Thomas Frey's Blog, page 37

The Massive Opportunity coming for Ground-Based Delivery Drones

On a recent trip from Montreal to Denver, Air Canada managed to misplace my one piece of luggage.

Since I travel extensively around the world, it’s rare that I have my bags checked, but this time they insisted because of the size of the aircraft. I reluctantly agreed, and they proceeded to lose it somewhere between Montreal and my connecting flight in Toronto.

None of this is terribly unusual. Air travel is a highly complicated system and bags get lost and have to be delivered to people’s houses all the time.

As I arrived in Denver, I felt strangely free. I already knew my bag wasn’t going to be there, so I knew I could take off without dealing with my heavy bag, or dragging it through the parking lot to my car and wrestling it into the trunk.

It occurred to me that many people would be willing to pay for this freedom, especially if it didn’t cost too much.

According to the Wall Street Journal, every lost bag today costs the airlines over $100 per bag, with much of that expense going to the company that delivers the bag to your home. But if that cost was reduced to a fraction of what it is today, and handled with a fully automated delivery system, not only would lost bags become far less of an issue, they’d open the door to entire new opportunities.

If bags could be delivered to your home for $10, many people would jump at this opportunity. For people riding a bus or train to the airport, this would be a no-brainer.

This type of delivery is far different than the flying drone delivery that has become such a hot topic, with the FAA positioning themselves as the gatekeeper for all things flying.

As I have written in a previous column, flying drones will soon be regulated by weight, distance, noise, etc. But automated ground-based delivery will have far fewer limitations and far less scrutiny.

That said, there are still a few technical hurdles to overcome, including the last 100 feet.

 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dominoes Pizza’s “Domi” experimental delivery drone

Pizza Delivery

Since pizza delivery has become such a staple of today’s “dine anytime” culture, Dominoes has been experimenting with various automated delivery schemes.

Using a driverless motorcycle such as the one above, that uses gyros to stay balanced and an onboard texting system to alert customers that their pizza is near, solves many of the problems involved in food delivery.

Delivering hot food to a waiting customer is vastly different that delivering a package to someone who may or may not be home.

As an example, those waiting for food are typically willing to walk to the street to pick up a delivery. Curbside delivery is vastly different than a front door delivery.

Flying Delivery Drones Vs. Ground Based Delivery Drones

From a technology standpoint, the biggest problem with home delivery will be the “last 100 feet.” Going from a curb along the road to a front door typically involves climbing steps, broken sidewalks, weeds, bushes, gravel pathways, mud, pets, and much more.

From an engineering standpoint, the design process will have to account for even the most absurd edge cases. Dog leashes tangled in the wheels, falling leaves obscuring machine vision, hail, rainstorms, neighborhood kids trying to steal the package, bird droppings, and insects are only scratching the surface.

Flying drones eliminate many of the friction points between a machine and the ground it drives or walks on. But there are still many delivery issues that come into play with flying drones and cramped spaces near a front door such as on porches with screen doors and hanging plants.

Since all airborne vehicles are restricted by weight, only a tiny percentage of all packages will be good candidates for the flying drone option. For a number of reasons ranging from security issues to certified pilot requirements, it will also become rather expensive.

For the foreseeable future, the vast majority of package delivery will happen with ground-based vehicles. The question then remains, how much of the delivery process can be automated, and at what point can the vast majority of human labor be eliminated from the system?

Driverless Delivery

Image searches on Google and Bing have a way of tapping into our current level of thinking about a problem, and very few people have really thought through the problem sets involved in delivering a package from a warehouse to a home when there are so many unpredictable obstacles involved.

At the same time, every corporate executive from FedEx, to UPS, to the U.S. Postal Service would like to reduce labor costs.

We continue to transition from delivering pallets to retailers, to delivering packages directly to the home. Rather than spending hours wandering through a shopping mall, we can find what we want with a few clicks of the mouse and it will magically appear on our doorstep the next day.

With automated delivery services, “next day” delivery can be reduced to “next hour” delivery, with the cheapest form of delivery happening in the middle of the night when the least amount of traffic is on the road.

Perhaps a better solution would be to create a curbside automated delivery box for every residence, similar to our mailboxes, with an automated text messaging system that alerts people whenever a delivery has been made.

David Porter’s Smart Box

In much the same way homeowners cover the costs for specialty trash containers that match the semi-automated trash trucks on the road today, homeowners could easily be required to install next-generation mailboxes designed to work with automated delivery machines.

In the late 1990s, I spent time working with David Porter, an ingenious inventor based in Kansas City who had developed and patented an automated delivery box he called SmartBox. As you can see from the photos, a delivery box like this can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including some that were as inconspicuous as a park bench with secured spaces hidden below the seat.

After spending several years trying to get industry leaders to take notice, David finally moved on to other ventures, resigning himself to the fact that he was a couple decades ahead of his time. However, given the chance, entrepreneurs and inventors like David are ready and eager to help solve the problems associated with automated delivery.

Final Thoughts

A recent Discovery Magazine article was titled, “Drone Delivery Services Are Booming In China.” In the column the writer claimed that “the state of drone couriers in China couldn’t contrast more with the situation here in the United States.”

SF Express, China’s largest mail carrier, is currently delivering over 500 packages a day with flying drones. Alibaba is also experimenting with delivering teas via drone.

Drone manufacturer XAircraft, the company that provides all the drones for SF Express, is anticipating their fleet will soon reach several thousand units, with daily deliveries climbing exponentially.

What’s missing from the article, though, is how small these numbers are in comparison to the overall volume of package delivery.

Yes, flying delivery drones will soon become a huge booming industry, but an even bigger opportunity is looming for ground-based delivery drones and all of the systems that will make driverless pizza delivery as common as using ATM machines today.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

.

All those Damn Laws! Over 18 Million Laws in the U.S… and climbing!

How many laws are affecting you as you’re reading this today?

If you think you know the answer, I will tell you you’re lying, and there is a law against lying about how many laws there are.

I really don’t know that there is, but then again, you really don’t know that there isn’t. So we could both be in trouble.

However, I do know that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is something I’ve heard many times in the past, but I have no clue as to whether it’s really law or just something judges use to belittle people into feeling guilty.

Thinking through the title for this column, I have to admit that I have no idea how many laws truly exist in the U.S. But then again, neither does anyone else.

They’re simply not countable. There is no central place for our laws, no common form, style, or accessibility requirements; only some level of hope that once enacted, people will pay attention to them.

Here’s why this is such a confusing issue.

The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. Every city, county, state, and special taxing district has its own governing body with its own elected officials.

Taking on many of the characteristics of living, breathing organisms, these governmental organizations are constantly fighting for influence, control, and survival.

Each one of these governmental entities has an ability to create and enforce its own laws, rules, and regulations. Working with a limited set of tools in their toolbox, governments have resorted to using laws and regulations to solve virtually every conceivable problem. The sheer volume of laws emerging from these 90,000 rule-making bodies is truly stunning.

It may indeed total 18 million.

With a society that is already heavily invested in our current systems, and people already pre-programmed to think and act accordingly, what we need is a system for changing the system.

Here’s what I would propose.

Society’s Operating System

Much like a computer operating system, our body of laws serves as the code for all citizens to abide by.

From a computer nerd perspective, writing a computer program that uses 18 million lines of code to accomplish the same thing as one with 1,800 lines would be considered a massively bloated program.

That’s exactly what’s happening with our laws. As an operating system, they demand far too much human energy and intellectual bandwidth to keep each of these fiefdoms running.

Making matters worse is the lack of any central repository for our laws. Some only exist on scraps of paper stored in filing cabinets in courthouses, while others have been meticulously stored in books and other digital medium.

Using another computer analogy, the lack of a central repository is like trying to operate a computer without a central cache for its memory.

This leaves us with a very dysfunctional operating system, and the only way to change an operating system is to rewrite the source code.

Proposing a Solution

We currently have no check-and-balance for impeding the excessive law-writing now taking place.

For this reason I would propose a four-step system for correcting the system. These are what I refer to as the “four laws for managing the laws:”

1.) Public Access Requirement: Make it a requirement that all laws be posted in one central online location – one central website for all laws. Any laws not posted on this website will be deemed unenforceable.

2.) Sunset Provision: Any laws that have not been applied or enforced in that past 20 years become unenforceable and must be removed from the list. Time spent getting rid of the clutter means less time for creating new laws.

3.) Simplification Mandate: All laws must be written on an 8th grade comprehension level. No laws can go into effect until they are certified as having been written on this level.

4.) Code of Government Ethics: No governmental entity will be allowed to directly profit from the enforcement of its own laws. The control of wealth is just as insidious as taking ownership of it. Whenever there’s a direct profit motive linked to law enforcement, the nature of government changes, and our humanity becomes compromised.

If I could add a fifth requirement, it would be that all new laws be game tested prior to implementation.

For many, the process of modeling and game testing our systems is a cause with epic meaning, something that many would want to participate in

Game designers would love the challenge. Game players will enjoy being part of something far bigger than themselves. Even politicians would love it because it gives them a logical path for answers.

However, taking these steps is only part of the answer.

Reigning in the Unreignable

Technology ends up being the great enabler of complexity. Is it possible for technology to take our existing super complex set of laws and turn them into something manageable, even reasonable?

If all of the laws are in a central place, we can develop artificially intelligent systems that can read, understand, and know how to apply them. Smartphones and other AI devices can let us know when we’re in a gray area or about to violate a law.

Applying machine learning to our courts and justice systems will finally make the phrase, “ignorance of the law is no defense,” a viable concept.

We won’t need to personally know the laws, our devices will do that for us. They will serve as our guide, our coach, and in some respects, even our conscience.

Is it reasonable to assume that morality can be automated, that our societal norms and human faux pas can be reined in?

Final Thoughts

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”

Does that mean, by extension, that automating a system for managing and enforcing all our laws will make us dysfunctional? Or will it simply make us more efficient?

Does the notion of having a machine that can tell us the difference between right and wrong scare you?

The rogue philosopher in me says this is the worse idea ever. But at the same time, the entrepreneur in me thinks there may be a golden opportunity for turning it into something great.

That said, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Could this give rise to a better grade of humanity, or the worst idea you’ve ever heard? I would love to hear your thoughts.

.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

 .

Living the Life of Bubble People and Unlocking the Next Phase of Human Existence

Having been born and raised on a small rural farm in South Dakota, I grew up with a very narrow perspective of the rest of the world.

With only two TV channels and three radio stations to pick from, our news options were very limited.

As a teenager, watching the nightly newscasts on television, I was thoroughly amazed at all of the things happening around the world, and yet none of them were happening near me.

I truly felt like I was living in a bubble, far away from all the excitement.

But I wasn’t alone. People everywhere were still getting used to the new technology, and limited TV and radio access wasn’t just a South Dakota issue.

For the most part, I didn’t know what I was missing, so inside my bubble were all the families and neighbors I hung out with. Much like me, they didn’t know what they were missing.

In understanding “bubble cultures,” there are micro-bubbles like the farm community I was raised in, and macro-bubbles that affect entire countries, planets, or civilizations as a whole.

Few people realize that humanity today is being confined to a macro-bubble. Our limited grasp of today’s technology, coupled with our limited understanding of the world, and just the limitations of being human, blind us from seeing our true potential.

In short, we’re living our lives as bubble people, limiting our view of the world to what we know, what we can prove, and what “the experts” say is possible.

But the bubble we’re in is not permanently confining or unbreakable. Over the past few centuries we have indeed been stretching the size and shape of our bubble, but even though it’s far bigger today, we still have a long ways to go to see what’s on the outside.

So is there an “outside” to our bubble?

The short answer is yes. In fact, the most exciting areas of the future will happen outside our current bubble. For this reason, I’d like to take you on a short journey to the other side of the bubble and an expansive view of human existence in the years ahead.

 

Eight Dimensions – Pushing the Envelope of Human Existence 

In the past, I’ve talked about how technological unemployment is a double-edged sword. On one hand people’s jobs are being automated out of existence, but at the same time, we’re freeing up human capital.

It’s rather preposterous to think that we’re somehow going to run out of work in the world, but having jobs aligned with the work to be done is another matter entirely.

I’ve also talked about the “Laws of Exponential Capabilities,” where the technologies being developed will give us exponentially greater capabilities. When this occurs, accomplishments of the past will seem tiny in comparison to accomplishments in the future.

Many of the columns I’ve written pertain to idea of catalytic industries like the Internet of Things, flying drones, big data, driverless cars, smart homes, health tech, 3d printing, VR, swarmbots, and sensors that will be creating many of the jobs in the future.

But going beyond today’s seedling industries are any number of human endeavors capable of creating entire new playgrounds for business, industry, and human accomplishment.

Stepping into this topic further, I’ve framed my thinking around the eight dimensions for expanding the bubble of human existence.

For those of you who think three-dimensionally, expanding our bubble is like pushing on ever facet of an octahedron, growing the size, reach, and capabilities in each of the X, Y, and Z axes.

The labels I’ve assigned to each of these dimensions include the following, and I’ll explain them in more detail below:

Honorability
Awareness
Purpose
Mastery
Reach
Potential
Durability
Freedom

Why humans?

Are humans really destined to master the universe? If so, what have we done to deserve this esteemed position?

There are many who would say that the world would be a far better place without people.

If we started making a list of all of the negative attributes humans possess, it would begin with words like dirty, dangerous, self-centered, moody, greedy, unreliable, hateful, destructive, self-centered, and perhaps ten thousand other descriptors that paint a very dim picture of who we are and what we’ve become.

For this reason, I’d like to propose the first dimension for expanding human existence – “the honorable human.”

1.) The Honorable Human 

Before we can ever be entrusted to receive the venerable keys to the universe, we must first prove we’re worthy of this grand undertaking?

While we have achieved great things in the past, the mysteries that remain locked “behind door number three,” will make our cumulative achievements to date appear as the tip of a needle in a universe filled with an endless supply of needles.

So what constitutes an honorable human?

Is an honorable human someone with great integrity, loyalty, and trustworthiness that you can always count on to do the right thing? Is it perhaps an evolved form of the transhuman that will arise from the singularity? Will it be a form of machine intelligence that enables us to take the higher road in every adversarial situation?

How will we ever know what attributes a person or persons will need to be deserving of this privilege? Does it have to be all of mankind or can it just be a select few?

The irony is that the people we are most likely to entrust with our future are those with great courage, strength, ethics, and willing to tackle life’s greatest challenges. However, in today’s world, one person’s greatest hero is often someone else’s greatest enemy.

We find ourselves divided by righteous differences, and these differences can lead to some very destructive consequences.

Righteous destruction is still destruction.

Similarly, a righteous conflict, battle, or killing is still a conflict, battle, or killing. Does an evil act that comes from good intentions somehow nullify the results?

At the same time, will we ever value someone without strength, conviction, drive, and passion? Probably not.

For this reason, our quest for expanding the bubble of human existence begins with a still indefinable goal of unlocking the honorable human in each of us.

What is it? What will these look like? How do we get there?

2.) Extending Human Awareness

In 1998, a column I wrote for The Futurist Magazine took issue with the state of computer displays. Viewing the vast and growing Internet through a little square box on our desk was, in my opinion, the equivalent of watching a baseball game through a knothole.

As a solution, I proposed we experiment with a variety of different shapes for displays starting with my favorite, a spherical display, well suited for viewing global activities such as travel itineraries, animal migrations, pollution flows, and weather patterns.

Even today, fifteen years later, we still find ourselves viewing the online world with primitive 2-dimensional flat displays. So when I heard about one satellite company’s vision for developing a real-time globe, with up to the minute live video feeds of virtually every square inch on earth, naturally it caught my attention.

It wasn’t just the spherical displays or video feeds of the earth that peaked my imagination, but the overall convergence of data. The number of sensory devices monitoring the earth is about to explode, and it occurred to me that a cross-pollination of data flows would radically alter our way of life.

Satellites monitoring the earth will grow from thousands to millions.
Embedded sensors will grow from billions to trillions.
Street cams, smartphones, wearables, and other connected “things” will grow from billions to trillions.
The amount of data generated will burst from petabytes, to exabytes, to zettabytes, to yottabytes.

Our growing number of data-generating devices will vividly increase awareness of the world around us. Increased awareness improves our ability to predict, and superior predictability will lead to greater control. Super awareness gives us the ability to pinpoint critical inflection points, and make changes before something serious happens.

3.) Extending Human Purpose

We are born as a baby, struggle our entire life with everything from finding food to eat, homes to live in, educating ourselves to gain more understanding, staying healthy, making friends and relationships, raising a family, earning a living, and then we die.

If we have more accomplishments in life, earn more money, have more friends, raise a bigger family, and somehow do everything better than anyone else, we will still eventually die. Right?

In a world teaming with 8.7 million different life forms, how do humans fit in?

Every past civilization, with their manmade structures, machines, systems, and cultures, has eventually succumbed to Mother Nature. Plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi have methodically removed every trace of what they left behind.

Are human accomplishments just a stepping-stone to what comes next?

We live in a world driven by prerequisites. A machinist needs to understand a single-point lathe operation before he or she can advance to multi-axial milling. Engineers need to understand the concepts of mechanical stress and strain before they start bending a cantilever beam. Metallurgists need to understand thermodynamics before they attempt phase transformations in solids. Physicists need to understand quantum mechanics before they can understand a standard model for particle physics. Mathematicians need to understand nonlinear differential equations before they can understand strange attractors.

Are all our accomplishments just stepping-stones to something else that we don’t know or understand yet?

Does the fact that we can ask questions like these, ponder the unponderable, think the unthinkable, and accomplish things that no other species can accomplish, somehow give us a higher purpose?

If we limit our thinking to solving past problems, we can only see a very narrow spectrum of our larger purpose. But who gets to decide what that is, and how will that expand over time?

4.) Extending Human Mastery

In my column, “In Search of Anomaly Zero,” I describe how we can begin to control the forces of nature and circumvent major disasters long before they happen. Once we can detect the earliest micro change in conditions and craft a timeline for an impending disaster, we will be able to create response mechanisms capable of mitigating whatever forces are in play.

Human mastery does not only give us the abilities to master the forces of nature, but every law of physics, every human condition, and every exception to every rule.

But disasters are not inevitable. Neither are illnesses, human aging, or even death.

So can we imagine something better?

If we can do a better job of controlling the negative aspects of life, and even extend it to enriching the positive aspects, how will we ever know if we are managing things better?

The opportunities for extending human mastery are endless, and a critical piece for extending the boundaries of human existence.

5.) Extending Human Reach

Many people think we live on an over populated planet. But at the same time, we also live in a very under populated universe.

The option for extending the reach of humanity throughout the universe is seemingly limitless, and yet our “reach” cannot be confined to outer space.

We also know very little about inner space, such as what lies inside our planet, inside our atoms, and inside our emotions.

In a universe that is over a trillion times greater in length than the combined distance traveled by all humans in all history, we will not overcome this challenge anytime soon.

 

6.) Extending Human Potential

Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, has predicted that we will reach a technological singularity by 2045, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge is betting on 2029, a date that is ironically on the hundredth anniversary of the greatest stock market collapse in human history.

But where the 1929 crash catapulted us backwards into a more primitive form of human chaos, the singularity promises to catapult us forward into a future form of human enlightenment.

Cloaked in an air of malleable mystery, Hollywood has taken license to cast the singularity as everything from the ultimate boogeyman to the penultimate savior of humanity.

In 2013, consumer genomics company 23andMe received a patent for a designer baby kit that would allow parents to pick and choose attributes for their soon-to-be-conceived kids. This was prior to the FDA cracking down on the claims they were making.

But they were not the first. The Fertility Institutes’ clinic in Los Angeles delivered the first designer baby back in 2009.

Designer babies have long been a cocktail party discussion topic with the understanding that the era of “super babies” will soon be upon us, with the prospects of creating bigger, faster, stronger humans.

Will these so-called super-babies grow up to become super-humans?

People like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have begun focusing in on the exponential growth of artificial intelligence, as a Moore’s Law type of advancement. This has led to an entire new field of study called transhumanism with many speculating on the next iteration of humankind and how it will be exponentially more advanced than people today.

What are the true limits to human potential, and how will we ever know if we’ve reached the limit?

7.) Extending Human Durability 

No person should ever die… EVER! Is that our goal?

There are many reasons why people die, yet these reasons may all disappear as we develop fixes and cures for everything that ales us.

Aging is currently our biggest problem. Over time we’ll likely be able to fix the aging problem and delay aging indefinitely.

Injuries and disease are also problems. Over time we will likely be able to prevent and fix the issues associated with injuries and disease as well.

In a past column I posed the question, “How long before I can 3D print a replacement body for myself?”

With major strides being made in the area of bio printing, this becomes a legitimate question. At the same time, we still live in a very primitive time when it comes to advances on the medical front.

Perhaps the most perplexing problem to fix will be deviant behavior, because the idea of fixing deviant behavior presumes we will have a good way of sorting out the dividing line between deviant and non-deviant behavior. But there again, over time we will likely develop medical or behavioral strategies that address deviant behavior.

So, if we have the ability to fix the problems involved with aging, injury, disease, and deviant behavior, theoretically we can create a society of people capable of living forever.

Is that our goal? And if not, why not?

8.) Extending Human Freedom 

For many of us, the idea of freedom conjures up symbols of containment, like steel shackles or doors that are somehow unlocked before us, allowing us to breathe the rare air of independence.

But going beyond the insular notion of conscious confinement, is a life unrestrained by the bonds of our own limitations.

Universal freedom comes with the sense that anything is possible.

If people did not have to worry about illness, safety, natural disasters, the limitations of time and space, and human frailty, what things will then be possible?

How long before we have the unbridled freedom to live life on a macro level, take on projects larger than our solar system, and begin living outside our own bubble?

Final Thoughts

I started this column by talking about how we’re still trapped in the bubble of human existence, but finding a way to expand our bubble, or actually live beyond our reality sphere is a challenging big picture perspective.

Granted, we’ve been doing it all along, first by taking micro steps, but moving to giant leaps over the past century.

What I’m suggesting here, by adding labels to each of these dimensions, is that this is our calling, our “unfinishable mandate” to continually stretch, grow, propagate, and master not only the world around us, but also the entire universe.

The human race is genetically predispositioned to push the envelope, color outside the lines, and reach for things that will forever be unreachable.

As individuals, there will always be some who are content to find inner peace and live a minimalist lifestyle. But as a race, we will always be driven by a need to make a difference, be admired for our accomplishments, and create moments of triumph in our otherwise pale existence.

We have only taken the first step in a trillion mile journey. The next few steps, in my opinion, will be absolutely amazing.

.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

 .

Blueprint for a Makers District

The demise of local retail stores has been painful to watch. Empty storefronts and weed-infested parking lots are gut-wrenching symbols of community decay.

So if I told you there was an immediate way to turn this around, would that catch your attention?

This whole transformation in thinking started with a short visit on Saturday to “The Source,” an artisan food market inside a former 1880‘s brick foundry in Denver’s River North District.

Located far away from most retail, I quickly became enamored with how this eclectic mix of 15 shops could attract a packed house on a cold wintery day in February to an industrial part of town.

This brief experience caused me to spend countless hours over the following days researching similar developments around the country. For me, the collision course of intersecting trends in retail has become a full-blown obsession. (Just for the record, obsessions are underrated.)

To summarize briefly:

The first shopping mall was born in Edina, MN in 1956. After peaking in 1990, there have been no new malls built in the U.S. since 2006.
Big-box retailing was born in 1962. That’s the year when Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target all opened their first big stores. After 50 years of putting mom and pops out of business, big-box retail is now struggling.
In 1994, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookseller. Twenty years later it has emerged as the primary reason big-box stores are shutting down.
In 2005, MAKE Magazine published it’s first issue, signaling the beginning of the makers movement. Words like “handcrafted,” “home grown,” “authentic,” and “artisan original,” suddenly entered the public lexicon.

With retail stores closing, consumers are left with fewer options for out-of-the-home forms of entertainment, and a pent-up demand for meaningful experiences.

This collision course of trends is creating the perfect storm for the next retail revolution – Maker Districts.

A maker district can best be described as a cross between an artist colony, farmers market, woodworking shop, music festival, bakery, brewpub, and brainstorming session all happening in the same space. It’s all that and more.

Here’s why I see Maker Districts entering your lives in a big way.

Making jewelry

The Maker District Advantage 

With online storefronts like Amazon flourishing, the need to run down to the local store and pick something up has been replaced with a few clicks of the mouse and a UPS guy knocking on your door the following day.

But consumers are getting restless. As mind numbing as it might have been to run to the store and pick up a bag of flour, there was always the chance of running into someone unexpectedly.

Coffee shops have replaced retail stores as the next best place to hang out. Most are busy, noisy places, but fresh coffee is constantly being brewed and people love to feel part of the maker experience.

The maker experience comes in many different forms, most of which are on the opposite end of the spectrum from coffee.

There are several reasons why Maker Districts are on the verge of turning traditional retail on it’s head.

First, people love to watch things being made. Every source of creation is also the source of inspiration.

Second, small mom and pop businesses have a vested interest in building their community. No, they probably aren’t the most sophisticated, tech savvy business people, but artisan products don’t need to compete on price, and they only need to earn enough for a comfortable lifestyle. These are people that are doing what they love, not changing the world.

Finally, from a real estate standpoint, the time it takes to refill an empty big box center with a Maker District can be a fraction of the time it takes to bring in another large-scale retailer. Cities will love having sales tax revenues replaced quickly and neighbors will love being part of the new experience.

“The Source” in Denver’s River North District

Planning a Maker District

It’s no longer good enough to see a painting, people want to witness the artist painting it. Being “authentic” goes far deeper than buying a limited edition copy “signed by the artist.”

Walking through an active, vibrant shopping district where people are baking bread, spinning pottery, brewing beer, making jewelry, cutting and designing stained glass, decorating cakes, molding with pewter, and sculpting with clay, will give every visitor their own one-of-a-kind experience.

In addition to the sights and smells, having musicians performing mood-stirring music will help establish a different character and flavor with every visit.

In this environment, creative people are both the entertainment and the proprietors of the shops.

Not only will this be a showcase for talent, it will attract audiences that are hungry for inspiration.

Fresh bread straight from the oven

Makers take Center Stage

All of the shops in a Maker District needs to support the idea of “making the products being sold.” Small, intimate storefronts ranging from 600 to 1,600 sq. ft., built around niche verticals will enable them to focus their resources.

Every storefront needs to be a local enterprise. No franchises or national brands.

Restaurants will be the anchor tenants, and various other food shops will add essential ingredients to the mix. Freshly made food helps intensify the smells and ambiance of the shopping experience. Possible food-related shops may include:

Restaurants
Cookie shops
Home made candy shops
Home made ice cream
Pretzel shops
Bread bakeries
Donut and sweet roll bakeries
Meat markets
Fudge shops
Custom health food makeries

In addition to restaurants and food shops, there should be a number of drink shops ranging from coffee shops to breweries. Option in this area will include:

Coffee roaster, brewers
Tea cutters, brewers, and mixers
Energy drink mixatoriums
Smoothie and protein drinks
Hand crafted beers
Cideries
Distilleries

Legalized marijuana in states like Colorado and Washington will soon see similar prohibition-ending efforts spreading across the nation. This will open the door for shops such as:

Artisan marijuana
Weederies
Food lacing shops
Custom edibles

In addition to consumables, creators of any number of hand-made products will find a welcome reception in this environment.

Custom one-of-a-kind furniture
Artisan clocks and time pieces
Jewelry makers – rings, earrings, and necklaces
Clothing, scarves, caps, ponchos, and headbands
Custom made shoes
Musical instruments
Handbags, backpacks, and carrying cases
Clay sculptures, bronze sculptures, stained glass
Painting, drawings, sketches, and etchings
Pottery, basket weaving, and woodworking

Adding to the mix will be next generation hyper-personalized product makers.

As an example, BoXZY just introduced an unusual fabrication machine with three personal fabrication devices built into a single machine – CNC mill, 3D printer, and a laser engraver. The CNC mill can shave and refine aluminum, hardwood, and plastic into small intricate designs, while the 3D printer can fabricate many complex shapes. The laser engraver is perfect for searing names, logos, and even photos into wood, cardboard, leather, and plastic.

Support Services

Complementary to the maker community on the main floor, will be a variety of support services that can be added to 2nd and 3rd floors of the building. These might include:

Designer and fabricator services
Architects, landscape designers, and interior decorators
Maker spaces and other educational support facilities
Coworking and business colonies

Woodworking at its finest

Final Thoughts 

Talent attracts talent, and creative genius will inspire other creative genius.

Even though a newly opened Maker District will have merchants scrambling to make their businesses operational, they will also be inspiring a new generation of young people with their energy, focus, and enthusiasm.

Maker Districts will be the community catalyst for a host of other ventures. Creative people provide the spark of imagination, and local evangelists will help promote ingenuity and inspiration to virtually every other aspect of the community.

A sleepy, uninspired town can be instantly transformed into a community known for its brilliance.

Out of every Maker District will come the uniqueness that every town, village, and city has been seeking.

Most of these elements already exist. The breakthrough innovation of a Maker District will be in how they are incentivized and assembled into a highly respected place in their own community.

 .

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

 .

 

The Great Cow Epiphany and the Six Immutable Laws of Information

 

Recent comments by Vint Cerf, vice president of Google and one of the founding fathers of the Internet, about the long-term viability of our data has many wondering what will happen to our digital information over the next 100, 200, or even 1,000 years.

At the heart of the problem is something he refers to as “bit-rot,” decaying levels of information that can be found in our digital storage systems.

Much of the data stored on outdated mediums like VHS tapes, vinyl records, cassette tapes and floppy disks has already been lost.

We currently have no usable form of storage technology capable of maintaining its integrity for centuries on end. Without a breakthrough in this area, humanity’s most important memories – videos, photos, books, writings, and thousands of other informational sources – may indeed be lost.

Sadly, paper remains as our most survivable form of information over the next 100+ years.

But here’s where that whole issue goes sideways.

Swiss scientists recently developed a process for encasing DNA in glass and chilling it down as a way to preserve data encoded in it for upwards of a million years. DNA is an ultra dense storage medium with the potential of holding 455 exabytes of data per gram of DNA.

Since all of the information that exists in the world today is still under 10,000 exabytes, we have the potential of storing all of the world’s data in less than a cup of DNA.

Yes, we still have a ways to go before encasing DNA in glass and keeping it chilled for all eternity becomes practical, and we still have to develop efficient ways to store and retrieve information, but the DNA approach may indeed be the light we’re looking for at the end of this tunnel.

With that in mind, I’d like to invite you along on a journey into the far reaches of future information. Come along as we create a few unusual scenarios surrounding the “six immutable laws of information.”

The Great Cow Epiphany

A few years back I came to the conclusion that the total amount of information that we could glean from a cow was actually bigger than the cow itself.

By this I mean every detail of both the inner and outer workings of a cow, along with every synapse firing, repositioning and interacting of cells, atoms, and molecules. Unraveling every micro-facet of an object will produce massive amounts of information.

This means that if we somehow manage to extract every possible detail from of a cow, the storage medium needed to hold all of its information would actually be bigger than the cow itself.

By extension, if we extract every possible piece of information from the universe, it would only stand to reason that the storage medium need to hold it all would have to be bigger than the universe itself.

While this may seem to be an absurd notion, in light of my earlier calculation that all of the world’s information today could be stored in a single cup of DNA, it helped me put the information world into perspective.

Here’s where I got it wrong, which in turn led to my latest epiphany.

First, we have only discovered a super tiny fraction of all available information – less than one percent of one percent of one percent.

Second, information about a cow is not bigger than the cow, IT IS THE COW!

All information, ever created regarding the cow, is already part of the cow.

Rather than researching an external source, such as the great Wikipedia-compendium of all online cow information, we need only jack into the cow itself.

No, we are still a ways away from developing this kind of technology, but unless I miss my guess, it will soon become the holy grail of informational physicists.

Every object, along with every plant, animal, bolt of energy, block of air, or force of nature already contains every possible piece of information about itself.

If this is indeed true, it means we have a very very long ways to go in discovering every possible tidbit and micro-tidbit of existing information.

 

The Grand Unified Information Theory – Six Immutable Laws

Over the past few days I’ve replayed the Cow Epiphany over in my head many times hoping to grasp its far-reaching implications.

Yes, it’s similar in many ways to The Matrix, but as a movie, it left out far too many details to be useful.

Starting with this as a working theory, I’ve come to some crazy, perhaps even outrageous, conclusions. So without further buildup, here are the “six immutable laws of information.”

1.) The total universe of information is constantly expanding. Trillions of new pieces of information are being produced by the world’s 7 billion people every second of every day.

2.) All information, ever created, is still in existence. Answer to all of life’s questions already exists. It’s only a matter of knowing how to ask them and through what channel to pose the question.

3.) Every object is an informational source. Every object, cell, molecule, and atom already contains a complete history, functional attributes, and physical details of itself and its surroundings.

4.) Without humans, information is meaningless. Information itself is devoid of purpose, capability, emotion, and economic value.

5.) Altering the informational code of life will alter life itself. As we change the informational base of an object, we change the object itself.

6.) Information is the lifeblood of human civilization. The overall efficiency with which we are able to discover, store, and retrieve information is directly proportional to how advanced we become as a civilization.

Our ability to archive and retrieve information is critical. Past civilizations have fallen apart over a single information gap. Future civilizations will be as equally susceptible if we don’t find a viable super long-term solution.

Over time, we will stop using storage mediums, and learn how to tap into the world itself (objects, cells, and molecules) on an informational level.

“Altering the informational code of life will alter life itself!” 

Final Thoughts

No we haven’t developed a “Vulcan Mind Meld” yet where we can place our hand on an object and instantly suck out all of the information and understand it. But that might not be as far fetched as it sounds.

Every cow-sized piece of information comes with more information about itself than we will ever be able to decipher.

Our quest to discover new forms of information will be never-ending.

Much like the blood coursing through our bodies, information is the lifeblood of our economy, and a necessary food source for the human brain.

 .

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

 .

 

Three Great Machine Learning Paradoxes

I installed my Nest Thermostat a little over a year ago. This “learning” machine was billed as being able to study the habits of people and adjust the settings to optimize both temperature and energy usage.

But ever since then I’ve found myself in a constant battle with my thermostat. It’s cooling things down when I need heat, warming things up when I’d rather be cool, and the amount of energy it’s saved is far less than the loss of productivity I’ve experienced from being uncomfortable.

This is also true with my other “smart” devices.

My washing machine still doesn’t understand the fabrics it’s trying to wash. My smart door lock still doesn’t know who I am. And our home security system does a far better job of keeping the good guys in, instead of the bad guys out.

Much of the “smartness” we’ve added to our lives has been in meager doses, slightly better than before, but not much.

That said, the level of intelligence in our homes, cars, clothes, and offices is about to move quickly up the exponential learning curve as connected devices combine remote processing power with everything around us.

Our orange juice bottles, cans of soup, and boxes of crackers will all have a way of reordering themselves when inventories get low. Toasters will soon be toasting reminders onto the sides of our bread so we won’t forget birthdays and anniversaries.

Biometric coffee makers will know exactly how much caffeine to put into our coffee, and our fireplace will even know what color of flame we’re in the mood for.

If I’m feeling ill, not only will my devices know what’s wrong, they’ll be able to scan my home and give me a quick recipe for a cure.

“Add 2 oz of turpentine from the garage, 3 tablespoons of shoe polish, four capfuls of Listerine, and 2 cough drops to a cup of boiling water, and what floats to the top will fix your problem.”

I refer to this as “MacGyvering medicine.”

Our learning machines will pave the way for a hyper-individualized world where everything around us syncs perfectly with our personal needs and desires. But that’s the point where the train begins to derail, and all our best intentions start to work against us. Here’s why.

Some Background on Machine Learning

Machine learning is an offshoot of the early work done on expert systems, neural networks, and artificial intelligence in the 1980s.

Since then we’ve figured out how to connect devices so one device can talk to another, added a pervasive Internet that attaches remote capabilities to imbedded chips, and today’s machine learning has morphed into something far different than anything researchers dreamed of in the 1980s.

With algorithms that can “learn” from past data, it uses sophisticated forms of predictive analysis and decision trees to closely simulate the human decision-making process.

As the number of sensors grows and the amount of data increases, the human-machine relationship will become more refined, and our ability to delineate between personal decisions and machine decisions will become an increasingly fine line.

At the same time, machine learning creates a number of quandaries or paradoxes for us to contend with.

 

Paradox #1 – Optimized humans will become less human 

If every smart device were able to tap into the mood of people it came into contact with, it could easily make decisions for them, and in the process, optimize their performance.

I’ve always been drawn to the idea of walking into a building and have the building recognize me. Parking spaces magically appear; the pathway to where I’m going lights up; music in the air perfectly matches my mood; temperature, humidity and environmental condition instantly sync with my body; and impeccably prepared food supernaturally appears whenever I’m the least bit hungry.

This utopian dream of living the easy life certainly has its appeal, but grossly oversimplifies our need for obstacles to overcome, problems to wrestle with, and adversarial challenges for us to tackle.

When life becomes too simple, we become less durable.

Without the need to struggle, we become less resilient. If we were to find ourselves living the soft cushy life on easy street, every new danger will leave us cowering in fear, unable to muster a response to the hazards ahead.

 

Paradox #2 – Originality becomes impossible when all possible options can be machine generated 

Humans place great value on creativity, originality, and discovery. History books are filled with talented people who figured out how to “zig left” when everyone else “zagged right.”

Recently, a company called Qentis offhandedly claimed its computers were in the process of generating every possible combination of words, and preemptively copyrighting all creative text.

It will also be possible for them to generate every possible combination of musical notes to enable them to claim first rights to every “new” musical score.

Similarly, Cloem is a company that has developed software capable of linguistically manipulating the claims on a patent filing, substituting keywords with synonyms, reordering steps, and rephrasing core concepts in order to generate tens of thousands of potentially patentable “new” inventions.

In much the same way computers are capable of generating every possible combination of lottery numbers to guarantee a win, patent and copyright trolls will soon have the ability to play their game of “fleecing the innovators” at an entirely new level.

More importantly, it confuses the concept of originality, and compromises the contribution of an individual if a version of every “new” idea already exists.

 

Paradox #3 – Perfection eliminates dependencies, removes our sense of purpose, and will destroy our economy

Humans are odd creatures. We have exceptions to every rule, we value intangible things based on our emotional connection to them, and our greatest strength is flawed logic.

One person’s deficiencies are counterbalanced by another person’s over-adequacies. Individually we’re all failures, but together we each represent the pixels on life’s great masterpiece.

Wherever we find insufficiencies, we create dependencies to help fill the gap, and every “need” produces economic value.

Using this line of thinking, the human race cannot exist as self-sufficient organisms. We all pride ourselves as being rugged individualists, yet we have little chance of surviving without each other.

Machine learning comes with the promise that we’ll soon become stand-alone organisms, content in our surroundings, wielding off-the-chart levels of intelligence and capabilities exceeding our wildest imagination.

However, this is where the whole scenario begins to break down.

Self-sufficiency will lead to isolation and our need for each other will begin to vanish. Without needs and dependencies, there is no economy. And without the drive for fixing every insufficiency, our sense of purpose begins to vanish.

Having a super intelligent machine is meaningless if there is nothing to apply the intelligence to. Much like a perpetual motion machine that never gets used, there’s little purpose for its existence.

How do we make the best possible decision?

Final Thoughts 

Yes, I love the idea of having a laundry soap dispenser that is connected to sensors in the washing machine and able to mix multiple channels of organic ingredients dynamically to suit the conditions of the wash and optimize the cleaning process.

I also love the idea of not having to make so many decisions. Until now, every new device seems to add more decision points to my daily routine, not less.

However we need to be aware of the quandaries ahead. Not all changes are for the better, and many times simple little shifts will have far reaching ripple effects that force us to rethink our systems, our communities, and our way of life.

Sometimes our best intentions are little more than a mirage that leads us to an area we never intended to go.

Machine learning is neither good nor bad. It’s up to us to decide.

.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

.

 

Going Beyond Micro-Payments to Nano-Payments

If a billion people each gave you a tenth of a cent, you would have $1 million.

Over the past few weeks I’ve become enamored with the power of financial friction. This could involve everything from adding a tenth or hundredth of a cent charge to every email sent, social media “likes,” video downloads, views of copyrighted photos, and much more.

Even though it may not seem significant, there is a huge difference between “free” and “0.1 cent.”

Tiny charges, much like the rest of life’s sandpaper, tend to give us clarity between what’s significant and what’s not.

The reason this has become such an important topic today is because transaction costs have plummeted along with the cryptocurrency invention of distributed block chain ledgers, and the possibility of creating “nano-payment” networks is opening the doors to thousands of new fractional payment models.

The traditional way of providing online services like email, news, or uploading photos has been to pass the cost of operating these services on to advertisers. But that could change.

Over the past decade, micro payment schemes have created successful business models around charges less than $1. As an example, Google’s AdSense charges advertisers as little as a few cents for every click of their ads.

It’s only recently that we’ve been able to consider much smaller charges, even less than a penny.

In the past I’ve been an ardent advocate of simplicity, but over time my thinking has changed. Automation enables complexity, and the intricacy of complexity is what opens the door for unusual new business opportunities.

Here are just a few ways these seemingly insignificant payment schemes could become a big deal in your future.

Tiny Town Taxes

Tax experts have long understood the value of tiny slivers of money.

In the Denver, Colorado area, we have a unique taxing district called the Scientific Cultural Facilities District (SCFD).

Colorado’s SCFD is the largest cultural tax district in the nation. Collecting just one penny on every ten dollar purchase in the seven counties surrounding Denver, the SCFD collected $47 million in 2013 which it distributed to over 280 non-profit organizations including the Denver Art Museum, Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver Zoo, and many more.

Tiny amounts of money coming from a large number of people have the potential to dramatically shift everything from lifestyle, to employment opportunities, and culture.

If, for example, a similar taxing district were established just for funding live musical performances, Denver or most other large cities could quickly establish themselves as the live music capital of the world. Struggling musicians would no longer be relegated to the scraps that society has to offer, and being an accomplished performer would move up the status ladder to being a well-respected profession.

A similar approach could be used to bolster other communities of interest like makerspaces, art colonies, niche incubators, and much more.

While many may think this is going in the wrong direction, nano-payments could be used for ultra-tiny forms of taxation, even as little as a penny on every $1 million spent.

Leveraging the Lectrons

The only limitations imposed on digital money are the limitations we impose on it. These are human based systems, and every barrier and limitation is subject to human intervention.

As a way of expanding our thinking in this area, here are 8 short scenarios with brief explanations.

1.) When it comes to e-books, would you rather pay $7.99 for the entire book or a tenth of a cent for every page you read? With this type of model it would be very easy to run the analytics and determine which chapters, sections, and pages most resonate with readers.

2.) If you received a tenth of a cent for every “like” on Facebook, but also had to pay a tenth of a cent every time you “liked” someone else’s page or photo, would you be making money or losing some at the end of each month? How could this Lilliputian economy be translated in other areas?

3.) For photos with a copyright, whenever someone clicks to expand the image, their account would be debited a tenth of a cent. In this scenario, the owners would be incentivized to having their photos show up everywhere to increase exposure.

4.) As a blog reader, every time you click “continue here,” you would be sending a tenth of a cent, or multiple tenths for every page viewed, to the writer. Would this incentivize more blog writers?

5.) Would you be willing to pay a tenth of a cent for every page on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn just to avoid all the ads being directed at you? The amount you pay would be in direct proportion to how much you use these services, but still a relatively small amount.

6.) Should every text message come with the option of paying a tenth of a cent to keep your service ad free?

7.) When it comes to videos, should a pay-per-play charge of a tenth of a cent be added to every YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Twitch, or Viddy play. Should people posting videos have that option for remuneration?

8.) Similarly, does it make sense to add a tenth of a cent charge for every episode of RadioLab, NPR, Freakonomics, or TED podcasts.

 

Fractal Transactions

A while back I wrote a column of the concept of fractal transactions, and this is where automation comes into play.

A fractal transaction is simply an automated point of money distribution. Money flows into the transaction, from one or more sources, and is instantly distributed to one or more recipients. While this doesn’t sound like anything earthshaking, it indeed is.

A fractal transaction remove the bottlenecks. By removing the person from the distribution process, it opens up many new strategies for doing business.

In its simplest form, a fractal transaction would involve a product or service. Let’s take for example a manufacturer who creates a widget. When an end customer sees the widget on a retail store shelf and purchases it, money flows into the transaction and is instantly split between the retail store and the manufacturer.

Going a few steps further, money paid for a book on Amazon would be instantly split four ways between the author, the publisher, Amazon, and the shipping company. Additional recipients may be a co-author, a referring website that gets a commission, or a warehouse worker filling the order.

 

The New Nano-Payment Paradigm

Yes, some people may view nano-payments as “death by a thousand paper cuts.” But in reality they’re just the opposite, the sparks that fuel a thousand new cottage industries.

A pay-per-use model could eventually replace many of today’s financing options. Instead of paying $300 for a printer, the printer could be free with nano-charges assessed for every page printed.

Every mobile app could be funded through an in-app nano-payment system that gets assessed with every use.

Video games could have a series of nano-payment options embedded inside each field of play.

Since opinion polls require so little effort, adding a nano-payment charge to the mix may be enough friction to make answers more meaningful. This line of thinking opens the door for creating a payment democracy, where users vote with nano amounts of currency.

Not only would we end up with a more accurate assessment of what people value most, but global voting systems themselves could also be financed and managed this way.

 

Final Thoughts 

With transaction costs approaching zero, old school paradigms will fall by the wayside.

Nano-transactions are the key to unlocking efficiencies the world has not yet known. The tempo of business will continually ratchet up, new business models will begin to materialize, and the old ways of doing business will lose favor as the flow of money begins to short circuits them completely.

Disruptive technology is always most effective when it can be applied to lucrative industries, and banking and finance is one that entrepreneurs have had their eye on for decades.

Nano payments are easy to overlook because they requires so many of them to appear significant. But with billions of people online, making literally trillions of transactions every year, the numbers are already there.

In the words of Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” And indeed there is.

.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

.

 

Four Rules for Game Testing Our Way to a Better Future

At a recent video game tournament in Denver called ClutchCon, I was moderating a panel discussion on the future of video games, and we got into the topic of leveraging the time and energy spent playing video games into a “wisdom of crowds” approach for solving the world’s problems.

Video games have a way of immersing players into an epic challenge that consumes them physically, intellectually, and emotionally. While detractors commonly dismiss game playing as a waste of time, it more accurately embodies an evolutionary shift in human pastimes causing more synapse-firing per second than virtually any other activity on earth.

It is this heightened level of brain activity that most intrigues me. Educators would love to tap into it. Employers would give anything to see their employees as engaged at work as they are in games. And big thinkers who are heavily invested in solving the world’s biggest problems would drool over the prospects of applying ten gazillion well-focused brain cells onto whatever problem they’re wrestling with.

Passive engagement is far different than commanding someone’s full attention, and games have a way of engrossing players on virtually every brain metric for hours, sometimes days, on end. Gaming’s kill-or-be-killed situations force players to constantly push themselves to another mental state.

The addictive nature of gaming comes from players reaching pinnacle levels of brain activity where they are rewarded with an endorphin-like high. Ordinary kids are suddenly transformed into a swaggeringly ultra-cool superhero persona, and the accolades they receive for their digital accomplishments are just icing on the cake.

At issue, though, is our ability to transition “digital accomplishments” into something of real world value. How can we shine this spotlight of laser-brain brilliance onto problems like curing cancer, mitigating hurricane damage, or large-scale corruption and actually change the world?

In many ways, the path to making some of the world’s greatest breakthroughs is much like slogging our way through a labyrinth of well camouflaged enemy warriors disguised as old school thinking, failed experiments, and self-doubt to find those eureka moments that have been eluding us for decades.

So is it possible to cluster the micro accomplishments of gaming in a way to inch our way towards the macro accomplishments of real world problem-solving? Here are a few unusual insights that are guaranteed to explode your objections to video games completely.

History of Game Theory and Gamification

Game theory did not really exist as a field until John von Neumann published a paper on the subject in 1928. His original paper was followed by his book, “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” written in 1944.

In 1950, the first mathematical discussion of the prisoner’s dilemma appeared as part of an experiment by famed mathematicians Merrill M. Flood and Melvin Dresher. The experiment was part of the RAND Corporation’s investigations into game theory because of its possible applications in dealing with the buildup of nuclear weapons.

The term “gamification” was coined in 2002, but did not become popular until 2010. Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems.

Gamification taps into people’s natural tendencies and uses both physical and psychological rewards to incentivize continuous play.

Types of rewards include points, achievement badges, entry into new levels, or winning some form of currency.

One of the newer approaches to gamification has been to make mundane tasks feel more like games with techniques like adding meaningful choice, onboarding, adding narrative, and increasing levels of challenge.

Jane McGonigal delivering her talk at TED

Enter Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is a famous author and game designer. In 2010 she gave a brilliant TED talk where she speculated that the countless man-hours dedicated to game play is preparing humanity for the future, but so far we don’t know what that future might be.

Author of the best selling book, “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” McGonigal has focused her thinking around the collective intelligence of massively multiplayer online gaming.

She believes gaming has the potential to solve social ills and improve our quality of life.

McGonigal says that gamers around the world are learning four valuable skills, skills she refers to as the “four superpowers:”

1. Urgent Optimism – Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it is always worth trying.

2. Weaving a Tight Social Fabric – Research shows that we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they’ve beaten us badly. The reason behind this is that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goals, and stay with the game until it’s over.

3. Blissful Productivity – People playing a game are actually happier working hard than most of us are relaxing or hanging out. They know what it feels like to be optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. Gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right kind of work.

4. Epic Meaning – Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions and human planetary-scale stories. She believes we are headed towards Nobel Prize level accomplishments through gaming.

Widely regarded as the public face of gamification, Jane’s breakthrough thinking has inspired a new generation of contemplative thinkers, including myself.

With this in mind, I’d like to step you through several ways in which we can apply the cumulative brainpower of gamers on real world problems.

Using game modeling for social simulations has been a long-time goal of system designers

Introducing the Four Rules for Game Testing Our Way to a Better Future

As we look around us, we are constantly confronted with things that don’t make sense. We see systems that are poorly run, corruption and inefficiencies happening on a broad scale, wasted resources, people falling through the cracks, and well-meaning individuals having their best intentions compromised.

Game testing is a way of directing the spotlight of human intelligence onto the systems that run our communities, our countries, and our technologies prior to them being implemented.

Much like sitting behind the master control panel of life, game designers in the future will have the ability to simulate every human-based system on a large scale and ferret out the necessary tweaks and modifications needed to optimize them for real-life conditions.

Game Testing Systems Defined

Not to be confused with the product testing that happens prior to a video games being shipped, game testing, in this context, is a way of modeling and simulating real life conditions, and by adjusting and fine-tuning decision-point variables, game designers will have the ability to optimize systems and recommend changes for large scale implementation.

RULE #1 – Every system can be modeled, game tested, and optimized on a broad scale.

All good systems have built-in mechanisms for checks and balance. The best ones not only keep people honest, but also place reasonable limits on the cost of government.

While modeling a system and turning it into an interactive experience with simulated real-life risks and rewards will indeed be challenging, it is still very doable.

The part that most people miss is that simulations like these can be constructed, tested, and improved prior to implementation.

As an example, if the U.S. government had game-tested the Affordable Care Act prior to implementation, they would have found hundreds, perhaps thousands of ways to improve the system before hiring all the people and writing all the operations manuals.

Game testing systems like this can also be applied to every change in the tax code, social welfare, business incentives, legal changes to the constitution and much more.

RULE #2 – Future technologies will enable us to extend the field of play far beyond the digital world.

Whenever an injustice has occurred on an international level, our first reaction is that righting a current wrong should be handled by state-run policing agencies like Interpol or the FBI.

But as with all quasi-governmental agencies, politics, budgets and resources come into play.

With the recent rise in human trafficking incidents around the world, officials are struggling to piece together all the data to grasp the big picture of what’s happening. In short, this is an epic problem.

A company called Insecam has emerged as the first large-scale aggregator of over 73,000 unsecured webcams from around the world. If Insecam were to whole-heartedly endorse efforts to stop human trafficking, the number of cams on their network would mushroom to tens of millions overnight.

In just a few years it will also be easy to visualize a combination of flying drone cams, walking people cams, and drive-by car cams that make their way onto this network, with all of the cameras tied to facial recognition software.

If gamers were given just a few data points concerning sightings of individuals after they were reported missing, or pattern changes in the lives of suspected perpetrators, they could instantly stitch together critical points of intersection, begin building traffic diagrams, and profiles of those in close proximity to the ones being abducted.

If we consider the way Reddit users rallied after the Boston marathon bombing, this is not a far stretch at all. The trick will be to expand it into a global camera network that reaches into even the most remote places on earth.

Adding a series of gamification elements to the mix, such as reward-based incentives, either monetary or non-monetary, the pushback felt by human traffickers will be almost instantaneous.

Any trafficker that has their face plastered all over the 6:00 pm news or pushed out to countless millions on some gamer’s hot-issue hotline will not be in business long.

RULE #3 – Game testing is an iterative process requiring continuous ‘leveling up’ to optimize and fine-tune system performance. 

One example that most people can relate to will be game testing our current tax code.

Though an expansive form of testing may start with just income tax, an expanded version of the test could include everything from sales tax, to estate tax, property tax, special district taxes and much more.

The result of this kind of testing may well be one new tax system that replaces all the old ones.

RULE #4 – Future systems will bear little resemblance to those in existence today.

Technology is forcing a natural evolution in the way systems are being designed and operated. But the natural pace of change in most governments is woefully out of step with the pace of what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Competition between governments is generally a good thing, forcing everyone to try harder. But the best-run governmental systems in the future will be game-tested prior to implementation and retested, and retested, and retested.

Each new wave of testing will bring about more change, and the natural pace of system evolution will increase exponentially.

Future generations will have little understanding of how complex and badly our systems were run in the past.

When it comes to gaming, our only limits are our own imagination

Final Thoughts

Modeling and game testing our systems is a cause with epic meaning.

Game designers will love the challenge. Game players will enjoy being part of something far bigger than themselves. Politicians will love it because it gives them a logical path to answers.

While I’ve purposely glossed over many of the details in implementing this strategy, it remains entirely doable and well worth the effort.

At the DaVinci Institute we’ve launched a new game design course as part of our DaVinci Coders School. In this context, it’s easy to see how game modeling and testing will soon become some of the most valuable skills in the world.

But I’d love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Am I just giving gamers another excuse for flittering their life away or does this have real potential?

.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

.

37 Critical Problems that need to be Solved for Drone Delivery to become Viable

 

It all started when Toni, one of our staffers working on our flying drone workshop, asked me a simple question. She asked, “Since I live in an apartment complex, if I order something to be delivered by drone, where would they leave the package?”

This naturally led to a longer conversation and we instantly ticked off around a dozen other problems that will need to be overcome before we can expect drone delivery to become a viable option.

As a futurist, I’ve often gotten caught up in understanding what an emerging industry will eventually look like, but tend to gloss over the labyrinth of issues that will invariably plague the early stage pioneers willing to plow through the messy early years and take on all the risks.

Naturally there are many areas where flying drones could instantly be put to use, but when it comes to having a company like Amazon offer product delivery throughout its system, these simple flying machines suddenly take on “workhorse” status requiring levels of durability, automation, and system-building that are currently missing inside most conversations.

For example, early stage drone delivery will require a pilot for every package, making it an expensive option. Not only will pilots need to navigate their way to the destination, they’ll need to handle the empty return flight back as well. Eventually this will be automated, but it’s not a simple task.

Since electric drones have very limited battery life and range, delivery drones will most likely be fueled with gas or some other petrochemical. Gas powered drones have issues with noise and pollution that will cause many communities to start restricting their use.

With limited range and capacity, only a select few items will be eligible for this kind of delivery. When it comes to delivering food, companies will need to carefully monitor portion sizes because weight will become an increasingly important variable.

After considering many of these current deficiencies, I thought it might be helpful to begin listing some of the key technical, system, and regulatory challenges that lie ahead. At the same time, every problem creates an opportunity, and the sooner our emerging drone entrepreneurs learn how to capitalize on these problems, the sooner we’ll see this industry take off like many of us are imagining.

With that in mind, here are 37 near-term issues that will need to be solved.

The Coming “Cautionary Tale” Era

Fear sells. Most of the news coming from traditional media has a fear component to it. We tend to pay close attention to those things we feel threatened by, and those crafting the most effective headline have an ingenious knack for penetrating the fragile armor protecting our emotional self.

When hitchhiking was all the rage in the 1970s, news stories harping on a few outlier incidents killed societies first large scale attempt at ridesharing, drawing far more attention to the isolated tragedies rather than the mass-market successes.

They also put a huge damper on early social media companies like MySpace by creating headlines around a small number of young teens who were coerced into becoming victims of pedophile stalkers and leaving out the large scale benefits of this kind of social interaction.

I certainly don’t want to minimize the dangers and tragedies associated with these crimes. But every new technology and every new social system requires some level of oversight and management.

This line of thinking will drive a similar era of cautionary tales surrounding the flying drone industry, turning it into a battle for the minds of average consumers.

For this reason, drone industry leaders, startups, and representatives will need to take the initiative in forging guidelines in this unchartered territory. With foreign competition rapidly gaining the upper hand, this is one area of business that doesn’t have the luxury of allowing things to unfold in a normal fashion.

Yanko Design’s concept delivery drone with

both fixed wing-vertical takoff capabilities

37 Critical Problems that need to be Solved

The intent of composing this list is not to put any sort of damper on this exploding new industry. Rather, the sooner people realize that solving these problems are ripe territory for entrepreneurial activity, the sooner a full-fledged commerce-driven wave of unmanned aerial vehicles can assume their labor-saving positions in the skies overhead.

1. Designated Delivery Spots – Much like mail delivery, drones will need designated places for package delivery. Commercial delivery to businesses will have different guidelines than home delivery.

2. Durability – Manufacturing drones durable enough to make 100 deliveries between scheduled maintenance and 10,000 flights over their lifetime will be an absolute necessity.

3. Conditional Awareness – Drones will invariable fly into unusual situations, and whether it’s swarms of bees, bird attacks, lightening strikes, or signal jammers, they will need to alert operators of problems as soon as they arise.

4. Black Boxes – Much like today’s commercial aircrafts, whenever a drone crashes, some sort of signaling device will be needed to allow for follow-up investigation and cleanup.

5. Maintenance Plans – Today’s hobbyist drones seem like simple contraptions, but higher end delivery drones will need a consistent schedule for prop replacement, motor alignment, sensor checks, controller board cleaning, etc.

6. Override Kill Switch – Wireless signals are far from perfect. If a signal is lost, hacked, or hijacked, the drone must either return home or be removed from danger.

7. Drone Classification System – Drones are being created in thousands of different shapes and sizes with thousands of different capabilities. A comprehensive classification system will be needed to properly manage and regulate this industry.

8. Cargo Classification System – Cargo classification systems applied to ground-based shipping will need to be revised for the more volatile conditions associated with remote controlled airborne vehicles.

9. Drone Insurance – Drones, drone cargo, and drone businesses will soon become the largest new market for insurance companies.

10. Vehicle Licensing – Every drone that falls within certain classification guidelines will need to be licensed and insured.

11. Pilot Licensing – Those who fly drones will need to be tested and licensed in a less rigorous but similar way that airplane pilots are tested today.

12. Operator Licensing – People who load and unload cargo onto flying drones will also need to be licensed.

13. Weather Contingency Plans – Every drone will have to deal with extreme weather at one time or another. Any condition ranging from wind, to rain, snow, hail, extreme heat or extreme cold, will need a contingency plan for both the retrieval and safe delivery of the cargo.

14. Privacy Rules – Privacy means different things to different people, but flying drones with cameras, scanners, and sensors give nefarious people far more capabilities than ever before. Privacy rules will need to be established sooner than later.

15. Security Rules – Once a famous person’s delivery address becomes known, they run the risk of receiving unwanted packages, solicitations, threats, and even things like chemical attacks.

16. Drone Spam Rules – Much like junk mail and spam email, flying drones open up the possibility of receiving everything from annoying products samples to mean-spirited pranks. Rules for “drone hate crimes” and “drone bullying” will soon follow.

17. Noise Guidelines – The larger the drone and the greater the distance it has to cover, the larger the engine it will need to operate. Since electric drones only cover short distances, some form of petrochemical fuel will be needed, and these vehicles will be noisy. Rather than waiting for 10,000 communities to imposed their own one-off noise ordinances, it would be better for the industry to be proactive in this area.

18. Automated Here-to-There Delivery – Drone delivery only becomes a mass-market affordable option when human operators are removed from the equation.

19. Grasp and Release Mechanisms – People who set a package out front, wanting to send it across town, will require a pickup drone capable of automated grasp and release.

20. Aerodynamic Packaging – Packages attached to the bottom of a drone will need to be far more aerodynamic than the rectangular boxes most commonly delivered today.

21. Fly-Drive Capabilities – Because of trees, porticos, awnings, and overhangs, drones may need the ability to land on open space and drive to the appropriate delivery spot.

22. Collision Avoidance Systems – With the potential of flying into everything from power lines, to trees, windmills, Christmas decorations, and other UAVs, a comprehensive collision avoidance system will be necessary.

23. Crowded Skies Navigation System – At some point in the future there may be as many as 10,000 drones flying over a city in a given day. Not only will they need to avoid flying into buildings, trees, and commercial aircraft, they will need to avoid other drones as well.

24. Drone Operating System – An operating system is the most important software that runs on a computer because it defines how it functions. Computer buyers typically will choose between Android, iOS, Linux, or Windows for their operating system. Since drones have a different role and purpose, they will require an entirely different kind of operating system.

25. Shot from the Sky Recourse – Many disturbed individuals will view drones as a “form of target practice.” Drone owners and operators will need recourse for these situations.

26. Political Awareness – Paranoia is already rampant when it comes to all the bad things people can do with drones. For this reason its imperative that politicians be given special attention so they can understand the cost-benefit ratio associated with any of their decisions.

27. Consumer Awareness – Rather than letting the news media define the industry, this emerging industry needs to be proactive in defining itself.

Soon to become the policeman’s new best friend

28. Education for the Drone Police – Police will not only employ drones to assist in managing public safety, they will also use drones to monitor other drones. Drones are far more versatile and faster to deploy than virtually all other options officers have at their disposal.

29. Education for Drone Lobbyists – Drones will become one of the most highly regulated industries of all times. It is not too soon to start educating the influencers.

30. Education & Certification for Drone Pilots – With all their different configurations, styles, and function, drone pilots will require far different training than airline pilots do. Currently there are very few simulation programs available for practice.

31. Education for Drone Maintenance and Repair – People who service and fix drones will be in hot demand in the near future.

32. Drone Financing – As the need for instrumentation and safety equipment mushrooms, delivery drones will become far more expensive. As a result, drone financing will become a hot new area of business in the near future.

33. Flying Drone Bill of Rights – Do people have the right to “keep and bear drones?”

34. Docking Systems – People will eventually not want packages delivered onto their driveways. For example, any pizza left on a driveway becomes an open invitation for cats, dogs, and other stray animals. A better option would be to have some sort of docking system that would allow the drone to land and deliver the package into a secure area.

35. Better Battery Tech – Battery technology has not progressed nearly fast enough for the drone industry. Even gas-powered drones will likely need batteries to fly through “quiet zones” such as hospitals, nursing homes, and environmentally sensitive areas.

36. Airbag Crash Protectors – Accidents will happen and on occasion, drones will indeed fall out of the sky. To prevent large drones with heavy or dangerous payload from causing serious damage to people and property on the ground, some form of rapidly inflating airbag will be needed.

37. Invisible Fences – There will be many no-fly zones around the world and these zones will need the equivalent of an “invisible fence” to keep intruders out.

An Overarching Need for Standards

With a growing need for everything from standardized operating systems, to standardized packaging, standardized docking systems, and standardized emergency protocols, there is a looming need for literally thousands of new standards to be composed, and different ones for every classification, capability, and interoperability issue surrounding drones.

At the same time, every new invention, innovation, or business methodology opens the doors for even more standards.

As far as standards go, this problem-opportunity vein can be mined steadily for decades to come.

Replacing the FAA as the Regulatory Body

Watching the FAA representatives at last month’s congressional hearings on drones made it overwhelmingly obvious that the FAA is out of its depth as the appropriate regulatory body.

Just because drones and aircraft share the same skies does not mean the two industries are enough alike to share the same regulatory body. In fact, aviation expertise may actually be a detriment to allow this industry to properly unfold.

Too much regulation too early will stifle entrepreneurial drive and initiative. At the same time, too little regulation will open the doors for countless potential catastrophes. It’s a delicate balance and good to err on the side of caution, but important to not stifle creativity and development at the same time.

Final Thoughts

The recent crash of a drone on the Whitehouse lawn is a clear example of just how far this technology still needs to go.

Yes, the problems keep mounting, and this is only the short list.

The problems listed above may seem overwhelming at first, but its quite common for any emerging industry to have a myriad of issues to contend with. The challenge here is that the amount of time for solving them will need to be compressed into a fraction of that for past technologies like automobiles, electricity, airplanes, or telephones.

Expect a contentious playground in the years ahead. The unleashing has only just begun.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

.

 

Technological Unemployment and our Need for Micro Colleges

Business owners today are actively deciding whether their next hire should be a person or a machine. After all, machines can work in the dark and don’t come with decades of HR case law requiring time off for holidays, personal illness, excessive overtime, chronic stress or anxiety.

If you’ve not heard the phrase “technological unemployment,” brace yourself; you’ll be hearing it a lot over the coming years.

Technology is automating jobs out of existence at a record clip, and it’s only getting started. But at the same time, new jobs are also coming out of the woodwork.

In March, when Facebook announced the $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift, they not only put a giant stamp of approval on the technology, but they also triggered an instant demand for virtual reality designers, developers, and engineers.

Virtual reality professionals were nowhere to be found on the list of hot skills needed for 2014, but they certainly will be for 2015.

The same was true when Google and Facebook both announced the acquisition of solar powered drone companies Titan and Ascenta respectively. Suddenly we began seeing a dramatic uptick in the need for solar-drone engineers, drone-pilots, air rights lobbyists, global network planners, analysts, engineers, and logisticians.

Bold companies making moves like this are instantly triggering the need for talented people with skills aligned to grow with these cutting edge industries.

In these types of industries, it’s no longer possible to project the talent needs of business and industry 5-6 years in advance, the time it takes most universities to develop a new degree program and graduate their first class. Instead, these new skill-shifts come wrapped in a very short lead-time, often as little as 3-4 months.

Recent workshop at the DaVinci Institute

We Create the Future, and the Future Creates Us

Every new technology creates a need for more training. Very often it ends up being niche learning that takes place in-house with existing employees. But we’re also seeing a growing refinement of industries driving the need for huge new talent pools that currently don’t exist.

Whether its virtual reality, specialized 3D scanning, 3D printing, mobile apps, Internet of Things, flying drones, or reputation management, the need for tech-savvy fast-to-adapt talent pools is growing, and growing quickly.

This is also an area where traditional colleges have missed the boat. Their attempt to put everything into a 2-year or 4-year framework has left the largest untapped opportunity ever for short-term full-immersion courses that help workers reboot their career.

Proud to be a DaVinci Coder

The rapid growth in coding schools such as our own DaVinci Coders is only a tiny slice of a much larger Micro College pie that will get created over the coming years.

At the DaVinci Institute, our goal is to create a working laboratory for launching new Micro Colleges. These Micro Colleges will span the spectrum from “fly drone academies,” to crowdfunding schools, 3D printer designer schools, aquaponics farmers institute, and countless more.

Stay tuned, the best is yet to come.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

.