in New York City. Working with 30 animated mannequins manufactured by Mannequins Jolicoeur International, Quebec, the figurines came to life, with some laughing, winking, smiling, whistling, and even speaking. It was all done in such a realistic way that it made visitors do an instant double-take.

The animation effects were accomplished by a high-tech, high-definition audiovisual system that projected facial images on to the mannequins.

In addition to the animated mannequins, the exhibit also featured another 110 ground-breaking mannequins that used unusual color finishes to create skin tones that corresponded with the diverse ethnicities that Gaultier hoped to portray.

Even though this exhibit dramatically raised the level of realism for modern day mannequins, the true potential for this technology will be unleashed over the coming years with the Internet of Things.

At what point will we add the brain?

The Internet of Things Goes Full Mannequin

So how do today’s lifeless pieces of plastic end up evolving into full animatronic fashion models that spend more time watching us than we spend watching them?

Mannequins will soon become part of the tech industry, closely integrating advances in machine intelligence, stationary robotics, sensor technology, facial prosthetics, and 3D printing for everything from teeth, to nails, to realistic looking skin.

Most of the advancements in “mannequinology” will inch forward one Internet-of-Things device at a time, but the real magic will occur later when all of the pieces are assembled and synced together like a symphony of moving, sensing, twisting, reacting pieces all working in concert around one central objective.

Are they real or are they mannequins?

The Great Mannequin Vs. Fashion Model Showdown

With inflating, deflating muscles, perfectly timed eye movements that create broad smiles as they pierce your consciousness, and morphing styles and fashions that have an amazing way of flowing perfectly with every body contour, the real trial will come when a staged test will determine whether or not these mannequins can outsell an equivalent team of live fashion models in the world’s major fashion centers of Paris, New York, London, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Rome, Berlin, Sydney, Antwerp, and Shanghai.

Much like IBM’s Watson computer pairing off against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011, the “Mannequin Vs. Model” showdown will inevitably end with machines stealing the show.

Fashion models living in human bodies with human limitations will have little hope of competing with the chameleon-like color-changing, shape-shifting features of future machines with full sensory capability of reading someone’s emotions with 100% accuracy.

At the same time, even though they can closely replicate human appearance, it will be a long time before they have the ability to simulate the warm and caring nature of genuine people.

How long before we can’t tell them apart from humans?

Final Thoughts

For many, the idea of having fashion models, that many of us regard as the ultimate form of personal beauty, lose in a one-on-one battle with synthetic humans is a rather depressing thought.

This notion that lowly machines, made of gears, motors, and switches can evolve into lifelike forms that can out-flirt, out-fox, and out-finesse even the sexiest among us is both confusing, depressing, and troubling all at the same time.

But before you resign yourself to this new state of depression, keep in mind that machine perfection like this will only exist if humans create it, manage it, and repair it when it breaks down. And it will always eventually break down.

It will also enable people to aspire to a higher calling. Rather than living the life of human works of art, this may be nature’s way of pushing us for more – more wisdom, more compassion, more of what it means to be human.

I would invite you to weigh in on this line of thinking. Will we be having a showdown between fashion models and humanoid mannequins anytime soon? Will people still remain in control, or will some form of machine intelligence create an entirely new set of problems for us. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

The post The Great Mannequin Vs. Fashion Model Showdown appeared first on Futurist Thomas Frey.

Engineering the Secret Engines of Off-Grid Living

Having just returned from a trip to Alaska, it occurred to me that most of the 660,000 sq miles of this beautiful state will never be habitable until a more complete off-grid solution is found. In Alaska, they’ve already figured out how to turn every one of their 3 million lakes into a landing strip, so transportation is far less of an issue than power, heat, lights, water, and communications.

Until recently, the off-grid living community has been focused on energy-related issues. Living in rustic conditions, chopping wood, hauling water, hand washing clothes, and poor lighting after dark made the lifestyle changes necessary to make the shift rather severe. That’s about to change.

Writing a column like this is often an exercise in connecting the dots, and from my perspective, there are three primary inputs and two primary outputs for off-grid living. The inputs are energy, water, and media (Internet), and the outputs are sewage and trash.

Three recent innovations are causing a shift in design thinking, making it far easier for people to become part of the off-grid living movement. The innovations include energy storage for the home, solar-powered Internet drones, and atmospheric water harvesters.

As some point, most of these structures will be designed and produced with some form of 3D printing in a matter of hours.

These advances will give us the tools for creating each of the inputs without wires, pipes, or infrastructure, and managing the outputs without polluting the surroundings.

Energy storage will soon become a total game-changer for the renewable energy industry

1.) Energy Storage for the Home

Solar and wind companies have been growing exponentially over the past decade. Alternative forms of power generation have been taking place in homes in literally every country in the world for many years.

The missing piece has been an efficient way to store the power from one day to the next.

In February, Elon Musk announced plans to enter the home energy storage business as a natural offshoot of his Tesla battery business. Since then a number of competitors have surfaced including Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Powervault, Samsung SDI, LG Chem, and the Saft Group.

Battery systems like this will enable homeowners to keep plenty of power in reserve for all of the cloudy and rainy days when solar doesn’t work, and the super still times when the wind doesn’t blow.

In the future, solar powered drones will provide high-speed Internet to even the most remote regions on earth

2.) Solar-Powered Internet Drones

Last year Google bought a solar-powered drone company, Titan Aerospace, at roughly the same time that Facebook completed their purchase of a similar company, Ascenta.

Solar-powered drones will function like low flying satellites to provide Internet, Wi-Fi, and telecom services to people in remote places on earth. Flying at altitudes of over 80,000 ft, they are above weather patterns and above commercial air traffic. With photovoltaic panels lining virtually every surface of the aircraft, and no clouds to interfere with their ability to generate power, they’ll be able to stay aloft for years at a time.

Not surprisingly, off-grid living enthusiasts are anxious for their arrival, as communications has become such a vital piece of modern living.

Even though Google suffered a momentary setback with the crash of one of their prototype aircraft a few weeks ago in New Mexico, this is an industry with a bright future ahead.

France's Eole Water uses windmills to harvest moisture from the air

3.) Atmospheric Water Harvesters

An atmospheric water harvester is a device that extracts water from the air.

Even though the ancient Incas had mastered the process collecting dew and channeling it into cisterns for later use, and had even developed a form of water-collecting fog fences to store moisture in portable containers, the process was essentially lost until recently.

Renewed interest came in 1977 with the first Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker's family on Tatooine used atmospheric water harvester on their moisture farm.

Early versions were slow to catch on in the marketplace for several reasons. The amount of energy needed to extract water from air was cost-prohibitive, some were too noisy, and most could not be adjusted to account for local variances in humidity and climates.

Since then a number of better designed air-to-water companies have sprung up using wind and solar to keep energy costs to a minimum. Here are a few examples:

FogQuest
EoleWater
A2WH
EcoloBlue
Air to Water
Air Water Green
Aqua Sciences 
Drinkable Air
Dutch Rainmaker
Skywell

The off-grid engine will serve as the functional core for virtually any off-grid home

Designing the “Off-Grid Engine”

I refer to this as an engine because key components can be designed as a self-contained modular unit to serve as the functional core of virtually any off-grid home.

This will involve designing a kitchen-bathroom unit that is tied to solar/wind generators with energy storage systems, atmospheric water harvesters, overhead water storage, and next-gen antennas for high speed Internet/telecom, collapsible in size to a single transportable unit that can fit in most shipping containers.

Going one step further, by adding state of the art shredding and incineration for trash, as well as electric incineration and composting for toilets, homeowners will be able to keep their outputs to the 1% range that the entire country of Sweden is currently achieving.

Once the “off-grid engine” is in place, for simple homes it’s only a matter of adding extra rooms to complete the house. More complex homes may require a second or third “engine” for more advanced lifestyles.

Many will even use the shipping container it was shipped in as part of the home itself.

Home-based food growing systems are become very sophisticated

For those wanting to grow their own food, hydroponic, aquaponic, and aquaculture systems can also be driven by the same off-grid engines.

With standard features and capabilities already built-in, new residents will find it quick and easy to adapt, eliminating virtually all their monthly bills in the process, even charging their own electric cars at home.

My prediction is that the first company to master this concept will create an entirely new market, and DIYers wanting to build their own little getaway won’t have to master all the intricacies of today’s ultra complex off-grid systems.

With off-grid homes and cars, monthly expenses will plummet

Final Thoughts

Even though the State of Florida has made the shortsighted decision to make off-grid living illegal, there will be plenty of opportunity in the rest of the world.

The recent surge in interest for tiny homes, ecocapsules, backyard shedquarters, shipping container homes, and less-traceable lifestyles are all driving us towards something that can best be described as “simpler living.”

There will always be people who love surrounding themselves with the opulence of their own wealth, but the general trend is in the other direction. Simpler, more manageable lives, that give us the opportunity to experience life on a more symbiotic level.

What I have presented here is one version of many possible directions off-grid homes may evolve into, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Will there be an off-grid engine driving your future?

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

The post Engineering the Secret Engines of Off-Grid Living appeared first on Futurist Thomas Frey.

The Future of South Korea

When Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, took the stage at Edaily’s 6th World Strategy Forum on June 11th at the famed Shilla Seoul, his keynote about how he become an entrepreneur was very personal. With a comical flare for storytelling, he carefully laid out many of his failed attempts for launching businesses prior to Wikipedia.

Entrepreneurship comes in many forms, but startups like Wikipedia are niched in the rarest of all categories now referred to as unicorn companies. Unicorns fall into a one-in-a-million classification where companies like Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Snapchat have revenues that grow exponentially into the billion-dollar range seemingly over night.

They also represent foundational shifts in the way the world does business.

Even though South Korea received the highest possible ranking in the 2015 Bloomberg Innovation Index, the country is better defined as a “fast follower with great secondary innovations” rather than one that spawns “unicorn companies with primary innovations.” But that description may not be true much longer.

In just a few short decades, this tiny country has gone from being dirt poor and technically primitive to one of the wealthiest and most technically advanced in the world. Framed around a super aggressive culture that permeates virtually every aspect of Korean life, the entire country seems determined to not only reach the top, but go far beyond what anyone else dreamed possible.

This was exactly what drove the people behind the 6th World Strategy Summit to focus on entrepreneurship, and what the startup communities of the future will look like.

On stage at the 6th World Strategy Summit in Seoul, Korea

Following Jimmy Wales on stage, I decided to draw attention to the undefined white spaces in our future, what I referred to as the 10X mega projects capable of unleashing the unicorn companies of tomorrow.

In my 20 minute talk I mentioned a number of possible world-changing projects including the whole earth genealogy project, creating a global language archive, space-based power systems, asteroid mining, colonizing other planets, floating cities, and sending a probe to the center of the earth.

The projects I mentioned are still so undefined that we don’t even know the right questions to ask. But as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say, “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company will not survive.”

Each of these ventures is waiting for someone to take the lead and create an entire new industry around them.

Highly focused and highly attentive, Korea's young people are very much students of the world

Six Big Picture Issues

From a big picture perspective, there are a number of daunting challenges ahead. Being landlocked by North Korea, lacking a startup culture, having the world’s lowest birthrate, sitting in the Asian shadows of China and Japan, and having a relatively small population of 50 million, forces the country to wield less influence than they’d like.

Landlocked by North Korea - With North Korea preventing highways, trains, and other forms of ground transportation from passing through, South Korea has been limited to air and sea options for dealing with global trade. Even though the isolation of North Korea is not sustainable and will eventually implode, it is a top-of-mind issue that continues to plague the good people of Korea.

Innovation Centers - Silicon Valley’s approach to innovation has focused on creating fertile breeding grounds for breakthrough thinking. Coworking spaces combined with incubators, makerspaces, angel and venture capital, advisor networks, and mentor teams comprised of serial entrepreneurs all play a role in the Valley’s constantly evolving primordial birthing zones.

Startup Cultures - Without a proven best-of-class business model to draw from, Korean efforts have tended to lag behind. Korean culture also has fewer heroes in the startup arena to draw inspiration from. Since startup cultures are primarily driven by young risk takers, declining birthrates are posing a number of challenges to making this cultural shift.

Declining Birth Rate - At the same time, a declining population poses a much bigger threat. Without an open immigration policy and exceedingly high expectations from those brave enough to raise kids, unfilled worker spots combined with a constantly eroding consumer base will eventually cause the supply and demand equation to go into a tailspin.

Sitting in the Shadow of China and Japan – If we look closely at the political gamesmanship being played by both China and Japan to gain a competitive advantage as well as global mindshare, it’s easy to see that South Korea’s battle to the top is far from over.

A Country of 50 Million – The Korean language is spoken by roughly 80 million people worldwide. Most are in North and South Korea. For Korean leaders to play an effective role on the world stage, they need to be fluent in two or more languages with the second being a language like Mandarin, English, German, or Russian.

Final Thoughts

For me it was easy to fall in love with Korea. Great food, great passion, and an unwavering determination to be the best of the best. More than virtually any other culture, they spend their time thinking and planning for the future.

But the future is never a destination, always a journey. Even with significant challenges ahead, the next chapter for this great nation will prove to be even more exciting than the last.

A phrase that I often use is, “the future favors the bold,” and South Korea is in a perfect position to become the boldest of the bold.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

The post The Future of South Korea appeared first on Futurist Thomas Frey.

Creating Humanless Distribution Networks

A couple weeks ago I was asked to speak at the 8th annual Turkish Postal Symposium in Antalya, Turkey on the future of the postal industry. This was a fascinating gathering of thought leaders to discuss next generation postal service.

I focused my talk around a central question – “How long will it be before we can mail a package and have it travel to a city on the other side of the world without ever being touched by human hands?”

As we move further down the path of automation, this is a reasonable question to be asking. Once we set a package into motion, it will essentially guide itself to its final destination by way of a completely automated global distribution network.

Many pieces of this distribution network are already in place, but as we dig deeper and try to understand what it will take to achieve this level of automation, we begin to uncover not only the technical elements that still need to be developed, but also the system layers to assure global standards and compatibility.

Since packages come in a variety of shapes and sizes, it’s reasonable to assume limits on both the size and the weight, both on the high end as well as the low end. As an example, a package the size of a grain of salt or as light as a helium balloon will need to be repackaged. Mailing larger items like skis, golf clubs, or bicycles may require a different kind of delivery service.

In addition to size and weight issues will be a series of other legal requirements for shipping restrictive items like alcohol, pharmaceuticals, live animals, biohazard materials, or products with special handling requirements like fragile glass, frozen food, or pressure sensitive instruments.

Establishing limits, rules, and standards will be a critical piece to this future mega-system.

Package labeling will need to be consistent everywhere. Adding a series of sensors to the labeling tags will enable users to keep track of the location as well as the condition of the contents in real time.

Automated loading system already exist

Adding to Our Global Infrastructure

If we think of this level of automation extended into a worldwide distribution system like other pieces of global infrastructure, we begin to get a sense as to how it will begin to fit into the lives of everyone on earth. For example, when we make a phone call anywhere in the world, our telecom networks connect instantly.

Many fully-mechanized distribution centers already exist in Europe, Asia, and North America, but this level of automation will require all countries in the world to eventually participate and create similar systems.

Mailing a Package in 2030

If we can imagine a day in the life of a common postal package in 2030 we will begin to better understand how a system like this will work.

Packages are first placed inside a designated “parcel pickup/delivery” space and a signal will be activated to begin the delivery process. Since this will be a 24-hour service, driverless drones will be dispatched instantly to make the pickup.

The sender will determine the item’s urgency and this will factor into a number of decision points along the way.

As the ground or air-based drone arrives, a robotic arm will extend out and retrieve the package. Depending on the time-sensitivity of the package, the drone may continue to make additional pickups and deliveries until it reaches capacity.

With packages in tow, the next stop will be a regional distribution center where parcels are sorted and sent on to their next stop, which may be another distribution center or a long-haul transit system like boats, planes, trains, or trucks.

Again, the time-sensitivity of the package will determine the likely form of transportation, and robotic systems will both load and unload these vehicles.

Once the parcel arrives at the final distribution center, it will be staged for delivery either with ground-based or aerial delivery drones.

In the future, there will be two kinds of addresses for delivery services - one for a typical home or office and a second one for wherever the intended recipient is at any given moment.

In the case of individual recipients, a series of automated messages will be sent to alert them that a package will be arriving shortly, and they can arrange to meet the delivery drone when it arrives.

With normal package delivery to a building, messages will also be sent when the package is delivered. Each building will have its own designated delivery area and robotic arms will be used to carefully place the parcel in the targeted zone.

There is no miracle science needed to complete this kind of infrastructure, just plenty of engineering work, and the political will and foresight to make it all happen.

Automated package pickup

The Missing Pieces

Naturally there are many missing pieces to the fully automated mega-system that will eventually be created.

1.) High Tech Mailboxes, Pickup & Delivery Pads – There is a huge opportunity awaiting for the first person who creates a universally accepted machine-dockable mailbox, as well as standardized, weather-protected pickup and deliver pads for homes and offices.

2.) Standardized High Tech Mailing Labels – Labels like this will monitor both the package’s location and the condition of its content.

3.) Automated Loading and Unloading Systems – Since several modes of transport will be involved, special attention will need to be paid to the handoff from one to the next, such as from a truck to a train or ship.

4.) Robotic Customs Agents – There will always be a need to inspect and monitor package content to prevent the distributing of illegal items.

5.) System Durability – Early systems will have countless points of failure, but over time, durable system will reduce breakdowns to less than one in a million deliveries.

6.) Trained Human Operators – As a system designed “by humans for humans,” there will still need to be a number of skilled human operators working in the background.

The list above is intended to highlight a few opportunities, but admittedly glosses over many of the details and intricacies involved in developing a complex global system like this.

The Argument for Going Global 

When systems are left incomplete, it requires more labor, more equipment, creating more pollution, segregation, isolation, and cultural barriers, not less.

The problem is that very few people are viewing our fragmented delivery networks as part of a larger global system. Over the coming years, global systems, involving representatives from countries all over the world will spring to life, helping to bridge the cultural barriers currently preventing mega projects like this from moving forward.

It boils down to the question of whether we are better off being a more cohesive, blended global society, or less of one.

One idea for pickup and deliver pads for homes and offices

Final Thoughts

Our need for mega projects like this is best explain in a previous column of mine titled the “Laws of Exponential Capabilities.”

Emerging technology and automation will make these types of mega projects affordable and technically doable, and increasing levels of connectedness are driving our need for efficient travel and shipping around the world.

As technological unemployment grows, countries will be looking for mega projects to both employ and reemploy our young people both now and for generations to come.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

The post Creating Humanless Distribution Networks appeared first on Futurist Thomas Frey.

The Black Hat Robots are Coming

It’s ironic, this whole effort to work so hard to make working obsolete, or in the case of artificial intelligence, the effort to think so hard to make thinking obsolete.

But then it should really come as no mystery. Machines are far superior to people. Every worker brings their own set of baggage to the workplace, and officials have created countless laws to protect these workers, making the human side of work messier than ever.

For most companies, the daily headaches of managing employee-related issues, complaints, and lawsuits has most executive teams longing for a more manageable situation, and if automating employees out of their jobs is ever an option, they’ll jump on it in a heartbeat.

Discrimination is fine as long as it’s with a machine.

It’s no wonder that Uber, boasting a $50 billion valuation after recruiting literally millions of drivers over its short 6-year lifespan, is now investing heavily in driverless technology to eliminate the very drivers the company was built on.

But Uber is not the only one. In China’s manufacturing hub in Guangdong province, a team has begun constructing the first zero-labor factory, with plans for 1,000 robots to work on their workerless assembling line.

Taking this line of thinking a few steps further, we are on the verge of having driverless busses delivering automated store clerks to retail shops that sell robots to other robots. Hmmmm.

So where do humans fit into this equation? Much like handing us a shovel and asking us to dig our own grave, our man-made machines are being replaced with machine-made machines, to replace the workers who made them.

No longer the realm of science fiction, we are less than a decade away from workerless factories, robots with their own bank accounts, Watson-like judges dolling out sentences in court, and having wars filled with robots fighting other robots.

Does anyone else see the massive ethical dilemmas looming in the background?

But before you go off and organize a team hell-bent on banning robots altogether, let’s take a closer look at the opportunity side of the equation.

The Foxconn Automation Story

Foxconn is the largest manufacturer of electronics in the world, employing well over 1 million people in its factories. They’re perhaps best known as the manufacturer of the iPhone and iPad.

In 2011, because of the rising cost of Chinese labor, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou made the bold assertion they would install a million robots in their assembly lines with plans to eliminate a significant portion of their workforce. But so far that remains an elusive dream.

While many of the $25,000 robots have been installed, they do not live up to the exacting standards Apple demands. Instead of replacing workers, the bots have been relegated to tighten screws, polish metal, and handle packaging.

Last month, Terry Gou revised his projections, saying the company would need 3 more years to automate 70% of its assembly line. Sticking to its original vision, he said the shift would replace people with machines and improve efficiency.

At this point its impossible to know if three years is a realistic timeframe and what percentage of the workforce, if any, will actually be replaced.

Understanding Dependencies

Like many other creatures in nature, humans are hardwired to be socially dependent. We need each other.

Very often the same people that are most helpful in our lives also create our biggest problems. There are no perfect people, just as there are no perfect machines.

Even though we can make machines that are far more durable and reliable than humans, there are no perfect machines. They will all eventually break down.

For the first 50 years after automobiles were invented, car-owners were forced to carry a toolbox along with them to make repairs along the road whenever something broke down.

Even with hundreds of years of machine-building under our belts, implementing countless new quality control programs like TQM, Six Sigma, and ISO 9000 certification, and our ability to design far better pieces of equipment than ever before, we will never be able to achieve a failure rate of zero.

As we add more and more technology to our lives, we will also be adding far more failure points.

In the end, it will always be people that have to clean up when technology fails …….and it will always fail.

Mankind’s Biggest Disasters

To better illustrate this point, we’ve had countless examples of disasters happening throughout history, even when our best and brightest were involved in the decision-making.

Here are ten of the world’s worst disasters, with many still being cleaned up.

1.) Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant – On March 11, 2011, a nuclear meltdown of three of the plant's six nuclear reactors was caused when the plant was hit by a tsunami triggered by a massive 9.0 earthquake. The following day, substantial amounts of radioactive material was released, creating the largest nuclear incident since Chernobyl. Over 300,000 people had to be evacuated.

2.) The Disappearance Of The Aral Sea - One of the largest lakes in the world, that once covered 26,000 square miles, between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south, has been shrinking since the 1960s because of water diversion for Soviet irrigation projects. Satellite images taken in August 2014 showed the eastern portion of the Aral Sea is completely devoid of water, and is now referred to as the Aralkum desert.

3.) Space Shuttle Challenger - On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in the air over Cape Canaveral, Florida. Disintegration began after an O-ring seal in a solid rocket booster failed at launch. All seven people onboard were killed.

4.) Pacific Garbage Patch - The Pacific Garbage Patch is a vortex in the Pacific Ocean that has collected marine debris like plastic, chemical sludge and other garbage. It extends over a large area, but much of the detritus is trapped below the water. Estimates of its size range from 70,000-15,000,000 square kilometers. Predicted by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists in a 1988 paper, researchers have since discovered other huge concentrations of oceanic trash vortices in both the North Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

5.) Sinking of the Titanic – Going down on its maiden voyage from England to the United States in 1912, the Titanic was known as the unsinkable ship. With no small amount of boasting, the ship was specifically designed to make the long journey to America with no possible chance of sinking.

6.) B-2 Stealth Bomber Crash – In 2008, on a practice flight in Guam, America's most expensive jet was destroyed when faulty sensors caused it to pitch up on takeoff, stall and crash, according to the Air Force. The B-2 stealth bomber, only one of 21 in existence at the time, cost $1.4 billion.

7.) Exxon-Valdez - In 1989, an Exxon oil tanker was on its way to California when it hit the reef near Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska. The tanker spilled over 760,000 barrels of oil into the water off the Alaska coastline.

8.) Space Shuttle Columbia - The Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed in February of 2003, just six minutes before it was scheduled to land. All seven people onboard were killed.

9.) Hindenburg Explosion - The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German airship caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock in Lakehurst, New Jersey. 36 people died in this explosion.

10.) Bhopal Disaster – Considered the worst industrial accident in history, on December 2, 1984 at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, over 500,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate gas and other chemicals. The toxic gas filtered into several of the shantytowns surrounding the plant. The government of India reported 558,125 injuries, with estimates of over 16,000 deaths.

The list above could easily be extended to include other catastrophes like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizons, Hurricane Katrina, Love Canal, and countless more.

The Black Hat Backlash

It’s not reasonable to think that we will somehow reach an era of being disaster free.

Machines wear out, computers break down, and even our best attempts at making a failsafe system will eventually fail. Add in a few earthquakes and nature’s own mechanisms for disrupting things when we least expect it, and we get a sense as to how fallible our future will be.

So who will be left to pick up the pieces? Just us lowly humans.

With our growing imbalance between the super rich and the super poor, a more likely scenario will be a scaling up of techno-stealth warfare of the clandestine kind, with black hat technologies used to disrupt our systems, industries, and government in unusual ways.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, “black hat” refers to hackers intent on being disruptive, malicious, and stealing for personal gain. Until now black hat hackers have been limited to the programming world. But that’s about to change.

Black hat drones, black hat robots, black hat car crashers, and black hat data manipulators will soon be entering our vocabulary.

One slightly deranged psycho-bot can easily be a thousand times more destructive than a single suicide bomber today.

Even in a society filled with cameras, tracking technology, and data trails as wide as a barn, every new generation of techno-hacker has devised ways of masking their path of destruction.

Final Thoughts

NPR recently created a fascinating interactive website posting the likelihood of certain professions disappearing.

On the high end of the spectrum, they predict telemarketers have a 99% chance of one day being totally replaced by technology, with cashiers, tellers and drivers all coming in with at 97%.

The jobs with the lowest potential of being overtaken by technology include mental health and substance abuse social workers. They have a 0.3% chance according to the data. Occupational therapists also rank at 0.3%, while dentists, surgeons and nutritionists appear pretty safe at just 0.4%.

That said, even the researchers that conducted this study for NPR admit that their estimates are rough and likely to be wrong.

History is filled with jobs that no longer exist. Whether it was pinsetters for bowling alleys, milk deliverymen, lamplighters, or switchboard operators, technology has a way of changing the work we do.

The biggest risk we face is in alienating the same people that will have to come in later to clean up after all the messes we make.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

 

 

The post The Black Hat Robots are Coming appeared first on Futurist Thomas Frey.

162 Future Jobs – The Video

What are the odds that the job you’ll be doing 10 years from now doesn’t exist today? Turns out the odds are pretty high.

According to a recent study by TheLadders, online job matching service, the fastest growing jobs are in user experience design, iOS and Android development, and business intelligence—some of which didn’t exist before 2007.

Their research, which gathered key word search data from 6 million members, also found that middle management jobs are being phased out. Sharing economy companies like Uber, Zaarly, Task Rabbit, and AirBNB have found ways to eliminate the entire middle management layer with software.

Indeed professionals can still earn high salaries within companies, but according to their study less than 2% of titles contain the word "manager" or "director."

A separate study done by HireVue concluded the top jobs of the future would involve “design” and “data science.”

There was also no such thing as a social media expert, VR media producer, crypto currency, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending experts ten years ago.

So what will the jobs of tomorrow look like? Here are a few ideas I've been bouncing around.

Future Jobs - The Video

Facing the Transition Ahead

Many people are scared of the future. With every science fiction movie that portrays technology as evil, and let’s be honest, that’s the theme of almost every science fiction movie that’s ever existed, it’s easy to develop some paranoia about the dangers ahead.

However, much of today’s technology is giving us super-human attributes. The same technology that gets blamed for eliminating our jobs, is also giving us capabilities beyond our wildest dreams. We have instant access to friends and family, instant access to answers for almost any question we ask, and instant entertainment if ever we get bored.

We can now think-faster, know-faster, and do-faster than ever before. We no longer end up being the “last to know.”

At the same time, every new technology also requires new skill sets for those working in those environments. Here are just a few of the skills that will be highly prized in the future.

14 Hot New Skills

Transitionists – Those who can help make a transition.
Expansionists – A talent for adapting along with a growing environment.
Maximizers – An ability to maximize processes, situations, and opportunities.
Optimizers – The skill and persistence to tweak variables until it produces better results.
Inflectionists – Finding critical inflection points in a system will become a much-prized skill.
Dismantlers – Every industry will eventually end, and this requires talented people who know how to scale things back in an orderly fashion.
Feedback Loopers – Those who can devise the best possible feedback loops.
Backlashers - Ever- new technology will have its detractors, and each backlash will require a response.
Last Milers – Technologies commonly reach a point of diminishing returns as they attempt to extend their full capacity to the end user. People with the ability to mastermind these solutions will be in hot demand.
Contexualists – In between the application and the big picture lays the operational context for every new technology.
Ethicists – There will be an ever-growing demand for people who can ask the tough question and standards to apply moral decency to some increasingly complex situations.
Philosophers – With companies in a constant battle over “my-brain-is-bigger-that-your-brain,” it becomes the overarching philosophy that wins the day.
Theorists – Every new product, service, and industry begins with a theory.
Legacists – Those who are passionate and skilled with leaving a legacy.

162 Jobs of the Future

Predicting future jobs is an exercise that involves looking at future industries and speculating on ways in which they will be different than the workforce today. Business management, engineering, accounting, marketing, and sales are all necessary skills for the future, but the work involved will also be different.

At the same time there will be many less-obvious positions that will need to be created. This is about those less-obvious positions.

The following is not an exhaustive list, nor do these job titles all have good explanations. Rather, this column is intended to be a thought-generator, an idea-sparker, to help you draw your own conclusions.

Future transportation will look radically different than it does today

Personal Rapid Transit Systems (PRTs)

PRTs like Hyperloop, Skytran, Jpods, and ET3 offer a new dimension in transportation. They operate above the fray, independent of the frenetic energy of today’s highways, airports, train, and bus depots. Details here.

Station Designers & Architects
Circulation Engineers
Traffic Flow Analyzers
Command Center Operators
Traffic Transitionists
Impact Minimizers
Demand Optimizers
Secondary Opportunity Developers
Feedback Loopers
Construction Teams – PRTs have the potential to become the largest infrastructure project the earth has ever seen, costing literally trillions of dollars and employing hundreds of millions of people. Details here.

Atmospheric Water Harvesters

One of today’s most significant breakthroughs is happening in the area of atmospheric water harvesters, being developed by a new breed of water innovators intent on solving one of earth’s most vexing problems.

Site Collection Lease Managers
System Architects
Water Supply Transitionists
Purification Monitors
Impact Assessors

Creating the God Globe

The “God Globe” is intended to be a master command center for planet earth, where we will, for the first time ever, begin to control nature’s greatest forces. Details here.

Global System Architect
Data Integration Manager
Inflectionists – Those who can pinpoint the optimal intersection of time, place, and information for change to occur.
Fear Containment Managers
Privacy Theorists, Philosophers, and Ethicists

The Sharing Economy 

The sharing economy is creating some amazing business models around the use of “other people’s stuff.”

Sharability Auditors – People who analyze homes and businesses for sharable assets.
Corporate Sharing Managers
Opportunity Spotters
Impact Assessors
Involvement Specialists

The Quantified Self 

The “quantified self” is all about building a measurable information sphere around each of us. As we get better acquainted with the Delphic maxim “know thyself,” we will become far more aware of our deficiencies and the pieces needed to shore up our shortfalls. Details here.

Quantified Self Assessment Auditors
Data Contexualists
Deficiency Analyzers
Skill Quantifiers
Bio-Waste Optimizers
Guardians of Privacy

What will the future of sports look like?

Future Sports

Sports have become the ultimate form of storytelling. Each contest is a test of the human spirit, with good guys and bad guys pairing off, amidst great drama, as contestants test their limits overcoming adversity, to achieve an unknown outcome. And all of this is happening in real time. Details here.

Simulation Specialists
Genetic Modification Designers and Engineers
Body Modification Ethicists
Athlete Qualification Analyzers
Cradle to Grave Lifecycle Managers
Super Baby Designers
Super Baby Psychologists
Super Baby Advocates

Commercial drones are ready to launch

Commercial Drone Industry

The U.S. Congress has mandated the FAA develop a plan to incorporate drones into national airspace by Sept. 30, 2015. Many in this new industry are chomping at the bit to get started.

Drone Classification Gurus – Different laws will apply to different classifications of drone vehicles.
Drone Standards Specialists
Drone Docking Designers and Engineers
Operator Certification Specialists
Environmental Minimizers – Sound diminution engineers, visual aesthetic reductionists, etc.
Drone Traffic Optimizers
Automation Engineers
Backlash Minimizers – Ever-new technology has its detractors, this perhaps more than most.

On the path to a trillion sensors

Our Trillion-Sensor Future

Industry experts are now projecting that we will reach 1 trillion sensors in the world by 2024, and 100 trillion by 2036.

Sensor Inventors, Designers, and Engineers
Data Stream Organizers
Failure Point Assessors
Data Transmission Optimizers
System Anthropologists
Data Actuaries
Last Milers – People who specialize in bridging the gap between where the data fields end and the user communities begin.

3D Printing

3D printing was recently named by Goldman Sachs as one of eight technologies destined to creatively destroy how we do business. As an industry making inroads in thousands of different businesses simultaneously, former Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson is famously quoted as saying, “3D printing will be bigger than the Internet.”

Automation Auditors – Assessing what parts, processes, and systems can be automated.
Material Experts
Design Engineers
Cost Estimators
3Dimensionalists – Those with an innate ability to think three dimensionally.
3D Printer “Ink” Developers
3D Food Printer Chef
3D Printed Clothing Fashion Designers, Material Specialists, and Stylists
Organ Agents – 3D printed organs are now being created and are in hot demand.
Manufacturing Process Consultants
Maintenance Guys

Internet of Things 

Seventy-five billion is the number of devices that Morgan Stanley has calculated will be connected to the Internet of Things by 2020. That’s 9.4 devices for every one of the 8 billion people that will be on earth in only seven years. IBM even created a starter kit to help people get started.

Locationists – People who specialize in adding the relevance of “place” to our global online communities.
Lifestyle Auditors
Efficiency Consultants
Ownership Network Setup Specialists – Everything people own over a certain value can be tagged, tracked, and monitored.
Augmented Reality Architects – Much like the paint we put on houses and the flavorings we add to food, the future will seem boring if our reality hasn’t been augmented in some way.
Avatar Relationship Managers – As the foibles of humanity enter the realm of autonomous, freethinking avatars, people will find it necessary to both manage and limit the often-dangerous relationships avatars get themselves into.

Big Data

Social media, blogs, web browsing, and company’s security systems are all generating enormous quantities of data, and it all needs to be stored, managed, analyzed, and protected.

Data Interface Mavens
Opportunity Spotters
Waste Data Managers – To insure data integrity in today’s fast evolving information storage industry, multiple redundancies have been built into the system. Achieving more streamline data storage in the future will require de-duplication specialists who can rid our data centers of needless copies and frivolous clutter.
Computer Personality Designers – Talking back and forth to a computer that has a machine-like voice is boring. But being able to download specific “personality packages” will add an entirely new level of engagement for basement-dwellers everywhere.
Data Hostage Specialists – Holding people as hostages is very messy. But holding data hostage is a less-risky crime that can be done remotely, and has the potential for far greater rewards.
Smart Contact App Developers – Smart contact lenses superimpose information on the wearer’s field of view.

Will there be a Central Bank in Bitcoin's future?

Crypto Currencies & Alternative Financial Systems

In 2008 the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Major banks were either failing or near failure, and the entire house of cards seemed to be one 10-of-Clubs away from becoming a meaningless flat stack in the middle of the table. Out of this growing distrust of banks, Wall Street, and our entire monetary system, the age of crypto currencies was born.

Crypto Currency Bankers, Regulators, and Lawyers
Currency Adoption Specialists
Anonymity Advocates
Theft Recovery Specialists
Crypto Currency Theorists, Philosophers, and Evangelists
Currency Strategists
Monetary Exchange Interface Experts
Standards Developers
Lending Tacticians
Seed Capitalists – In the startup business world there is a huge gulf between initial concept and fundable prototypes. This dearth of funding options will require an entirely new profession.
Privacy Managers – If you think you have lost most of your privacy already, we’ve only scratched the surface. We are all terminally human, and as such, we do not always make good decisions. Striking the perfect privacy-transparency balance will require far more than amateur insights. It will require privacy professionals.
Secondary Opportunity Maximizers

Micro Grid Conversion

Over the coming years, the national electric grid will be broken into a series of micro grids. Details here.

Micro Grid Strategists
Mass Energy Storage Developers – We are still terrible at storing energy from one day to the next. Once mass energy storage systems are developed, micro grids become infinitely more viable.
System Transitionists
Power Conversion Specialists
Efficiency Optimizers
Benefits Translators
Secondary Opportunity Expansionists
Backlash Minimizers

Will your next home be 3D printed?

Contour Crafted Houses

Many people think of contour crafting as 3D printing for houses, but Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis from the University of Southern California sees it as much more. In addition to it’s ability to print an entire house in less than a day, it can be used to eliminate slums, help rebuild areas after a natural disasters, and even build large buildings and luxury homes with custom architectural features that can be changed with only a few clicks of a mouse. Details here.

Construction Material Designers
Structural Engineers
Site Planners
Setup Teams
Tear-Down Teams
Cleanup Teams

Driverless Everything

Driverless technology will initially require a driver, but it will quickly creep into everyday use much as airbags did. First as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually it will become a safety feature stipulated by the government.

Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made by vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

Delivery Dispatchers
Traffic Monitoring System Planners, Designers, and Operators
Automated Traffic Architects and Engineers
Driverless “Ride Experience” Designers
Driverless Operating System Engineers
Emergency Crews for when things go wrong.

Bio-Factories

Based on using living systems, “bio-factories” represent a new process for creating substances that are either too tricky or too expensive to grow in nature or to make with petrochemicals. The rush to develop bio-factories as a means for production not only promises to revolutionize the chemical industry but also transform the economy. Hundreds of products are already in the pipeline.

Nano-Medics – The medical problems most people have can be traced to a single cell or a small group of them. Health professionals capable of working on the nano-level, both in designing diagnostics systems, remedies, and monitoring solutions will be in high demand.
Bio-Factory Doctors, Strategists, and Developers
DNA Scientists
Gene Sequencers
Treatment Monitors

Micro-Colleges 

The systems used to create colleges centuries ago seems justifiably primitive by today’s standards. Learning formulas for nearly every degree are based on hours, one of the least important considerations when it comes to assessing talent. Colleges today cost far too much, and they take far too long. For this reason, a new wave of full-immersion skill training centers, or Micro Colleges, has begun to emerge. Details here.

School Designers
Policy Advisors
Career Transitionists
Goal Counselors
Student Relationship Managers
Student Mentors, Coaches, and Counselors

Senior Living

With almost 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, the number of seniors who need specialized housing will only increase the need for more options and better solutions.

Legacists – Managing people’s legacy
Lifestyle Housing Designers
Aging Specialists
Situational Therapists
Life-Stage Attendants
Memorial Designers
Octogenarian Service Providers – As the population continues the age we will have record numbers of people living into their 80s, 90s, and 100s. This mushrooming group of active oldsters will provide a demand for goods and services currently not being addressed in today’s marketplace.

Future Agriculture

When people think of farming, they typically conjure up images of a tractor cresting a hill billowing large plumes of exhaust into the air. This image will become a distant memory as automated machines, drones, and swarmbots enter the pictures. As with all industries, there are many micro-forces driving the changes in future agriculture. But there are three dominant trend lines – precision, relevance, and control – that will be driving this industry.

Plant-Jackers and Tree-Jackers – Plant and tree alteration specialists, who manipulate growth patterns, create grow-to-fit wood products, color-changing leaves, personalized fruit, etc.
Molecular Gastronomists
Bio-Meat Factory Engineers
Supply Chain Optimizers
Urban Agriculturalists – Why ship food all the way around the world when it can be grown next door.
Bio-Hacking Inspectors and Security
Swarmbot and Drone Operators and Managers
Plant Educators – An intelligent plant will be capable of re-engineering itself to meet the demands of tomorrow’s marketplace. Plant educators will not work with lesson plans or PowerPoint presentations, but the learning process will be even more effective.
Plant Psychologists & Plant Therapists – As we mess with the “minds” of the plants, there will invariably be any number of unplanned reactions.

The Dismantlers

Over the coming years will see a number of industries dismantled, and this will require a skilled workforce of talented people who can perform this task in the least disruptive way. It’s easy to spot these industries by their aging systems, facilities, and infrastructure. In many cases they have become unnecessary and unsustainable in the future, and will be scaled back to a fraction of their current size.

Prison System Dismantlers –Details here.
Hospital and Healthcare Dismantlers – Details here.
Income Tax System Dismantlers - Details here.
Government Agency Dismantlers – Details here.
Education System Dismantlers - Details here.
College and University Dismantlers - Details here.
Airport Security Systems Dismantlers
Airport Customs Dismantlers

Robotic earthworms are no longer a fantasy!

Extreme Innovation

Outside of the multiple categories listed above are a number of unusual jobs, many still decades away. Here are just a few to whet your appetite.

Extinction Revivalists – People who revive extinct animals.
Robotic Earthworm Drivers – The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills because that is where we have buried our most valuable natural resources. In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil.
Avatar Designers – Next generation avatars will become indistinguishable from humans on a two-dimensional screen. However, avatars will only live in the computer world for a short time longer. It is only a matter of time before they emerge from the computer and appear as visual beings, walking around among us. Once an avatar goes through the radical metamorphosis from an image that we see on a screen to a three dimensional being that joins us for dinner, carries on conversations with our friends, and serves as a stand-in for us at meetings, we will see work start on an even more realistic avatar, one that we can touch.
Gravity Pullers – The first wave of people to unlock the code for influencing gravity.
Time Hackers – If we think cyber terrorists are a pain, it will seem like nothing compared to devious jerry-riggers who start manipulating the time fabric of our lives.
Clone Ranchers – Raising “blank” humans will be similar in many respects to cattle ranching. But once a clone is selected, and the personality download is complete, the former clone will instantly be elevated to “human status.”
Body Part & Limb Makers – The Organ Agents listed above will quickly find themselves in a different line of work as soon as we figure out how to efficiently grow and mass produce our own organs from scratch.
Global System Architects – Our systems are transitioning from national systems into global systems. Architects of these new global systems will play a crucial role in future global politics.
Memory Augmentation Therapists – Entertainment is all about the great memories it creates. Creating a better grade of memories can dramatically change who we are and pave the way for an entirely new class of humans.
Time Brokers – Time Bank Traders – Where do you go when you run out of time? Naturally, to the time-bank, and take out a time-loan.
Space-Based Power System Designers – At some point, the burning of earth’s natural resources for power will become a thing of the past. Space-based systems will capture and transmit power far more efficiently than anything currently in existence.
Brain Quants – Where the stock market manipulators of the past meet the brain manipulators of the future to usurp control of marketing and messaging on Madison Avenue.
Nano-Weapons Specialists – Many of the weapons of the future will be too small to be seen by the human eye.
Lip Designers – If you could have any lips in the world, what would they look like?
Earthquake Forecasters – Everything we know about the inside of the earth has been developed through indirect evidence. We have no maps of the center of the earth. We have no accurate diagrams, no understanding of motion, fluidity, or changes happening with any degree of accuracy. While scientists are developing skills to work with nanoscale precision on the earth’s surface, the best we can muster below the surface is blindfolded guesswork done with 100-mile precision.
“Heavy Air” Engineers – Compressed air is useful in a wide variety of ways. However, we have yet to figure out how to compress streams of air as they pass through our existing atmosphere. Once we do, it will create untold opportunity for non-surface based housing and transportation systems, weather control, and other kinds of experimentation.
Amnesia Surgeons – Doctors who are skilled in removing bad memories or destructive behavior.
Geoengineers – Weather Control Specialists – We are moving past the age of meteorology and climatology to one where the true power-brokers will wield the forces of nature.

Final Thoughts

In much the same way that the 1985 Apple LaserWriter gave birth to desktop publishing, the 2010 MakerBot’s Thing-O-Matic 3D printer gave birth to desktop manufacturing.

Automation is no longer the domain of the elite few, and the quicker we can make the transition to all industries, the quicker everyone can participate.

The list above is just scratching the surface. When we automate jobs out of existence, that doesn’t mean there is no work left to do. We are freeing up human capital, and this human capital can be put to work creating millions of new jobs in thousands of new industries.

It will, however, require a whole new level of system thinking to unleash these pent up ambitions.

Please feel free to join in the discussion and weigh in with your thoughts below. Your ideas, comments, and opinions are much appreciated.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything

Solving a Billion-Person Problem

My friend, Peter Diamandis, likes to say, “The best way to become a billionaire is to solve a billion-person problem.”

When I first heard this phrase, I had difficulty imagining what a billion-person problem looked like.

A problem that affects a billion unique individuals is far different than one affecting a single person one billion times. Hmmm, one person loaded down with a billion problems? Sounds like most Mondays to me.

Putting that image aside, it’s hard to imagine getting rich from solving the plight of even a few massively problem-plagued individuals, but perhaps solving repeated problems happening to larger groups is not so farfetched.

Finding commonalities that create a billion-person community is also an interesting approach. As an example, somewhere between 10-15 percent of the world’s population is left-handed, upwards of a billion people. A recent study showed that left-handed people generally earn less money, so solving this obvious status impropriety may be a worthy cause.

It also occurred to me that solving a problem with a billion “occurrences” may work. What things happen over a billion times a year? This will include routine things like finding food to eat, water to drink, sleeping, talking to a friend, staying warm, staying cool, getting dressed, staying safe, and much more.

Framing the topic around time, such as saving a billion hours or minutes, may also work. To put this into perspective, a billion minutes equals 694,444 days or 1,902 years.

It was at this point that ideas began to take shape. Eliminating a billion starving moments, a billion moments of frustration, or a billion minutes of confusion started to make sense.

As we transition from national systems to global systems, will it be possible to create an additional billion units of fairness, compassion, empathy, freedom, or opportunity?

After thinking about this last question, it dawned on me how massively important every tiny system change will be when it happens on a global level. Here’s why this topic will play such a significant role in our global future.

14 Billion-Person Problems

Our systems determine our behavior and bad systems tend to drain the enthusiasm, capabilities, and the very lifeblood from our best and brightest. Here are a few obvious examples of our billion-person problems:

1.) Borders – Crossing borders is still a hassle, except for Europe where the EU has decided much of it was unnecessary.

Between 2004 – 2007 the European Union (EU) added 10 poorer, ex-communist countries to its ranks. Since EU citizens have the right to move freely from one country to the next, the 100 million people living in Central and Eastern Europe states could have easily migrated to the richer countries.

Since average incomes in Sweden were more than eight times higher than those in Romania, it would have been easy to anticipate many making a permanent move. Yet only about four million Eastern Europeans have migrated since 2004, while many come and go.

Rigid border crossing create friction and isolation, while open doors tend to be revolving ones.

Before the 1950s, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border was easy. Many Mexicans crossed to do seasonal work, but few settled. Most people preferred not to uproot their families.

Today’s regimented scrutiny for anyone crossing borders has created an either-or situation, forcing those in dire straits to simply go underground. As a result, the practice of circumventing traditional border controls has become well defined and human trafficking, a huge business.

Solving the issues surrounding the massive, time-sucking border-crossing process is easily a billion-person opportunity.

2.) Roaming Charges – Anyone who accidentally switched on their data-roaming while in a foreign country knows the kind of expensive telecom landmines they’ve just unleashed.

While the European Commission planned to blaze a new trail and scrap the fees by the end of 2015, the effort was vetoed by EU countries themselves with a decision to leave mobile roaming charges in place until the end of 2018.

Even though there are tons of workarounds, using services like Skype, Tox, Slack, and Viber, there remains a billion-person opportunity inside this problem.

3.) Privacy – Two years have now passed since Edward Snowden broke ranks with the NSA’s spy culture, showing the world what kind of holes we have in our so-call private lives.

At the same time, the number of bad actors intent on taking down entire countries is climbing and surveillance technologies are a hugely important tool for tracking down those with evil intent.

More security means less privacy, and more convenience means less security. Much like playing a constant rock-paper-scissors game, we are still a long ways from solving the privacy-security-convenience game.

So where does that leave our privacy? If you have a solution for the privacy dilemma, you will be solving one of life’s great billion-person problems.

4.) Pollution – Anyone walking around big cities in China knows how important it is to have windy days. But wind is a poor solution to a pollution problem that could have been eliminated at the source.

However factory pollution is only a small piece of a much larger puzzle. There are now over 100,000 ships on the world’s oceans and the largest ones will emit as much as 5,000 tons of sulfur in a single year, roughly the equivalent of 50 million cars. This is far more than a billion-person problem, it’s an every-person problem.

5.) Access to Clean Water – Of all the water on planet earth, only 2% is actually fresh water. And because of all the difficulties accessing fresh water, only about 25% is accessible at any given time. This means the entire human race survives on 0.05% of all of the world’s water. Somewhere in the middle of all this unusable water is a billion-person opportunity.

6.) Person-to-Person Payments – Similar to handing someone a $20 bill, only in digital form, peer-to-peer payment systems are already beginning to spring to life. According to Forrester Research, this market will be worth about $4 billion by 2017 and grow exponentially from there.

7.) Paying Taxes – As a general statement, our existing tax systems are far too complicated and the time it takes to prepare and file taxes is a complex form of labor that virtually no one recoups.

8.) Access to Healthcare – According to the World Health Organization, 57 countries face a severe health-care workforce crisis. The shortage of health-care workers represents a major roadblock toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals blueprint, agreed by all countries and leading developmental institutions, to meet the needs of the world’s poorest people by 2015.

According to a recent World Health Organization report, about 2.36 million health-care workers and 1.9 million managerial and support positions are needed worldwide. But that’s only part of the deficiency. They estimate that nearly 1 billion people worldwide have almost no access to essential health services due to a global shortage of 7.2 million healthcare workers.

9.) Global Surgeries – Of the 313 million operations performed in 2012, only 6% percent were performed in low and middle-income countries where over a third the world’s population lives. This means that an additional 143 million operations are needed each year just to meet the basic disease burden in these countries.

10.) Gender Equality – The United States ranks 65th in wage equality for similar work, according to a World Economic Forum study of 142 countries. In 2013, women who worked full-time, year-round in the United States were paid 78 cents for every dollar earned on average by men, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That gap, though, is worse for women of color: Black women make 64 cents and Latinas make 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white man.

In addition, a total of nine countries in the world do not guarantee maternity leave – United States, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Suriname and Tonga.

We still have a long ways to go to achieve anything close to gender equality in the world, and with over half of the global population being female, this is far more than a billion-person problem.

11.) Access to Capital – Capital has been migrating from rich countries to developing nations over the past several decades, but the movement of funds from the U.S. dollar, euro and yen markets to the capital-scarce emerging economies around the world has not kept pace.

Central to this issue is the lack of a “trust architecture,” workforce talent, and regulatory consistency. As example, a country without credit bureaus, accounting standards, and stock exchanges lacks the basic infrastructure to build an entrepreneurial culture with the financial backing to compete in the global marketplace.

12.) Technology Access – In the developed world technology has transformed our lives, allowing us to access information at any time from an ever-growing number of devices. Tasks once performed by grueling effort have been reduced to a single click or tap.

The good news is that information technology itself may be a major part of the solution. With the decreasing costs of smartphones and tablets in the developing world we are seeing entire new populations accessing the Internet.

13.) Educational Access – Studies have shown we now face a global teacher shortage of over 18 million worldwide with over 23% of today’s young people attending no school at all.

In addition, a recent McKinsey Global Institute study shows the global labor force will be approaching 3.5 billion in 2030, of which 60% will need to be retrained or have additional skills added to their daily routine by 2025.

Technology may provide some of the answers, but we will still be facing a billion-person education opportunity over the coming years.

14.) Sleep – Researchers at the Warwick Medical School have found that 16.6% of the world’s population reporting insomnia and other severe sleep disturbances. Similar studies in Canada and the U.S. have found rates as high as 20%.

Many who work on sleep research now view it as an emerging global epidemic with well over a billion people feeling the ongoing torture of sleepless nights.

Final Thoughts

The 14 problems listed above, and their countless derivative sub-issues, are intended to help spark your imagination. As a rough guess, I would estimate well over a thousand of these billion-person problems in existence today, with many of them centered around wasting time.

I often think about the billion moment-sucking black holes that have been incorporated into our global system architecture.

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 precious time is being coopted by everyone from inconsiderate businesses, to overbearing government, to painful security checks at the airport.

This is what I call “time pollution.”

Time pollution is far more than a billion-person problem, it’s an every-person problem.

Like a leaky sieve carrying our daily time supply, however much we start with is never even close to what we end up with. And while most of us enter life feeling like we have squanderable amounts of time to work with, as we get older, our rapidly dwindling years reveal a much different story.

Whether it’s time shortages, access to resources, or deficiencies in human capital, our growing awareness of global problems is also creating an awareness of global opportunities.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue. I know I’ve missed many, so please take a moment to add your thoughts in the comments below. In my mind, it’s far less about becoming a billionaire and far more about becoming a global hero.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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When the “Things” we buy know more about us than we know about them

What if the things you were thinking about buying already knew you were considering a purchase? Much like going on a date, where the person you were dating wanted to look their best for you, what if the product went through a similar process, primping it’s hair and donning an inviting smile to present itself in the best possible light?

Welcome to the Internet of Things, where our intentions always precede us.

The simple act of inspecting a product, or weighing its potential, will cause ten times as many sensors and emotion-analyzing algorithms to peer back. Your prospective product will be inspecting you far more thoroughly than you’ll be inspecting it.

Yes, this kind of reverse surveillance has traditionally been done in the digital world, where our search history and traffic patterns become fodder for marketing gurus everywhere. But physical products are in no way immune from these kinds anticipatory algorithms.

In their own conniving ways, future “things” products will use a variety of tools to position themself in a better light. Much like the lone Snickers bar that always manages to work its way to the edge of the shelf and say “pick me, pick me” when you’re most vulnerable, ingenious new products combined with smart merchandising will manipulate everything from viewing angles, to lighting, ambient sounds, smells, and subtle but attention-getting music, all for the sole purpose of pushing you a millimeter or two closer to that all important wallet zone.

Every consumer comes with a complex bundle of wants and needs. As a casual observer it’s rare that someone could pick up on the miniscule visual queues given off by most buyers. But we are constantly emitting information. Tons of it.

The same micro-gestures that make us bad at the game of poker, make us infinitely more readable, and consequently infinitely more impressionable, than we would ever suspect.

Unlike data junkies that rely on activities from the past to predict future purchases, “things” products will be able to tell what we’re thinking now, and even anticipate what we’ll do next.

Welcome to the world where our products are smarter than we are, and the marketing professional of the future becomes the all-knowing strategy wizard lurking behind the proverbial curtain.

Welcome to the Internet of Things, where our intentions always precede us

The Unfair Seller’s Advantage

The Internet of Things is all about objects talking to other objects.

In the past, being a salesman was hard work. It was typically a numbers game where talking to enough people and making enough house calls would inevitably pay off.

But over the coming years, the simple act of stepping into a retail store will instantly trigger tens of thousands of simultaneous conversations where the clothing racks and jewelry displays will talk to our belt buckles, earrings, shoes, and purse, and those conversations will be instantly relayed to our refrigerators, cars, closets, and televisions.

Even before we reach the first clothing rack or jewelry counter, the store will have constructed an elaborate customer profile and sale strategy, setting off a series of imperceptible little signals that will cause us to wander into the areas of the store with the highest potential for sales.

Much like an under-floor magnet that controls the movements of a rolling steel ball, consumers will be coaxed, coerced, and prodded with a series of hyper-personalize sensory queues that let us feel like we’ve still in control even though we’re not.

To avoid any possible allegation that we’re being overly manipulated, marketing professionals will be quick to assure us that we won’t be buying a single item that we don’t already have an underlying desire and predilection towards.

Similar to going to a pet store and having adorable little puppies furiously wagging their tails to get your attention, future products will do their best to emulate the puppy buying experience.

Would you buy a robot simply because you felt sorry for it?

When Robots Sell Themselves

In the past, great product designers knew how to create something that would elicit an emotional response. Everything including color, style, shape, utility, purpose, and packaging all formed the basis for how we think about that product.

But products are no longer confined to the physical space they occupy.

Consider the following scenario.

The year is 2035 and you need a new robot to help out around the home. Buying robots online is never the same as buying them in person, so you decide to go down to the nearby Robots-R-Us retail store and see what they have in stock.

Unlike most retail stores, there are no humans that work in this store. Unbeknownst to you, the Robots-R-Us sales system started tracking you the very moment you decided to visit the store.

Every burp, butt scratch, fleeting glance, and foot fidget is logged and calibrated to optimize your in-store experience.

As you enter the store, the first robot to approach you is the one you’ll feel most comfortable being greeted by, but it won’t be the one you’ll end up buying.

Since they know you pride yourself on making calculated decisions, the sales process will involve introducing you to a series of increasingly capable machines, knowing all along the exact amount you’ll eventually spend, and the exact machine you’ll be buying.

It’s a sales grooming process, and robots know far more about playing human games than people know about playing robot games.

Robots, however, are not one-size-fits-all machines. Future robots will be morphable, resizable, and have a personality that continually readjusts itself to mesh with yours.

Not only will it exhibit its own form of puppy-dog cuteness to get you to lower your guard, but it will incorporate the touch and feel, vocal qualities, and facial gesture you find most appealing.

In the future, products that don’t have the ability to transform their touch and feel experience to mesh with yours will feel lifeless and foreign. It will only take one buying experience with the next generation of the Internet of Things to get totally hooked on it.

 

Final Thoughts

Yes, this may be a frightening scenario. Humans gradually giving up control, one purchase at a time, to tomorrow’s super smart products and their subversive marketing algorithms, is not only a novel concept, but one we can all identify with.

I won’t even get started on the potential for “things” products to blackmail us into purchasing them, but very likely next-gen hackers will be all about pushing our most-embarrassing-moments buttons to make us do their bidding.

Contrary to the way problems have been solved in the past, simply writing new regulations and policies will have little affect on conversational networks where the actual criminals will be ten steps removed from any actual crime.

At the same time, our profit-driven businesses will likely embrace early generations of this type of marketing. Since it’s still all about profits, those who master the fine art of coercion will invariably come out on top.

I realize that this column has deteriorated woefully from and an inspired look at how marketing could evolve during the coming Internet of Things age, to a depressingly bad set of options over the years ahead. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Where are the silver linings in these scenarios? Are we really destined to become victims of our own marketing? What kind of controls will we need to prevent abuses with this technology?

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By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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Three Laws of Exponential Capabilities – Video

We are entering into a world where driverless vehicles will eliminate millions of driving positions; robotic systems will work relentlessly day and night eliminating millions of manufacturing, welding, painting, and assembly positions; and things that seemed impossible to automate in the past will have computers and machines replacing people’s jobs.

At the same time, the amount of time it takes to build ships and skyscrapers, create massive data storage centers for all our growing volumes of information, or produce global wireless networks for all our devices has dropped significantly. But along with each of these drops is a parallel increase in our capabilities and our expectations.

For these reasons, I’d like to reframe the discussion by proposing the following “Laws of Exponential Capabilities”:

LAW #1: With automation, every exponential decrease in effort creates an equal and opposite exponential increase in capabilities.

LAW #2: As today’s significant accomplishments become more common, mega-accomplishments will take their place.

LAW #3: As we raise the bar for our achievements, we also reset the norm for our expectations.

As you read the rest of this column, you’ll find an abridged version of the Three Laws of Exponential Capabilities. Full version here.

LAW #1 – With automation, every exponential decrease in effort creates an equal and opposite exponential increase in capabilities.

When it takes less effort to do something, we naturally do more things. This has been proven out time and again throughout the centuries.

To illustrate this point, here are three industries that have radically changed humanity over the past centuries – Transportation, Photography, and Media.

1.) Transportation: Thinking in terms of our travel capabilities, if we use the average transportation speeds in Richard Florida’s “Great Reset,” we can extrapolate an exponential growth in the number of miles the average person will travel over their lifetime.

1850 – Average speed 4 mph – Traveling 4 miles per day X 50 year life expectancy = 73,000 miles.
1900 – Average speed 8 mph – Traveling 8 miles per day X 60 year life expectancy = 175,200 miles.
1950 – Average speed 24 mph – Traveling 24 miles per day X 70 year life expectancy = 613,200 miles.
2000 – Average speed 75 mph – Traveling 75 miles per day X 80 year life expectancy = 2,190,000 miles.
2050 – Average speed 225-250 mph (projected) – Traveling 225 miles per day X 90 year life expectancy = 7,391,250 miles.

We have transitioned from slow and difficult forms of transportation to fast and painless. Going from 73,000 to 7.3 million miles in a lifetime is a 100X increase in human mobility.

2.) Photography: The famous photograph titled, “View from the Window at Le Gras” by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, was one of the first photos ever taken and the oldest surviving one.

Photography started as a slow and arduous process in the 1800s requiring exacting precision and lots of time. With the introduction of cheaper and better cameras, film, and processing the number of photos taken began working its way up the exponential growth curve.

But it wasn’t until recently, with the birth of digital cameras in our phones and free storage, that the number of photos per day really took off.

Currently there are roughly 350 million photos a day loaded onto Facebook. If we assume the pictures loaded onto Facebook only represent a small fraction of the total, say 10%, that would mean we are taking 3.5 billion photos every day, or 1.3 trillion per year. As amazing as that sounds, that’s probably a very low number.

LAW #2 – As today’s significant accomplishments become more common, mega-accomplishments will take their place.

It is no longer reasonable to assume the same mega-project that have challenged us in the past will be the same size and scale of the mega projects that will be needed to challenge us in the future.

Living in a world where our ever-expanding use of automation and AI is reducing the human contribution in nearly every achievement, we are also witnessing a dilution in the value of past benchmarks.

For this reason, a new generation of mega accomplishments are beginning to surface.

One example of a next generation mega project is the Elon Musk – Daryl Oster proposed transportation system where specially designed capsules are placed into sealed vacuum tubes and shot, much like rockets, to their destination. While high-speed trains are breaking the 300 mph speed barrier, tube transportation has the potential of reaching speeds of 4,000 mph, turning it into a form of “space travel on earth.”

Even though tube travel like this will beat every other form of transportation in terms of speed, power consumption, pollution, and safety, the big missing element is its infrastructure, a tube network envisioned to combine well over 100,000 miles of connected links.

While many look at this and see the lack of infrastructure as a huge obstacle, it is just the opposite, one of the biggest opportunities ever.

Constructing the tube network has the potential of becoming the largest infrastructure project the earth has ever seen, with a projected 50-year build-out employing hundreds of millions people along the way.

The 15-year difference in animation quality between

Pixar’s Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 3 (Click for hi res image)

LAW #3 – As we raise the bar for our achievements, we also reset the norm for our expectations.

When Pixar released the first Toy Story in 1995, it was the first feature film to be produced entirely with computer animation. Naturally it looked a little rough around the edges compared to the new stuff, but it represented a massive breakthrough in the way animated films were produced.

Fifteen years later, in 2010, when Toy Story 3 was released, the Pixar team raised the bar considerably on the quality and detail of the animation. It didn’t take them less time to produce, but instead they dedicated tremendous effort to raising the quality standard. (The photo above is a great illustration of the difference.)

Crazy-Big Projects of the Future

Whether it’s building the Great Pyramids in Egypt, erecting the Great Wall of China, or sending someone to the moon, crazy-big projects have a way of defining our humanity and raising the bar for future generations.

As our capabilities improve, we simply need to set our sights higher and aim for the stars…. literally!

Naturally there are a few downsides to our expanded capabilities. Addictions can become exponentially more addictive. Dangerous people can become exponentially more dangerous. And global conflicts have the potential of becoming exponentially more disastrous.

With all of our increased capabilities, perhaps the one we are lacking the most is our ability to anticipate problems.

That said I‘d love to hear your thoughts. What’s missing, what needs to be reworked, and where is this most and least applicable?

We will all be spending the rest of our lives in the future, so we all have a vested interest in understanding it better.

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By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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The Coming Era of Alternative Credentialing

 

Earlier this week the DaVinci Institute became the first organization in the world to offer Microdegrees® to the graduates of the Institute’s coding school, DaVinci Coders. People who complete courses in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Swift/iOS, and Game Development will all be on track to receive this new form of credentialing.

Working as a launch-partner with Atlanta-based Edevate, the Microdegree® is new form of digital credential that certifies someone has completed 1,000 hours of learning in a professional discipline. Completing a Microdegree will be the equivalent of a full year of undergraduate upper level courses.

According to Gordon Rogers, President and Cofounder of Edevate, “Our goal is to reinvent credentialing. This is similar to the introduction of iTunes, which offered consumers the option to purchase a single track instead of the entire album.”

Expanding the notion of credentialing, Edevate plans to offer Microdegrees to students completing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), coding schools, and other competency-based programs. The Microdegree is similar to Udacity’s Nanodegree, but it is institutionally agnostic, meaning that it can be earned by combining programs offered through many different institutions, with the freedom to stack and blend different types of educational experiences.

Students who are granted a Microdegree will receive a printable PDF diploma along with a digital badge linked to a transcript that describes the educational experience they just went through.

Microdegree candidates can also test out of certain courses by completing an Educational Testing Service’s Major Field Test. Major Field Tests are comprehensive undergraduate and MBA outcomes assessments that measure a person’s knowledge and understanding in a certain field of study.

At the DaVinci Institute, we’re excited about breaking the mold of traditional credentialing, but our sense is this is just the beginning of many new cracks that will be forming in the ivory towers of traditional education.

Here is an expansive view of the options you will have with alternative credentialing over the coming years.

Udacity’s Nanodegree

Last year, Sebastian Thrun and his team at the innovative education company, Udacity, launched a new form of credentialing called the “NanoDegree.”

Working in partnership with AT&T, Udacity is offering online courses focused on entry-level software skills that can be completed in less than a year. The cost to the student is roughly $200 a month. As part of this arrangement, AT&T will offer paid internships to some of the NanoDegree graduates.

So far AT&T is the only company that has committed to hire graduates holding the NanoDegree credential, and only 100 in total, but it’s a start.

Even though AT&T was the only one making the commitment, other companies like Cloudera, Autodesk and Salesforce.com have all endorsed the degree.

For many years, companies like Cisco and Microsoft have offered certification programs that provide tech workers with specialized skills to work with their products. This adds a unique twist to professional credentialing.

But Sebastian Thrum has much bigger plans for the NanoDegree than just certification programs, sighting, “The intent is to make this a new industry-wide platform.”

Enter Edevate’s Microdegree

Much like Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, Edevate’s founders, Gareth Genner and Gordon Rogers, are disruptive thinkers determined to blaze new trails in higher education.

In addition to the DaVinci Institute, Edevate is in discussions with a number of MOOCs and coding schools as well as regionally accredited colleges and universities that are interested in both adopting Microdegrees and granting transfer credits.

Taking it one step further, Edevate has already curated over 8,800 free & low cost educational resources on their website, www.edevate.com, that can be used to earn MicroCredits towards a Microdegree. Through the Edevate platform, users can maintain a lifelong Universal TranscriptTM of their educational experiences and growing bank of credentials.

Learning and MicroCredits

Learning takes time, but not always the same amount of time.

With DaVinci Coders we’ve found that 1,000 hours of proficiency is usually enough to gain an entry-level position in the industry. But not everyone is cut out to be a computer programmer, so some will still not be qualified even after 10,000 hours of work.

For this reason, the idea of 1,000 hours of learning is based on averages – an average learner, spending 1,000 hours, gaining an average level of proficiency.

At the same time, learning happens in far smaller units than 1,000-hour blocks, so we also created the MicroCredit based on just one hour of learning, and fractional MicroCredits for the ultra tiny learning bits.

From a credentialing perspective, how important will it be in the future to validate every hour of learning? To some, it may be far more important than you realize.

Eighteen MicroCredit Scenarios

Here are a number of MicroCredit scenarios designed to expand your thinking and help you grasp the significance of this opportunity.

1. Watching a Movie – If someone goes to a movie, and takes a short test afterwards, should they be eligible to earn 2-3 microcredits? Is this a cultured learning experience equal to reading a book? If this option is made available, movie studios will jump on this in a heartbeat as a way of validating their value.

2. Reading a Book – Similar to the movie scenario, every publisher in the country will be interested in offering credits for people who read their books and take a test.

3. Watching TED Talks – TED conferences attract brilliant speakers who make their topics fun and interesting. Since these talks are generally around 20 minutes, could 3 TED talk, followed by short tests, be valued at 1 MicroCredit?

4. Playing Video Games – Even though video game cultures often get trashed in academia, those who master the intricate skills necessary to earn high-level rankings know it’s not easy. Once again, if game developers were able to grant MicroCredits inside their games for certain levels of achievement, it will instantly change our cultural perspective on the game industry.

5. Foreign Travel – With foreign travel becoming increasingly common, it tends to hold less value today than in the past, but is still recognized as a significant form of learning. Will someone create an (X*travel=Y*MicroCredits) algorithm?

6. Filing for a Patent – The process of filing for a patent is a noteworthy accomplishment that may be worth several MicroCredits.

7. Producing an Event – Events range from small to huge. But producing a successful event is a unique form of learning that will cause others to take notice. Again, is there a MicroCredit algorithm that can be applied?

8. Memberships – Credit by association. Should association memberships come with MicroCredits? The credibility of an association adds to the credibility of you as an individual.

9. Start a Business – Launching a business is a significant learning experience regardless of how successful it becomes. Did someone say “MicroCredit algorithm?”

10. Published a Book – Writing and publishing a book is a major accomplishment worthy of MicroCredits.

11. Produce a Documentary – There is something noble and noteworthy about producing a documentary, and the entire exercise puts documentarians into a class of their own. On a learning scale, what is that worth?

12. Foreign Travel with a Cause – Whether you’re working with Engineers Without Borders creating bridges or water systems for desolate villages, or working with Teachers without Borders and teaching young people a much needed craft, foreign travel that is tied to a cause will be worth far more in MicroCredits than travel by itself.

13. Serve on a City Council – Local elections have a way of validating your status in the community and serves as a wonderful learning experience.

14. Commissioned Artwork – Artwork is only as important as the artist who tells the story. Commissioned art brings with it a rare form of learning as well as a unique position of honor.

15. Learning a Foreign Language – Learning a language in a classroom setting is vastly different than learning it on the streets of a foreign city. Each level of proficiency could be worth multiple MicroCredits.

16. Creating a High-Traffic Website – The size of your digital footprint is directly proportional to your online status. Should increased status be recognized with MicroCredits?

17. Becoming a Dog Breeder – Dog breeders learn things that cannot be taught in a classroom. They also hold prominence in social circles far beyond the pet-owner community.

18. Being Elected to a Higher Office – When people vote someone into office, it’s a unique and powerful way of telling the world they are important. Until now, there has been no way of credentialing this kind of learning experience.

The 18 examples above are just a tiny slice of spectrum when it comes to assigning credits and MicroCredits to our daily learning experiences. Many questions remain, but the key to a brighter future may come in the form of automating the assignment of MicroCredits to our best and brightest.

Categories and Taxonomies for MicroCredits

The examples above are all vastly different kinds of learning. Learning languages, filing patents, creating art, or producing a documentary all involve unique forms of learning.

Should Microdegrees be formed around a single topic or a combination of multiple topics?

Colleges have created specific taxonomies for categorizing credits like math, social sciences, humanities, etc.

But MicroCredits are far more granular in nature, creating the potential for new ways of grouping and qualifying skills.

Over time, Edevate will become a credit bank for MicroCredits and other types of life-learning achievements. As we move further down the path of alternative credentialing, many of these questions will get sorted out.

Final Thoughts

When someone hands you a resume in the future, how important will it be to list the 5-7 Microdegrees you’ve earned over the past few years? Will it be more important than your B.A. in fine arts?

If someone watches 1,000 TED videos, will they be better educated than someone who earns a traditional college degree? In many cases yes, but it doesn’t come with the “hands-on doing” that creates a well-rounded learning experience.

The type of learning that comes from building your own home, or programming your own wearable tech, or starting your own distillery are far different than sitting in a classroom learning abstract concepts. These types of experiences have been grossly undervalued in the past, at least from a credentialing perspective.

On one level, Microdegrees need to be hacker-proof, scam-artist-proof, rigorously monitored, with checks-and-balances that make them highly valued in the marketplace. In short, they need to be “micro prestigious.”

At the same time, they also need to add meaning and expand our notion of what’s truly valuable in life. This, in turn, will force us to rethink what makes something credit-worthy.

Many of life’s greatest experiences have been undervalued because of our narrow perspective of authenticating value in learning. Over the coming years, we’ll see a huge need to reskill our workforce, and as this unfolds, Microdegrees, or something like it, have the potential to become the most recognizable credential in the world.”

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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