Thomas Frey's Blog, page 39

Extreme Graphene and the Coming Super Materials Gold Rush

In 2004, scientists Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov from the University of Manchester, used adhesive tape to lift a thin layer of carbon from a block of graphite, and placed it on a silicone wafer. Graphite is the stuff commonly found in pencil lead.

As simple as this sounds, what these two scientists had created was a 2-dimensional form of carbon known as graphene, and in 2010 they received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. But that’s only part of the story. 

What makes the discovery of graphene so important is all of its unusual properties. It is a pure form of carbon that is very thin, very strong and very expensive.

SUPER THIN – It is only one atom thick, so it is almost transparent.
SUPER STRONG – Graphene is the strongest material ever discovered, 100 times stronger than diamond, and 200 times stronger than steel, and yet flexible and even stretchable.
SUPER CONDUCTOR – It conducts heat and electricity faster at room temperature than any other known material. It also charges and discharges electrically up to 1000x faster than traditional batteries.
SUPER EXPENSIVE – Even using the most advanced processes for manufacturing it, graphene still runs around about $100,000 per square meter.

These unusual attributes have made graphene the most exciting new material in all of science. 

Since its discovery, a total of 8,413 patents were granted by February 2013 in areas such as super computing, electronics, energy storage, telecommunications, renewable power, health care, and telecommunications.

Over the coming years, the price of graphene will go through an exponential price drop similar to Moore’s Law.

Here’s why graphene and a host of other super materials are turning material science into the hottest of all hot new fields of research.

 

Dr. Bor Jang – Grandfather of Graphene

Dr. Bor Jang – The Real Grandfather of Graphene 

Nobel laureate Andre Geim was once asked why he never patented graphene. His answer was that a tech company executive told him that in a few years, big companies would hold so many graphene patents that he’d spend a fortune suing them.

Little did he know that a patent was filed on graphene a full 2 years before his so-called breakthrough discovery. US patent number 7071258, titled “Nano-scaled graphene plates” was filed in October 2002 by Dr. Bor Jang, founder of Angstron Materials, and Dr. Wen Huang, researcher at Nanotek Instruments, a company that was also founded by Dr. Jang. Both are in Akron, Ohio.

Dr. Bor Jang is an extremely rare scientific talent who had done tons of work on graphene long before the rest of academia discovered it. He currently holds over 40 patents on graphene-related applications and that number continues to grow.

One shortcoming though, Dr. Jang almost never publishes scientific papers, making him virtually unknown in academia. So did the Nobel Committee award the prize to the wrong people? In a word – yes. This was a serious oversight by the Nobel Foundation for not searching patent activity first.

The structure of graphene resembles chicken wire 

Extreme Graphene

The Wikipedia entry for “graphene” is over three times longer than the entry for “steel.” It also has over three times as many references. Even though graphene is made from carbon, its unusual properties and distinctive attributes have required a mountain of research, and this, in turn, requires a mountain of explanation.

It’s these distinctive attributes that make it valuable in so many different industries.

Here are ten examples:

1. Super Capacitors – Angstron Material’s 2010 patent for graphene-based super capacitors has been receiving lots of attention. Dr. Bor Jang explains, “This type of supercapacitor is especially attractive for electric vehicle where the pairing of supercapacitors with fuel cells or batteries could provide a hybrid system capable of delivering high power acceleration and energy recovery during braking.”

2. Energy Storage – Dr. Bor Jang’s super capacitor patents may also hold the keys to our coming energy storage revolution. Researchers at Korea’s Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have already demonstrated graphene-based super capacitors that can charge 100% in just 16 seconds and repeat the charge-discharge cycle over 10,000 times without a significant reduction in capacitance. This could translate into charging your phone in 30 seconds, or your electric car in a few minutes.

3. Wireless Power – Battelle’s February 2013 patent on using graphene to develop a more efficient Tesla Coil, where the graphene would wrap around the wires of the coil to act as protection against unwanted eddy currents, makes these coils far more suitable for wireless power transmission. Nikola Tesla’s dream of wireless power is still alive and well, living inside the power of graphene.

4. Super Sensitive Touch Screen – Samsung’s March 2014 patent describes using graphene to give all touch screens the ability to differentiate between weak and strong touch.

5. Ultra Thin Batteries – Apple’s June 2013 thin battery patent is focused on using graphene as a heat sink in batteries. In order to adequately cool a battery, a graphite coating is normally 30 millimeters thick. The graphene heat sink drops it to less than one.

6. Controlling Epileptic Seizures – Neurologists at the University of Washington have determined that cooling the brain by 1.2 degrees Celsius will inhibit epileptic seizures. Cooling is achieved by replacing a small piece of the thermally insulating human skull with thermally conductive graphene, allowing heat to flow from the brain to the cooler scalp. This technique has been demonstrated to prevent seizures before they occur.

7. Instant Deicing of Aircraft – In a February 2013 patent, Saab describes how to apply a graphene layer to aircraft wings to remove ice from the wings during cold weather, and eliminate the need for the ‘chemical spray’ used today.

8. Nano-Scale Transistors – A January 2013 patent by IBM explains how they’ve manage to mitigate many of the challenges of nano-scale electronics by removing the parasitic capacitance and resistance through a simple reengineering of the geometry of the transistor with graphene.

9. Thermo-Conductive Lubricants – A November 2012 patent by Angstron Materials describes dispersing single-layer nano graphene platelets in oil to provide improved thermal conductivity and reduce friction. In addition, it offers viscosity stabilization, and thermal conductivity values are the highest ever recorded for fluid materials.

10. Highly Efficient Water Filtration and Desalinization – Water and graphene have an unusual relationship. Water can pass through it, but almost nothing else can. Aluminum-oxide, currently used in many water filtration applications, becomes instantly outdated by graphene’s strength and rigidity. Researchers at Lockheed claim a graphene filter will reduce energy costs of reverse osmosis desalination by 99%. 

 

Aerogels are often referred to as “frozen smoke”

The Coming Age of Super Materials

You may not think its possible to conjure up some imaginary substance and create it on a computer, but that’s exactly what’s happening in the world of material science. Some of the newest materials getting scientists excited still only exist in theory. The next giant step will then be to actually start producing them.

Others already exist but are so new that their true range of application are still little more than conjecture in the minds of those developing them. 

That said, we are about to embark on the golden age of material science with digitally modeled materials being fabricated and used in thousands of experimental applications before landing on their primary uses in the business arena.

Here are just a few showing earth-rattling potential: 

Aerogels are a synthetic porous ultralight material created with a process that replaces the liquid component of a gel with gas. The result is solid matter, typically carbon, but with extremely low density and low thermal conductivity. Sometimes researchers refer to it as “frozen smoke.” Its current uses include insulation for skylights, chemical absorber for cleaning up spills, thickening agents in some paints and cosmetics, drug delivery agents, and water purification. But we are only scratching the surface of the thousands of other uses still to come.
Stanene (two-dimensional tin sheets) may be the next super material that competes with graphene. Even though it’s still only a theoretical substance that’s never actually been produced, it has lots of the thought leaders in material science world buzzing.
Shrilk is a material made from leftover shrimp shells and proteins derived from silk. Its dissolve-over-time biodegradable attributes will allow it to serve as sutures or scaffolds for growing new tissues that disappear when they are no longer needed.
Biomimetic nanomaterials are just now coming online. As an example, lotus leaves that are resistant to wetting and dirt due to their nanostructured surface are being used to develop waterproof paints and textiles.
Growable metals are still only in the backroom laboratory stage, but speculation has them being developed by adding metal salts to the irrigation water in plants, and using a secret process to sort the metals from the organic matter.
Spider silk is made from a biopolymer called an aquamelt, which can be spun at room temperature 1,000 times more efficiently than plastics. While spider silk itself will probably never be used, researchers are looking to make other materials that mimic spider silk’s tricks.
Carbon nanotubes are members of the fullerene structural family. Being carbon-based like graphene, carbon nanotubes compete on many levels with graphene in areas such as strength, conductivity, and stiffness. Even though the first paper describing carbon nanotubes appeared in 1991, no one has yet cracked the code for producing long strands inexpensively.

 

Graphene aerogel, the lightest substance on earth, weighing only 0.16 milligrams per cubic centimeter, resting on a flower

Final Thoughts

Graphene is strong, stiff and extremely light. Those who immerse themselves in its properties have their mind racing with possibilities.

One example has it being used to create bulletproof skin that instantly transforms the body into “cloaking mode” where wearers suddenly go invisible whenever signs of trouble appear.

It could eventually replace steel and carbon composites in everything from aircraft, to bicycles, to ships, to armored vehicles in the military.

Using graphene, thinly layered across surface areas, with its high electrical conductivity, thinness and strength, it could lead to fast and efficient bioelectric sensory devices, with the ability to monitor everything from glucose levels, to hemoglobin levels, to cholesterol, and even DNA sequencing.

The possibilities seem endless.

But graphene is just one piece of a much larger puzzle being constructed in the coming era of super-materials. These materials are a result of a convergence of our ever-increasing connectedness, infinite computing, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and a few technologies that still defy adequate description.

If you think this is cutting edge stuff, better brace yourself for what comes next. The genie has left the bottle, and next-gen super materials are poised to be a key ingredient in virtually all forms of innovation from here on out.

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By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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You will be a different person by the time you reach the end of this article

Whatever happened to that young child you were not so many years ago?

As a baby, life was all about eating, sleeping, and dry diapers. Even though you are learning new things quickly, not much else really mattered.

By the time you enter grade school, you have learned to walk, talk, feed yourself, and have fun with your friends. Mom and dad were very important and playtime is a central part of every day.

Entering high school you’ve grown much taller, in most cases, doubling your height from when you were two. Your eyes and facial features have many similarities and look familiar, but you are now very different. You are fascinated by music, television, and any time you spot a passing smile by someone of the opposite sex, it become heart-stoppingly important.

Relationships matter. Every new day has you seeking a different set of experiences. You take pride in whatever you were good at, and become enamored with things you enjoy.

Every personal relationship brings with it a different set of involvements. Your first kiss sets the stage for your second, and your first intimate moments become cemented into the very fabric of your being.

As you enter your 30s and 40s, your skillsets change dramatically. With age comes perspective, big problems become little ones, and over time, even the little ones faded away. In so many ways, you can now see the bigger picture.

In your 60s and 70s you begin to feel time is running out. One moment of urgency gets replaced by the next, but urgency also comes with a new outlook. Your greatest memories become like gardens of eternal beauty, a place where you graciously linger whenever they show up.

It is in this progression that we begin to realize that the future has changed us every step of the way. Even though there are continuations to our personality and genetic structure, we are constantly changing. One cell gets replaced by another until we bear little resemblance to that person we were so many years ago.

And yes, you are now a different person than you were, even a few seconds ago when you first started reading this column. So why does this matter? 

Here are 18 reason why the person you were still matters, and another 18 reasons why it doesn’t.

Understanding the physics of the future

The Ball Dropping Experiment

Take a ball, preferably one that bounces, and hold it in the air above your head. As you drop the ball, consider the implications of what happens.

During the 2-3 seconds it takes to reach the ground, several things are happening.

The ball at 6 feet above the ground is younger and different than the ball at 4 feet, 2 feet, and the one that impacts the floor. At each of these intervals, the ball is represented by distinctly different space and time coordinates, and in perhaps a million different ways, the ball changes as atoms are rearranged, electrons shift, and the chemical composition is slightly altered.

So is the ball at 4 feet and 2 feet a continuation of the ball being dropped, or something else. From a digital thinker’s perspective, every micro-second of time requires all of our surroundings be visually refreshed, just like the computer display on our desk.

Does this mean that the dropping ball is actually 10,000 individual ball scenes organized is some cosmic way to represent the fluid motion associated with it moving towards the ground? 

Probably not, but it also does not answer the fact that everything around us is constantly in motion, changing every micro-second of every day.

18 Reasons – Why the person you were still matters

The former you has set the stage for the present you, and the person you are today will become critically important to the person you become in the future. 

Memories – Every past memory helps crystalize who you are today.
Shared Experiences – Every long-term relationship is built around shared experiences, and these shared experiences provide the common ground foundation for future ones.
Emotional Values – Everything around you is constantly being emotionally rated on a subconscious level. That is why your car will generally hold more value than things like a skateboard or power drill.
Skills – Learning how to perform a task efficiently ties directly into a combination of short-term, long-term, and muscle memory. While some skill will fade over time, their influence will remain for years to come.
Your Body – Your present body came from your former body.
Derivative Talents – Every talent you have is a derivative of some other talent, interest, or tendency.
Physical Improvements and Physical Impairments – Every time you work out, it causes both short and long-term changes to your body and health. On the flip side, every time you hurt or injure yourself, it will also cause residual effects that linger over time.
The Personality Equation – Every individual is a combination of attributes, tendencies, desires, interests, and about 20 more ingredients we don’t have names for yet. Some will change significantly over time, but others less so.
Secrets – Hidden deep beneath the sub-floor of human consciousness are our secrets that can come back to haunt us if we don’t deal with them somewhere along the way.
Struggles – Our struggles are what make our accomplishments valuable.
Obsession – Determination becomes obsession and then it becomes all that matters. But from my vantage point, obsession is underrated.
Possessions – Yes, it is possible to simply walk away from all of our possessions, but few people do. Not only do we own our possessions, they own us. And the things we own, very often influences our future decisions.
Connections & Networks – We forge our weak and strong relationships through our connections. But today’s social networks give us the tools to amplify those connections in a massively powerful way.
Inner Voice – Our most intimate of all intimate relationships takes place in the rarely audible space inside our head. We have a constant love-hate relationship with our inner voice, and even though we argue with ourselves, it will continue to influence who you are in the future. No it won’t! Y.e.s., i.t. w.i.l.l.!
Hopes & Desires – Inside every great person is the hope and aspiration to become something better – more meaningful, more influential, more passionate.
Reputation – If we’re doing things correctly, our reputation will enter the room before we do. Our reputation involves a multitude of variables, and is one of the most influential aspects of who we are.
Quirkiness – Todays foibles can become tomorrow’s most admired qualities if we know how the leverage them.
Legacy – For many of us, the disturbance we leave in the force field of life is the most significant accomplishment we can possibly make.

Former self vs. future self. It’s not about winning!

18 Reasons – Why your former self no longer matters 

The voice of the fatalist inside often gives us little room for hope. If we believe that change is not possible, then it certainly isn’t. But at the same time, we are being inundated with constant examples of how different we are today than we were, say 20 years ago.

Here are 18 of these examples.

You look different. You’re nearly unrecognizable to those you hung out with 20 years ago.
You’ve forgotten. The vast majority of your life has disappeared into the ether, leaving little more than a faint residue of the imprint you made along the way.
Your physical abilities have changed.
Your income is different.
Your friends are different.
Your clothes no longer fit, and if they still fit, they fit differently.
The things you valued most in the past, now holds little meaning. (Note to self – Shag carpeting should have never been invented.)
Your favorite sports team today has none of the same players you remember from ten years ago.
New friends may be more valuable than old friends.
Your ability to make brilliant decisions today is far greater than the person you left behind.
Past mistakes can only haunt you if you’re still you.
Bad memories can be replaced by good ones, and old dreams can be replaced by more inspiring, more infectious, more exciting new dreams.
New skills will make you a different person.
Every significant shift in your life can be broken down into a series of baby steps that can be repeated, modified, redirected, or recalibrated.
You are only one relationship away from being the person you want to be.
There is always a path out of your current dilemma.
The only thing holding you back is you.
There is no limit to personal wisdom.

Final Thoughts

Each morning, as I brush my teeth, I barely recognize the person in the mirror staring back at me.

If I’m the same person I was 20 years ago, then why do I look so different, think so different, and why has my path of progress been so unpredictable?

When people are sent to prison, the person coming out is dramatically different than the person going in. The set of experiences on the inside, with every possible influencer being a capital “L” loser in the game of life, has a massively deleterious influence on the person leaving prison life behind.

Our best and brightest have but a brief moment to shine, and even the most gifted and most privileged bear the scars of human existence.

Some of you who read this will find it depressing and, in so many ways, discouraging. Yet others, reading the exact same words, will find inspiration and reasons for hope.

As for me, I continue on my never-ending journey to discover the great truths about what lies ahead. For me, that is my calling, a calling that I do not take lightly.

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By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Disrupting Healthcare – When Devices Replace Medicine

Doctors today are constantly selling.

No, it didn’t start out that way, but a system has evolved that richly rewards members of the physician’s food chain if sales continue.

These sales include the selling of tests, pills, therapy, referrals, or simply selling the patient on their competency as a doctor.

Over the coming years, much of the selling will be replaced by data. Expert opinions get replaced by hard cold facts. Yes, this will unfold over time and the transition period will involve a multitude of probabilistic approaches that will eventually lead to a more factual-based decision-making process.

While many in the medical profession view this as taking away much of the doctor’s power and authority, it may be just the opposite. Big data is not the doctor’s enemy, but rather a hugely valuable important tool, perhaps the most important of all time.

Consider the following scenario.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, patients walking into the doctor’s office will first receive a full-body scan, creating a complete data model built around several thousand data points. Any area that gives even the slightest hint of troublesome activity will warrant closer inspection.

For any number of conditions, rather than prescribing medicine as a treatment, doctors will prescribe a device. Devices will have a wide range of purposes ranging from ingestible cams and monitors, to wearable super data-collectors, to body function amplifiers, to pulse correctors, to early warning indicators.

During the transition period it will be a combination of drugs and devices, but eventually most medicinal treatments will be replaced with devices designed around coaxing the body into repairing itself. 

Over time, doctors will transition from being the experts on human biology and medicine to being the experts on biological data and biological devices.

Here’s why understanding this transition period is so important. 

 

Digital modeling will soon replace labs and testing

Healthcare as a Battleground 

Yes, there are many things wrong with healthcare today. According to Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize Foundation and author of the best-selling book Abundance, it’s no longer healthcare. It’s sick care. It’s reactive, retrospective, bureaucratic and expensive:

Doctors spend $210 billion per year on procedures that aren’t based on a patient’s needs, but fear of liability.
Americans spend, on average, $7,290 per person on healthcare, more than any other country on the planet.
Prescription drugs cost around 50% more in the U.S. than in other industrialized nations.
At current rates, by 2025, nearly 1/4 of the US GDP will be spent on healthcare.
It takes on average 12 years and $359 million to take a new drug from the lab to a patient.
Only 5 in 5,000 of these new drugs make it to human testing. From there, only 1 of those 5 is actually approved for human use.

With so much negative press surrounding the healthcare space, each of these problems points to an equal and opposite opportunity, and inside these opportunities we can begin to see glimpses of what our future might hold.

Future Doctors 

It would be a mistake to assume that we won’t need doctors in the future. The deeper we probe into the inner workings of human biology, the greater our realization of how little we actually know. 

It would also be a mistake to blame doctors for the system they currently find themselves in. Buoyed by the whims of big insurance companies, big pharma, and big government, doctors often find themselves the unwitting pawn of other, much larger, agendas. 

That said, doctors are about to enter unfamiliar territory, with mountains of data replacing judgment calls, and former ways of doing business simply gone forever. Not all will survive this transition. 

Data models will replace x-rays; sensors will replace labs and tests; devices will replace needles, blood draws, and pills; and people will gain control over their own data. 

There may indeed be a bifurcation of old school and new school physicians, and universities that teach traditional medicine vs. those that teach bioinformatics, data-chemistry, genomic-roadmapping, and cellular manipulation.

But in the end, for those who want to continue learning, and continue probing the farthest reaches of future healthcare, doctors will have unlimited opportunities to make a difference in the years ahead.

Doctors assisting DaVinci robot in surgery

A Brighter Future Ahead

The tech world is making massive inroads into next generation healthcare. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Johnson & Johnson is working with IBM’s Watson computer to help it understand scientific research and determine the cause and effect relationship of treatments given during clinical trials. One of their systems is now consuming 27,000 documents a day, and has proven to be 90% accurate at diagnosing lung cancer, far superior to the 50% accuracy of human doctors.
Google has developed a smart contact lens that can do real-time monitoring of a diabetic’s blood sugar levels. Future versions of these lenses could include cancer-detection, drug-delivery, and come with super night vision.
Intuitive Surgical’s DaVinci robot has already performed over 1.5 million surgeries, using high definition 3D vision. This robot, with its precise micro-movements inside the human body eliminates the potential for hand tremors commonly associated with human surgeons.
Gene sequencing has plummeted in price 100,000-fold, from $100M per genome in 2001 to $1,000 per genome today. Human Longevity plans to create the largest genomics data set ever by sequencing over 1 million people. They believe accumulating a massive dataset like this will lead to cures for cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease, and ultimately a plan for extending human life.
When it comes to 3D bioprinting, tissue biofabrication is already a reality, and the next step will be to create precisely designed organs, and transplanting these organs into the human body. The company 3D Systems has already demonstrated how to create accurate dental and anatomical models, custom surgical guides, implantable devices, exoskeletons, hearing aids, prosthetics and braces for scoliosis and other applications.
3D printed prosthetic limbs are showing up everywhere, many demonstrating superior design and functionality for less than $200. Traditional artificial limbs will run $50,000 to $70,000, and need to be replaced as a child grows or a person ages.

 

Oddly enough, most futuristic images of healthcare still have

doctors wearing a 100-year old stethoscope around their neck

Final Thoughts

If I were on the board of a pharmaceutical company today, I would be advising them to study, research, invest, and acquire some of the emerging device companies because that’s where the future lies.

Healthcare is an industry involving complicated politics, irrational decisions, and legions of people looking for their next paycheck. However, the sheer volume of money in the system is making it a prime target of entrepreneurs all over the world. 

But for those thinking that emerging tech will enable them to circumvent the entire healthcare system completely, it may, but only for a very tiny subset of the population.

We are on the verge of crossing over from science hype to science reality, with the prospects of creating a tremendous upside. Yes, there will be more than a few battles fought along the way between doctors and health industry executives, insurance administrators, and government officials but in the end, it doesn’t have to be a win-lose situation.

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By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Computing’s Next Big Transformation – Semantic Intelligence

I had great difficulty completing this column. This is partly due to the complex nature of the technology and partly because its implications may indeed be so far reaching that I’ll sound over-reaching in describing it.

Several companies may find what I’m describing to be rather disturbing. It’ll be disturbing because this technology is on the verge of undermining most, if not all, of their product development plans.

For two nights this week I was immersed in understanding the foundational shifts about to occur inside the software development industry, and this work is all taking place inside a tiny company called Mindaptiv located in the Denver Tech Center, a hub of startup activity in Colorado.

With a core team of true believers on staff that filled the presentation room, the company’s CEO, Ken Granville, and chief technology visionary, Jake Kolb, took our team from the DaVinci Institute through a series of demonstrations and discussions to grasp the potential of what they are on the verge of unleashing.

Working from inside his secluded geek lab in Boston, Jake started this journey in 2011 by asking the basic question, “What if software didn’t have to be written?” 

As most developers know, scripting a thousand lines of new code can be a very painful process. So what if a computer could simply recognize objects and you could just tell this JARVIS-like machine what you wanted it to do with them?

Over the past three years, that’s exactly what Jake and Ken have been building, a kind of “Ironman Room” of spatially capable objects that can be directed both verbally and through gestures with symphony-like precision. Even though they’re only partially there, it’s the kind of technology that would make Tony Stark proud.

Rest assured, I only know a few of the tricks this duo has up their sleeves, but we’re all about to become part of something much bigger than some new gadget we can all carry around in our pockets. No, this one is a game changer on steroids, and here’s why. 

History Of Transformational Computer Technologies

Computer technology has gone through several fundamental shifts since they were first invented. 

1944 – ENIAC: The grandfather, where Digital Computers began
1964 – IBM 360: Start of the Mainframe Computing era
1974 – Altair 8800: Start of the Personal Computing era
1990 – Tim Berners: Beginning of the World Wide Web
2007 – iPhone 1: Start of the Mobile Computing era
2015 – Mindaptive: Entering the Semantic Intelligence era

Admittedly this is a gross oversimplification of the biggest transformations in computers. I could have included many other significant shifts ranging from the introduction of Browsers, to Search Engines, to Open Source, to P2P, to Cloud Computing, and much more.

Without a doubt, all of these elements have contributed to the evolution of today’s highly nuanced improvements leading to today’s sophisticated computer technologies.

But on a zero to ten scale for rating tectonic shifts on the Richter Scale of computing, Sematic Intelligence is drawing lines on parts of the chart that haven’t ever been written on before.

Semantic Intelligence Explained

We use our devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones to convey meaning. We talk on the phone, write and read text, emails, blogs, news, look at and send pictures and videos. We do this because these inputs and outputs symbolically represent objects with behaviors and attributes that make sense to us as humans.

We don’t see pixels; we see words that our mind converts into pictures. We don’t see all the tiny squares, circles, and rectangles on the screen, but rather what they represent. In video, we don’t see still images or individual frames. Instead, we see the fluid shifting of movement, as we would experience in real life.

Our brains are hardwired to detect objects and assign value and meaning.

To explain this more simply, humans don’t think like computers and computers, until now, haven’t had the ability to understand humans. At least not easily.

Scientists working on this problem have identified a number of semantic gaps that have prevented this from happening:

The semantic gap between different data sources – structured or unstructured
The semantic gap between the operational data and the human interpretation of this data
The semantic gap between people communicating about a certain information concept.

The Mindaptiv Approach to Closing these Gaps 

The Mindaptiv approach is to turn every object into a set of instructions using a system for automatic object detection. This involves a process for dynamic down-sampling and up-sampling what it sees.

In doing so, every object is converted into a description, and the file size for that description is exponentially smaller than the data itself. This means that every server, laptop, tablet, and smartphone can easily be converted into a Semantically Intelligent device.

For example, a video is converted automatically and seamlessly from pixels into objects with attributes like size, shape, and color, with corresponding information about its time and space coordinates, just like our brains do.

Unlike Artificial Intelligence (AI), that requires a super computer like Watson, Semantically Intelligence, with its diminutive file structures, takes far less processing power and bandwidth. For this reason, high definition images and video, can be stored, transmitted, and presented from semantic definitions at a fraction of the time and cost it would take to send the pixels.

Taking this a few steps further, Semantically Intelligence’s size and speed advantages mean we will be able to send a text in English and have Hindi, Egyptian, or Mandarin come out the other side.

When it comes to the Internet of Things, the flow of “intelligence” from one device to the next will be exponentially greater and when we talk to our devices. And given a few learning cycles, our devices will finally learn to “think like us.”

The pieces I’ve explained so far are only what Ken refers to as, “a few shavings of ice off the iceberg of possibilities.” It’s not even close to being the tip.

Ken Granville (right) demonstrating Mindaptiv

Describing the Capabilities

One of the first demos we saw was a side-by-side comparison of a low-res photo, a jpeg under 50k file size. With one side showing the current state of the art, any zooming in on the photo resulted in a highly pixelated image.

Using Mindaptiv technology for transmitting a description rather than pixels, that same low res image could be expanded to a stadium-sized image and still maintain its crispness.

This was also demonstrated with several videos. Think about what it would be like to project a video the size of an airline hangar onto a massive wall and still maintain perfect resolution, yet transmitting the information through exponentially smaller file packets.

The second demo was designed to show how its object-capturing and object-manipulation features worked. In this presentation, a video feed of a vase showed how the vase could be selected and stripped away from the rest of its background. The vase was then placed onto a variety of different video backgrounds. In this example, the vase remained part of a live feed, so the vase itself could be repositioned, expanded, or turned sideways in real time.

Features like this will be very appealing to the special effects people in Hollywood and the gaming world. 

Additional demos showed the difference in code once an object was reduced to a description. The number of lines of code dropped from thousands to dozens. Once the description file was sent to it’s receiving device, the lines of code once again expanded into its original multi-thousand-line format.

This contraction-expansion feature will have massive implications in everything from big data, to telecom, to Internet security, to new hardware designs.

 

Final Thoughts

Admittedly, what I’ve described so far is not enough to give you an accurate sense of what’s going on here. Even for those working on the technology, the true implications will take years to fully realize. 

In my opinion, Mindaptiv is sitting on a loaded powder keg waiting to explode.

Yes, there are still any number of things that can go wrong, and this may be far too disruptive for most computer companies to readily embrace. But from my vantage point, Mindaptiv will transform the business world more significantly than the invention of the computer itself.

This is a revolution. Over time, all devices will become Semantically Intelligent. As a second step, which may happen somewhat concurrently, AI will be layered over the top, with AI adding the thinking, reasoning, decision-making, diagnosing, even feeling elements to the equation. Think of the movie “Her,” only better.

With a Semantic Intelligence layer, AI will be faster, cheaper, and perform better than anything in existence today.

Yes, I may indeed have had one glass too many of the Mindaptiv Kool-Aid. But even if they don’t manage to carry the torch across the finish line, someone else will. And personally, I can’t wait.

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By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Should Robots Have Their Own Bank Accounts?

Typical house-bot shopping on a budget

The year is 2027 and Winston, a newly born house-bot charged with doing a number of domestic chores including cleaning, meal prep, laundry, and building maintenance, has been programmed to not only perform the work, but also restock supplies once they reach a certain level.

Owners have wide latitude in the amount of autonomy they can grant their bots when it comes to decision-making, and spending authority is always the one given most attention. Much like a young child making decisions on their own for the first time, owners are typically reticent to grant too much authority until all of the systems are proven to be reliable.

The recent news story about a similar bot in Portugal, that glitched-out in an endless loop and ordered over $20,000 in cleaning supplies in less than a minute, was still fresh in everybody’s mind.

Yes, safeguards were quickly put into place to prevent anything like the Portugal incident from ever happening again, but the hangover effect of bad news has a way of lingering for a while in the background.

Typically, after the first 200-300 text messages from a bot, seeking spending approval on everything from $3.45 toothpaste to $12.93 laundry detergent, the owners typically relinquish their item-by-item purchase scrutiny in favor of the peace of mind that comes from being less bothered. 

But on this occasion, the store that the bot normally buys from has discontinued the brand of pasta it was requesting. When this happens, after searching for other likely suppliers that happen to be too far away, the bot sends over a list of possible replacement options, along with product ads and marketing descriptions.

Since most domestic products like this come with a list of personal preference attributes like smell, taste, and texture, it’s not possible for a bot to make a personal preference decision based on what the owner truly likes. Ideally samples are sent for owners to conduct a personal experience test, but pasta is not an item easily sampled. So this one required an additional text message.

As a way of safeguarding decisions like these, most owners have chosen to open separate bank accounts for each of their bots as an additional measure to limit potential losses. Winston, the house-bot has his own account, just like Trimly, the yard bot, and Sped, the deliver drone.

Here’s why most homeowners will opt for this approach in the future and why today’s banks are ill-prepared for this kind of activity.

 

Will shopping bots ever be banker friendly?

Banker’s Point of View 

For bankers, checking accounts have traditionally been a loss leader, used to entice people to deposit their money into their bank. In the banking world, the larger the deposits, the greater the number of loans they can make, and the loan department is where banks make most of their money.

But over the years, banks have chosen to add a number of tripping hazards to checking accounts to make up for their losses on small personal accounts.

This means that only the most hyper-analytical account holders are able to avoid the overdraft fees and over-limit fees imposed on those living paycheck-to-paycheck. 

With the advent of bots, and the subsequent bot-accounts, bankers are now contending with personal master accounts filled with multiple sub-accounts, which exponentially complicates the accounting issues they’re forced to deal with.

Not only has this necessitated that all tripping hazard fees fall by the wayside, but they’ve found customers to be very price sensitive when it comes to imposing monthly account fees to make up for their losses. 

In the years of vacillating about whether to let go of their highly profitable offender-fees, a new breed of bank alternatives has sprung to life, offering lower cost everything, and better service to boot.

Even though banks are still handling transactions deep in the background, they’ve become a far less visible facet of daily life.

The Amazon Trash Can is a smart device that scans and reorders discarded products

Baby Steps of Progress

Rest assured, as a society we don’t instantly jump from today to a future world with bots making purchase decisions. We will begin with a host of other unbanked appliances that first introduce the concept.

As an entry point, the Amazon Trash Can, with it’s scanning-and-reordering of every product being disposed of, will set the stage for similar smart, and eventually smarter, devices.

Here are a few logical Internet of Things approaches to what will likely happen soon. 

Smart Linen Closets – Monitor and inventory soaps, shampoos, conditioners, and more.
Smart Pantries – Often connected to smart refrigerators, the smart pantry will oversee common usage of food and supplies in the kitchen.
Smart Supply Drawers – Monitor and inventory everything from batteries, to paper, to staples, to toner.
Smart Gym Lockers – People that workout need vastly different products, services, and attention than those who don’t, and smart gym lockers are well-tuned to this kind of attention.
Smart Medicine Cabinet – As our pill culture grows more dependent upon having every drug and possible side effect carefully managed, administered, and scrutinized, the smart medicine cabinet with come with electronic calendars, reminder mechanisms, and will even text you when you slip up.
Smart Liquor Cabinet – Similar to a party kitchen, maintaining fresh fruits, mixes, liquors, and garnishes becomes an elaborate chore.

In the future, how will you know the good bots from the bad ones?

The Ethical Bot Dilemma

How much authority will future bots have? Will they be given the authority to keep alcohol away from alcoholics, cigarettes away from minors, and turn off devices when kids should be doing their homework?

Will the same bots that serve as your personal trainer and image consultant also be given authority to change your diet, schedule doctor appointments, and arrange social engagements?

Will they be given authority to sign for certified mail, to fill a prescription, hire an exterminator, or care for a baby?

Could we also go down the dark side of robotics and direct them to terminate a dictator, rebel leader, or anyone else who may stand in our way? 

Will bots be used as the intermediaries in drug deals, human trafficking, and arms shipments to keep the principals at a safe distance?

Will autonomous bots with bank accounts ever have to pay taxes? Could community bots be organized like a foundation and evolve into the biggest tax haven of all times?

Would you allow a robot to give you a haircut?

Final Thoughts

In much the same way servants, nannies, and butlers were given budgets and spending authority for a household operation in the past, next generation robo-butlers will be given similar responsibilities in the future. Only there will be a lot more of them, and the issues and implications will become far more complicated.

As we enter the era where machines talk to other machines, it will soon make perfect sense to have house bots talking to bank bots and store bots to handle menial chores like buying supplies for the home and office.

Until now, bank accounts have never been viewed as a personal necessity. In fact many banks have implemented strict qualification processes to weed out those who were deemed undeserving.

In fact, only 30% of the world’s population today actually has a bank account.

The coming bot era can either be viewed as a blessing or curse for those in the banking world. But it will be up to them to claim the high ground, and they will need to do it quickly.

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By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Seven Reasons Why the Value of Human Life is Increasing Exponentially

What’s the value of a human life?

For some of you this is a very disconcerting question because it attempts to put a dollar value on a person, something we value in far different ways.

But that is exactly what governments and businesses find themselves doing on a daily basis. Every time an insurance company calculates their premiums, militaries plan their budget, or juries calculate an award in a product liability case, the value of human life is a central part of their decisions.

In fact, the value of people is a subconscious calculation that we all make on a daily basis. Each of the following statements will indicate a value judgment happening in the back of our mind:

If I take this training my salary will go up.
When the mayor died, his estate was worth millions.
As a single mother raising 7 children, she left a tremendous legacy.

Much like adding an adjustment for inflation, cost of living increase, or adding a premium for brand name anything, we are constantly readjusting our sense of life’s value in our mind.

To some, the difference in value between a homeless person in Indonesia and the President of the United States may be well over $1 trillion. To others, they should be considered equal.

Seven global shifts are currently underway causing the underlying value of human life to move up the exponential growth curve, and along with it, a massive reassessment of corporate decision-making is about to begin. 

Here is why this will become such a huge factor over the coming years.

Past Human Life Calculations

To set the stage, here’s a fascinating video clip of a debate about the value of human life between the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and a young Michael Moore.

In this exchange Moore objects to a decision that was made by Ford Motor Company in the 1970s, based on a typical cost-benefits analysis, to not spend $11 per car on changing the design of the Pinto gas tank in a way that would reduce the likelihood of gas-tank explosions.

Friedman contended that Moore’s complaint merely was over the low value of $200,000 per life lost, not over the principle that the value of human life has a finite upper limit.

Moore seemed to agree with that principle, but he objected to the idea that some executive at Ford could casually decide the fate of Pinto buyers, and that the value of avoiding a horrible death or injury from a burning Pinto was as low as the company had assumed in its formal risk analysis.

Moore assumed that most Pinto owners would have gladly paid the extra $11 to fix the gas-tank problem. But business decisions like this are far more complicated than that with literally thousands of tradeoff decisions being made on the design of every vehicle, where 100% safety can never be guaranteed, and cost savings is always a significant factor.

However, a cost-benefits analysis like this would have looked dramatically different if the value of a human life were to shift from $200,000 to as high as $2 billion sometime in the future.

If you’re wondering how much your life is worth today, you’re not alone.

Here are some of the factors that will drive “value-of-life” calculations like this through the roof in the future. 

Seven Global Shifts

As with many facets of the “quantified self” movement, we now have a growing ability to quantify the value of human life with far greater accuracy.

1.) Declining Birthrates 

Global populations are growing increasingly fluid, and currently the United Kingdom is home to the most diverse immigrant community in the world, where 1 in 8 people are immigrants. 

China and India are basically exporting people. The number of Indian and Chinese-born people living outside of India and China have more than doubled since 1990.

But the most significant change occurring is a global depopulation trend happening in most wealthy nations. Countries need to average 2.1 children per family to maintain an even population base.

According to the World Bank, here is what’s happening in some of the most populated countries in the world:

Korea (1.19)
Japan (1.43)
Thailand (1.56)
Russia (1.60)
China (1.69)
Brazil (1.81)
Chile (1.85)
U.K. (1.91)
U.S. (1.93)
Sweden (1.98)
France (2.00)
India (2.48)

With the exception of India, each of these countries will experience a shrinking populations in the future.

As birth rates decline, each child becomes more precious, and the value of each life rises.

2.) Improving Global Connectedness

We all have our own fan clubs – people who care about us and we care about them. In the past, our primary influence tended to be limited to our Dunbar Number, the 150-250 people we were closest to.

Today, with extensive social media connections, our fan clubs have grown to not only include the strong relationships found inside the Dunbar Number, but also weak and even tangential relationships with people all over the world.

With each new connection, our value as an individual grows along an exponential growth curve that tech gurus like Bob Metcalfe and Dr. David Reed have been attempting to quantify.

Over time, the value of our personal network in tomorrow’s hyper-connected world will become markedly more quantifiable, and by extension, more valuable than the formulas we use to drive our metrics today.

3.) Improving Base of Skills 

A skilled laborer is more valuable than an unskilled one, and a multi-skilled individual is even more treasured.

Over time, our ability to accurately assess macro and micro skills will add to the growing body of evidence that the value of human life is indeed snowballing.

Counter to fatalist thinking that automation will cause large numbers of people to be unemployed, automation is simply readjusting our capabilities. By 2030, with the help of automation, the average person will be able to accomplish 50-100 times more in their lifetime than their counterpart today.

Average lifespans around the world have doubled over the past 200 years

4.) Increasing Life Expectancy

Life expectancy is currently increasing by two years every decade, and there are no signs of that slowing down. Average lifespan around the world is now double what it was 200 years ago.

Many times in the past, experts have predicted the increase in life expectancy would slow down and may even reverse, but they have repeatedly been proven wrong.

So will aging increase …forever? Is there a limit to how long we can survive into old age? 

With improved diets, lifestyles, and healthcare advances particularly in such areas of gene therapy, stem cells, and radical life extension research, having people reach the age of 250 with an active lifestyle becomes increasingly probable.

Most experts have concluded that there really are no hard ceilings that will prevent us from living indefinitely.

In Great Britain, as example, the Office for National Statistics predicted in 2010 that nearly one-in-five people would live to see their 100th birthday. By 2030, that number could well exceed one-in-two (50%).

As the producing/consuming years of human life grows, so does its overall value.

World per capita GDP is increasing

5.) Increasing Options for Creating Wealth

Interestingly enough, banks have become guardians of the old economy, embracing the networks of laws and regulations that give them protected turf in a bristling tech economy hoping to crack the shell and be set free.

Banks have reinforced their ranks with traditional thinkers wishing to maintain the status quo. Rank and file executives within the banking community are outsiders to the emerging cryptocurrency movement with their thinking focused on “how they will fail.”

On the other side of the equation are cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, some of the best and the brightest in the world, continually asking, “How can we make this succeed?”

Much like white corpuscles attacking the antibodies of corporate structure, they will eventually find a way, and cryptocurrencies will create expansive new ways to generate and amass wealth.

In addition to physical wealth, we have created numerous ways to accrue less tangible forms of wealth such as owning property rights, digital assets, and intellectual property.

So far, we are only scratching the surface of what’s possible. In the future we will uncover exponentially more options. 

Extreme poverty has been decreasing significantly

6.) Decreasing Poverty Rates

At the same time that global wealth is increasing, extreme poverty is dropping. We still have a long ways to go to create what many believe to be an equitable distribution of wealth around the world, but it’s moving in the right direction.

Along with decreasing poverty comes increasing purchase power among even the poorest of the poor.

7.) Accelerating Sense of Preciousness in Children

Most families today are fine with only one or two children. Dropping from 6-10 kid families 50 years ago to less than two today, the amount of time and attention dedicated to each child increases.

From an investment standpoint, parents today are willing to pull out all the stops. They view everything from better daycare, to better clothes, to better sport leagues as an investment in their children’s future.

Long-Range Implications 

These seven major trend lines, combined with dozens more, will be causing us to continually rethink how we value human life.

As the value of people climbs into the stratosphere, it will have huge implications on everything from product liability cases, to life insurance, to the way we value ourselves.

If our life is worth $2 billion, will we rethink our decision to buy a $200 couch, sleep on a $50 bed, or buy $19 shoes?

Will a better bed cause us to be better rested, extra alert, and more valuable in the future?

Final Thoughts

People in the future will view themselves as being in a constant state of improvement.

This means that over the coming decades we will become exponentially more fixable – trainable, repairable, improvable, and even re-inventable.

It will never be about who we are today, but who we have the potential to become.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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192 Future Uses for Flying Drones

The thought occurred to me that mounting a video projector to a flying drone could give it unusual capabilities. 

My first idea was to use it for special effects at a concert or major indoor event. But a device like this could also be used for spot advertising – creating momentary images on the sidewalk or parking lot; subliminal advertising – suggesting a variety of products or services inside graphic images; emergency rescue – displaying a series of arrows to help someone lost in a forest; or image masking – to disguise someone’s body and facial features to prevent them from being monitored. 

This line of thinking started me down several dozen new paths almost instantly.

Drones can be low flying, high flying, tiny or huge, silent or noisy, super-visible or totally invisible, your best friend or your worst enemy.

We can add lights, sound, cameras, microphones, sensors, robotic arms, wave cancellation technology, or wave enhancement technology.

Simply adding a robotic display will enable us to fly in and have a private video conversation with someone on the other side of the world.

Flying drones can also roll along the ground, stick to the side of a building, float in a river, dive under water, jump onto a building, climb a tree, or attach themselves like parasites to the sides of trains, ships, and airplanes.

One moment they can be hovering in front of you and the next they can fly off at the speed of sound, disappearing into the clouds.

Combining all these capabilities, attributes, and special features into one single device will open up a world of possibilities unlike anything before in all history.

Join me as we step into the magical world ahead being unleashed with this amazing new technology – flying drones.

Introducing the Triple Checkerboard

I’ve developed a brainstorming technique called the “checkerboard” as a way to generate ideas. It’s a very simple idea – start with eight categories and list eight items in each category, enough to fill all 64 spaces on a checkerboard.

When I’m feeling extra creative, I’ll generate enough ideas to fill two checkerboards – 128 of them.

But it’s only in my most masochistic moments that I’ve decided to torture myself into coming up with a full triple checkerboard of 192 ideas. This requires a little prep work to get into the mental zone for rapid idea generation.

Naturally, jumping into an epiphany fest like this involves editing out all the goofy ones, and few others too esoteric to be meaningful.

As promised, here are the 24 categories I’ve created, with 8 examples in each category. 

Tiny handheld drone

Early Warning Systems – How different would the world be if we had some advance warning that a disaster was about to happen? Each of these will require sensor swarms capable of detecting tiny changes to our atmosphere or surrounding environments.

1. Earthquake Warning Networks

2. Hurricane Monitoring Swarms

3. Tornado Warning Systems

4. Hail Preventer/Sound Cannons

5. Avalanche Preventer/Sound Cannons

6. Impending Flood Alert Systems

7. Tsunami Forecasting Systems

8. Forest Fire Preventers

First responder “get eyes on it” drone

Emergency Services

9. Missing Child Drone – Much like a hunting dog, capable of tracking the smell of the child.

10. Thermo Sensor Drones – For avalanche rescue.

11. Infrared Sensor Drones – For early forest fire detection.

12. Insect Killing Drones – Kill the insects before they kill you.

13. Poacher Drones – Tracking animals in danger of being poached.

14. Endangered Species Drone – Signals whenever an endangered species is in danger.

15. Eyes on the Problem Drone – Whenever a city receives word that there is a problem, their first response will be to send up a drone to “get eyes on it.”

16. Missing Pet Drone – Many will pay dearly to find a missing pet.

Channel 5 News with drone coverage

News Reporting

17. Accident/Incident Monitoring – High altitude monitors search for whenever a series of elevated heart rates show up, and drone will instantly zoom in for a closer look, alerting those monitoring the feed. Once an accident or incident has been detected, a series of other drones will be called in to record the entire event.

18. Time-Lapse Weather Drones – Capturing the big picture over an extended period of time from virtually any angle.

19. Protestor Cams – Wherever large groupings of people gather, drone monitoring will alert news organizations to meaningful activities.

20. Man-on-the-Street Interview Drone – Questions and answers done with common people on the street.

21. Real-Time Stats Drone – Recording everything from traffic counts, to people tendencies, to air quality, to brand preferences, to A-B testing, and more.

22. Rapid Comment/Interview Drones – Whenever a major political decision is made, “interview drones” are instantly deployed to capture public sentiment.

23. Locker Room Drones – Rapid interviews with athletes after major victories/losses.

24. Photo Drones – Spatial positioning to capture the perfect photo from the perfect angle.

Several companies are testing drone delivery services

Delivery

25. PO Box Drones – Your post office box, once it’s been filled, will lift off and deliver the mail directly to you.

26. Medical Prescription Delivery – 24-hour, any time, any place.

27. Grocery Delivery – Already in use.

28. Mail, Package Delivery – Already in use.

29. Anticipatory Delivery – Automated systems anticipate a failure and preemptively order replacement parts.

30. Send-It-Back Return Drones – Clothes don’t fit or it’s not what you ordered, no problem.

31. Direct from the Farm Produce – Fresh peaches, tomatoes, watermelons, cherries, and grapes any time of the year.

32. Banquet Catering Drones – Lavish feasts flown in at a moments notice.

Overhead thermoscan energy audit of building

Business Activity Monitoring

33. Construction Monitoring – Real time monitoring of building projects, even on the other side of the earth.

34. Topological Surveying – Rapid surveying systems to speed development projects.

35. Instant Environmental Impact Assessment – Instantly monitor, anticipate, and record environmental changes on any project.

36. Power Line Monitoring Drones – Checking for problems, deterioration, and signs of danger.

37. Thermo Imaging of Buildings – To spot heat loss.

38. Sensitive Product Shipping – Monitor shipping and handling of delicate products all the way from manufacturer to end customer.

39. Open Seas Pirate Monitoring Drones – Once they are spotted, send in the pirate attack drones.

40. Geological Surveying – Next-gen mapping of oil and mineral deposits.

Oculus rift controller for Parrot Bebop Drone

Gaming Drones 

41. Three Dimensional Chess Drones – What’s the fun in 2D chess when you can fly your knight or rook in for a perfect kill? Checkmate!

42. World of Warcraft in Space – Working outside the limitations of two-dimensional displays, augmented reality drone games will introduce a whole new dimension to gaming.

43. Three Dimensional Treasure Hunts – Finding unusual objects in unusual places.

44. Drone Jousting Matches – The collisions will be spectacular.

45. Monster Truck Vs. Flying Drone Matches – Who wouldn’t pay to see this?

46. Drone Racing – The drone version of the Indianapolis 500.

47. Drone Obstacle Courses – Great training for aspiring drone pilots.

48. Drone Hunting Season – Forget the clay pigeons, this is far more challenging.

AirDog automatically follows and films you

Sporting Drones

49. Perfect Athlete’s Performance Sphere – Perfect weather dome formed over athlete – creating perfect humidity, temp, air pressure, etc. – to enhance athletic performance. Also shouting words of encouragement that no one else can hear.

50. Space Racing Camera Drones – Enabling audiences on earth to witness the drama unfolding as drivers race spaceships.

51. Personal Trainer Drones – Totally relentless in making you work out.

52. Instant Landing Pad – Much like an instant airbag flown in and inflated at a moment’s notice.

53. Marathon Trackers – Following the progress from miles away.

54. Runner’s Metabolism Tracker – Watch how your body changes in real-time.

55. Bareback Drone Riders – Rodeo has a new sport.

56. Outdoor Bowling – Levitating bowling game that operates 1’ above the ground, with a floating ball return.

Entertainment Drones 

57. Comedian Drone – Flies in and performs random acts of comedy.

58. Magician Drone – Flies in and performs random acts of magic.

59. Concert Swarm – Spatial cacophony of sound coming from 1,000 speaker drones simultaneously.

60. Drone Circus – Entertainment in a whole different realm.

61. Performance Art Swarms – Visual swarm ballet where our imagination is the only limiting factor.

62. Mega Photo Stitching Competitions – With thousands of drones photographing an image simultaneously, this will be the process used to create the world’s highest resolution image.

63. Prankster Drones – Send random stuff to random people and video their reactions.

64. Fireworks Dropping Drones – Our ability to “ignite and drop” fireworks from the sky will dramatically change both how they’re made and the artistry used to display them.

Video projector drone

Marketing

65. Spot Advertising – Project momentary images or commercials on the sidewalk or parking lot in front of members of your target audience.

66. Subliminal Advertising – Project scenic or artistic images on walls, trees, and surfaces, each with hidden messages suggesting a variety of products or services inside the graphics and images.

67. Multimedia Formations – Swarms morphing and shape-shifting into giant three-dimensional logos and messaging.

68. Banner Pulling Drones – Old school advertising brought closer to earth.

69. Food and Product Sampler Drones – Since fewer people will be going to stores, they can sample new things on a regular basis.

70. Grandstanding Drones – Using drones to do something spectacular.

71. Flying Strobe Drones – To draw a crowd.

72. Fresh Bread Drones – The smell of fresh bread always turns people’s heads.

Helicopter drone used to monitor crops

Farming and Agriculture – As the cost of operating drones drops, they will reach a point of efficiency where it becomes profitable to have a micro drone pick and transport a single kernel of wheat 1,000 miles to its final destination. 

73. Artificial Bees – Rapid pollination drones.

74. Seeding Drones – Swarmbots planting one kernel at a time.

75. Insect Monitoring Drones – Rapid identification of all insects, bugs, worms, and mites. Also executes all of the bad ones, keeping track of bug body count.

76. Fertilizer Monitoring Drones – Even trace elements can make a huge difference.

77. Disease Monitoring Drones – Even a small outbreak can be disastrous.

78. Bird Frightening Drones – For crops like sunflowers where birds can destroy an entire field in a matter of hours.

79. Crop Fogger Drones – When temperatures get below freezing.

80. Harvesting Drones – One kernel at a time if necessary.

Animal herding/monitoring drones

Ranching Drones – Tracking animal movements, pregnancies, eating patterns, weight gains-losses, and any signs of danger. Each form of livestock will require different sensors, tracking systems, and monitoring equipment.

81. Cow Monitors

82. Horse Shadowers

83. Pig Monitors

84. Bee Observers

85. Sheep Trackers

86. Chicken Monitors

87. Turkey Trackers

88. Duck & Geese Monitors

Police drone

Police Drones – The police will use drones to track down criminals and even for search and rescue missions. They’re a cost-effective alternative to manned helicopters.

89. Drug Sniffing Drones – Faster and more versatile than bloodhounds.

90. Political Corruption Sniffing Drones – Faster and more versatile than whistleblowers…. Maybe!

91. High Speed Chase Drones – The chase is over even before it starts.

92. Domestic Violence Monitors – Remote monitoring of potentially volatile situations.

93. Child Abuse Monitors – When in doubt, these hovering nanny-cams will provide close scrutiny.

94. Neighborhood Watch Cams – Patrolling the neighborhood even when the neighbors are gone.

95. Ankle Bracelet Replacement Drones – Adjusted to the freedoms stipulated by the courts with more real-time data.

96. Instant Court Drones – Your day in court may only be minutes after receiving your ticket.

Smart Home Drones

97. Airbrush Swarm – Add artistic murals to your walls in seconds.

98. Dusting Drone – Cleans walls, shelves, countertops, and virtually every other surface.

99. Lawn Manicuring Drone – Perfect lawns every time.

100. Leaf Raking Drones – Menial labor is a thing of the past.

101. Home Security Drones – Whether the threat is coming from the sky or on the ground, these drones will spot the problem, alert the owners, alert authorities, and rain fire and brimstone down on any intruders.

102. 3D Printer Repair Drone – Whenever a crack or damage occurs, the 3D printer drone will fly in and print a perfect patch every time.

103. Special Drone Docks – To allow 24-7 drone deliveries, and to alert you when they arrive.

104. Diaper Changing Drones – I have no idea how this one will work, but once perfected, the demand will be off the charts.

Real Estate

105. Real Estate Photography Drones – Real estate agents, especially those selling high-end homes, use drones to fly over their listed properties and capture aerial footage of the grounds and surrounding neighborhoods.

106. Atmospheric Water Harvesting Drones – Fly to high humidity areas, suck moisture from the air, and deliver it within minutes.

107. Home Inspection Drones – Find the problems before spending too much time on a property.

108. Battery Replacement Drones – Replace the batteries in your house, much like replacing the batteries in your clock.

109. Trash Removal Drones – Off grid living at it’s best.

110. Sewage Removal Drones – To distant leech fields.

111. Insurance Adjuster Drones – Filing a claim will never been easier.

112. Instant Listing Drone – Put your house up for sale in a matter of minutes. 

University of South Florida plans to let students checkout drones at its library

Library Drones – As we enter the drone era, the library/sharing economy will take on some interesting new dimensions.

113. Tool Loaning Libraries – Borrow a drill, wrench, socket set, welding torch, hammer, plane, power saw, soldering iron, or more.

114. Emergency Equipment Loaning Libraries – Emergency generators, emergency lighting, first aid kits, etc.

115. Pet Lending Library – Animal shelters or fraction pet ownership kennels will be able to fly your pet to you at a moments notice.

116. 24-Hour Books, Audio Books, Videos, Artwork, & Information Archives – On demand library services delivered right to your home.

117. Tech Lending Library – If you find an old Commodore 64 disc or Atari Space Invaders cartridge and want to have a retro weekend, just borrow one of the original computers or game consoles to make it happen.

118. Borrow an Expert Library – Flying video screen with a live connection so you can have a brief conversation with an expert who can answer your questions.

119. Borrow a Big Brother – Companionship with a drone chaperone.

120. Drone Lending Library – Borrow a drone. It will come to you.

Titan Aerospace solar powered WiFi drone!

Military and Spy Uses – In 2010 the U.S. Military spent $4.5 billion on drones. By 2018, that number is expected to reach $18.7 billion.

121. Missile Launching Drones – Already in use.

122. Bomb-Dropping Drones – Already in use.

123. Flying Camouflage Drones – Visually masking everything below.

124. Communication Disruptors – Creating zero-communication zones over targeted areas.

125. Battlefield Medical Supply Drones – Providing almost instant source of supplies and equipment for battlefield injuries.

126. Invisible Spy Drones – Too small to see, with rolling, jumping, flying, attach to anything capabilities.

127. Heat Seeking Bullet Drone – Perhaps the most dangerous weapon ever to be invented, this bullet-size drone can be shot from thousands of miles away at a specific target, and never miss.

128. Solar Powered High-Altitude WiFi Drones – In March 2014, Facebook purchased Ascenta, a solar-powered drone company based in the UK. Facebook intends to use the high-altitude flyers as part of a network of linked satellites, drones and lasers that can beam Internet to remote communities from the sky. In April 2014, Google purchased its own solar-powered drone company: Titan Aerospace. The company designs ultra-lightweight, solar-powered planes that fly high above commercial air traffic and can remain aloft for up to five years.

Healthcare Drones

129. Humanitarian Applications – Researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology are developing drones that can deliver vaccines and other critical medical supplies to remote locations in the developing world.

130. Canary Drones – Test out air quality inside mines and other questionable air environments.

131. Body Sphere Monitoring – Swarm of micro drones to monitor any changes in a person’s energy fields.

132. Hovering Health Monitors – Real time tracking, measuring, and analyzing body movements.

133. Physical Movement Analysis – Therapeutic monitoring of all physical movement to analyze strengths and efficiencies and suggest ways to improve.

134. Skin Care Monitor – Tracking overall skin and dermis health.

135. Seeing Eye Drone – Replacing the seeing-eye dog.

136. Infectious Disease Monitoring Drone – Will alert you whenever you’re about to come into close proximity with someone carrying a contagious disease.

Cal Poly students’ “SkyBarge” won American Society of Mechanical Engineers drone competition

Educational Drones

137. Historical Reference – “At this location on Oct 18, 1963 a meeting was held to decide the fate….”

138. Real-Time Perspectives – “A civil war is currently being fought between rival factions and these are before and after scenes of the main transportation route through their country…”

139. Geometric Shapes – Drones used to form patterns in space, showing the math behind calculating angles, volumes, areas, and relationships.

140. The Question & Answer Drone – Wherever you walk, this drone will pose a constant series of questions to challenge your understanding of the world around you. Correct answers will be given after three attempts.

141. Documentary Drones – Film and motion picture companies using drones for aerial footage, because drones are quieter and don’t vibrate as much as helicopters.

142. Language Partner Drone – Learn a foreign language with an interactive drone partner.

143. Basic Math Drones – Real math problems done with three-dimensional examples, unfolding before your eyes.

144. SAT-ACT Prep Drone – Constant testing until you’re ready for prime time. 

Science & Discovery

145. Archeology – A team of archaeologists uncovered structures thought to be from an ancient Native American village in New Mexico using drones equipped with heat-sensing cameras. The thermal images enabled the researchers to see beneath the desert floor, which helped them locate the buried structures.

146. Whale Watching – Real time tracking of whale pods everywhere in the world.

147. Bird Migration – Real time tracking of birds as they move through their migratory patterns.

148. Forest Health – Map everything from bark beetles, to pine beetles, to spruce beetles, to disease patterns, and more.

149. Ocean Currents – Using temperature sensors to do real time tracking of warm water currents.

150. Aurora Borealis – Real time tracking of the northern lights and the underlying colliding solar winds and magnetospheric charged particles.

151. Solar Flare Monitoring – Using a diverse pattern of solar-watching drones, scientists will be able to do real time monitoring of all solar activity with far greater precision than anything used today.

152. Earth Noise Monitoring – Establishing a wide configuration of listening posts throughout the atmosphere to listen to the shifting noise patterns of the earth itself. 

Future commuter drone!

Travel Drones – Oddly enough, flying drones will replace our need for flying cars.

153. Commuter Drones

154. Taxi-Limo Drones

155. Bar Hopping Drone

156. Tourist Attraction Drones

157. Hop-on-Hop-off Drones

158. Emergency Rescue Drones

159. Trucking Drones

160. Overnight Sleeper Drones

UAV with robotic arm

Robotic Arm Drones – Add a robotic arm to a flying drone and a person’s mind begins to swirl with possibilities.

161. Hazardous Material Drones

162. Transporting Dangerous Chemical Drones

163. Rescuing Dangerous Animal Drones

164. Chess-Playing Drones

165. Arm Wrestling Drones

166. Spot-Welding in Difficult Places Drones

167. Mechanical Repair in Difficult Places Drones

168. Space Junk Removal Drones

Reality Distortion Fields – Steve Job’s secret talent applied to drones. This involves our ability to distort virtually every form of our sensory perceptions.

169. Odor Cancellation – Eliminate bad odors and make every bathroom, landfill, and pig farm smell like springtime.

170. Sound & Noise Cancellation – Noisy neighbors can be a thing of the past.

171. Visible Light Cancellation – Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak done with drones.

172. Magnifying Drones – Make distant object appear closer.

173. De-Magnifying Drones – Make close objects seem further away.

174. Color Changing Drones – Distort the visible light spectrum to whatever you desire.

175. Thermo Cannons – To blast heat into whatever may need heat.

176. Voices in Our Head Drones – Silent invisible drone that talks to us. With a little voodoo programming the voice can sound exactly like a person’s own voice. Bad guys and terrorists can be influenced and maybe even grow a conscious without ever knowing they’re being externally manipulated.

Periscope drone, capable of seeing far beyond what’s on the ground

Novelty Drones

177. Personal Periscopes – Want to see over a tall building? No problem, and you can even view the image on your smartphone.

178. Plant Communicator Drones – If we listen closely, every plant is speaking to us.

179. Frisbee Turbo Fliers – Comes with a self-balancing turbo booster to assist Frisbee gamers everywhere.

180. Shade Drones – Too much sun, no problem. The drone clouds are here!

181. Mosquito-Free Zone Drones – Keeps all of these pesky critters away.

182. Dating Drone – Spots nearby potential dating partners who fall into your compatibility categories.

183. Relevancy Drone – To filter out anything that’s not relevant.

184. Elevator Drones – Set up to move people on the outside of buildings, also with the capability of doing building hopping.

Will floating drone cities ever be possible?

Far Out Concepts

185. Massive Flying Drone Resorts – Think of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas hovering at 1,000-foot altitude. Paradise in the clouds.

186. Artificial Earthworms – Microbe-sized swarmbots can be built to “chew their way through” landfills and fields of toxic material as a way of improving the rate of decomposition and lowing toxicity levels.

187. Personal Prep Swarms – Once we step out of the shower in the morning, the swarmbots will dry our skin, fix our hair, and take their place as part of our ever-changing wardrobe.

188. Swarm Clothing – Flying swarmbots will serve as our clothing, flying into “clothing formation” on command, reconfiguring themselves according to our fashion moods, changing color on a whim.

189. Protective Swarms – Flying swarmbots will be capable of forming shields to protect people from too much sun, too much wind, and even temperature extremes. In personal confrontations, swarmbots will form a protective shield around people, keeping them safe.

190. Mental Conduit Swarms – Swarmbots will serve as an information conduit for our minds, forming antennae to capture wireless transmissions, forming an information-processing array for the data, floating visual displays that only we can see.

191. Remote Viewing Swarms – Remote viewing from anywhere, at any time, from any angle, will be possible as the swarm moves into whatever position we ask it to. This “eye in the sky” can range from several miles across on one extreme to a micrometer across on the other.

192. Superman Swarm – With flying swarms that serve as our clothing, the next step will be for them to evolve into an exoskeleton of sorts for physical enhancement. Flying swarms will give of superhuman strength, superhuman durability, and even the ability to fly.

 

Final Thoughts

The purpose of composing this rather exhaustive list is not an attempt to cover everything, but rather to show the enormous versatility of this platform.

The complete list of will easily include over 10,000 listings.

Some may think that drones will become the most annoying devices on earth. In many cases that might be true.

Without the proper protections, drones can be dangerous. The same drones that deliver food and water can also deliver bombs and poison. We may very well have drones watching the workers who watch the drones, and even that may not be enough.

Eventually we’ll find the positive uses far outweigh the negative ones, and we’ll develop the right systems to make it all workable.

As we go down this path, we’ll also be unleashing millions of new startups that are destined to drive the economy for decades, if not centuries, to come.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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When it comes to jobs, why is this time different?

In 1964, and open letter was drafted and sent to President Johnson, warning him of the coming Triple Revolution.

The letter was composed and signed by 35 members of the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution,” which include luminaries like Nobel Chemist, Linus Pauling; civil rights activist, Tom Hayden; and Swedish Nobel Economist, Gunnar Myrdal.

The letter focused on three revolutions taking place at the time:

Cybernation Revolution – increasing automation
Weaponry Revolution – mutually assured destruction
Human Rights Revolution – growing civil unrest

While the letter talked about all three issues, it focused primarily on the Cybernation Revolution where they predicted that machines would cause massive new unemployment:

“A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs.”

Of particular interest to me was the work of one of the signers, Robert Theobald, a futurist who had written extensively on the economics of abundance and his advocacy of a Basic Income Guarantee. These are the same topics being discussed by those today who fear massive technological unemployment in the years ahead.

Even though this 1964 warning of a Triple Revolution registered little more than a tiny blip on the radar screen of history, computers have dramatically changed the jobs landscape as well as the skills required to perform those jobs.

Today we are seeing many voice similar concerns about technological unemployment, where computers, robots, and machines are automating our jobs out of existence. In fact, some have gone so far as to call this the “robot jobs Armageddon.” 

So is this time truly different? Here are six overarching shifts in the world that are causing many to say, “Yes, this time may really be different!”

Six Massive Global Trends

As we survey the trends landscape, there are literally hundreds of significant trends affecting us in one way or another. But if we sort through the ones that pose a fundamental shift to employment, seven of them tend to rise above the rest.

 

1.) Declining Birthrates 

Britain’s Telegraph recently published an article with the headline, “South Koreans will be ‘extinct’ by 2750 if nothing is done to halt the nation’s falling fertility rate.” With a fertility rate of 1.19 children per woman, Korea now ranks as the lowest in the world.

India, China, Japan, and Brazil all have massively declining fertility rate, part of a global trend towards negative population growth. Yet the media and many educated Americans have missed this major development entirely, instead sticking to erroneous perceptions that global population will continue to drive everything from environmental degradation and immigration to food and resource scarcity.

Here are a few of the latest fertility rates, according to the World Bank, in major countries around the world. Keep in mind the replacement rate is 2.1 for a population to stay at its current level.

U.S. – 1.93
Chile (1.85)
Brazil (1.81)
Thailand (1.56)
France (2.0)
Norway (1.95)
Sweden (1.98)
Russia (1.60)
Japan (1.43)
U.K. (1.91)
India (2.48)
China (1.69)

With the exception of India, the major population centers of the world all are destined for negative population growth.

Yes, the world population is still growing, fueled primarily by people living longer and high fertility rates in Africa. But even Africa is predicted to slip into negative growth rates over time.

The most significant challenge is the long lead-time needed to move in the other direction. Since raising a child takes about 20 years to go from infant to productive adult, any major improvements here wouldn’t show up until somewhere between 2035-2040.

Even though many are rooting for zero population growth for environmental reasons, the struggles ahead related to managing systems with a growing imbalance between young people and old people, will not be easy.

2.) Exponential Industries

In some ways exponential industries as a great way to compensate for our declining workforce.

Exponentialism is the science behind digital technologies far-reaching influence on innovation. The exponential cost-performance of the three basic building blocks of our digital world – computing power, storage, and bandwidth – have started to affect vertically every other business, sending jolts of performance opportunities through these industries.

This type of change is most disruptive when two or more technologies “interact and combine” in ways that “coalesce into open platforms and ecosystems.” Think in terms of the intersection between AI (artificial intelligence) and quantum computing, or changes to synthetic biology when it’s amplified by 3D printing.

Exponential innovations are rapidly crossing boundaries we could never imagine in the past, and as a result, our language and terminology has begun to blur. At the same time, it’s already touching staid old industries like financial services.

Mixing AI and natural language processing (NLP) with shopping, work, and social characteristics, we have the potential to develop far a more dynamic credit rating systems, facilitating far more efficient ways to match lenders and borrowers. This will mean new industries will explode from zero-to-operational in a matter of hours rather than months or years.

Exponential industries are confusing, thought provoking, and mysterious all at the same time because they have the potential to spawn massive change in a short period of time, often with little forewarning.

3.) Our Growing Levels of Awareness

The Internet is building our awareness in ways we can’t yet assign metrics to. The number of photos we see in an average month, the amount of information we consume, the amount of time we spend interacting with digital personas, avatars, and entertainment are all part of our growing awareness of the people, places, and things that will all be part of our future.

Every 60 seconds there are over:

2 million Google searches
205 million emails sent
900 new websites created
2.5 million new Facebook likes
$102,000 spent on Amazon
152,000 new photos uploaded to Facebook
3.4 million YouTube video views
200,000 new Tweets on Twitter

Along with all this activity comes a user mindset that is increasingly aware of millions of tiny information fragments that guide our decision-making, our ability to adapt, and our ability to function in our increasingly fluid work environments.

Awareness will become a key part of our employability in the future.

4.) Our Growing Levels of Fragility

As our dependence on systems and technology grows, so do the number of potential breaking points.

We all know that a simple power outage can shut down our work, traffic systems, restaurants, doctor, and dental offices. Having a very reliable electric grid makes it difficult to justify backup systems in most places. 

We also know how disruptive it can be to lose cell coverage, not have Wi-Fi, or lose our water, cable, or Internet altogether. Every new capability tends to increase our expectations, but when it’s gone we are forced to compensate.

The average person in the U.S. today is highly dependent on a multitude of systems, services, and technologies. As an example, we depend on:

Facebook to find out how our family and friends are doing
Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps for directions
Pandora, Spotify, or Rdio for music
Apple TV, Roku, or Chromecast for streaming TV
Netflix, Hulu, or iTunes for television programming
Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook for email
Amazon, eBay, and Etsy for online shopping
FedEx, UPS, and USPS for overnight delivery
Skype, WhatsApp, and Viber to make international phone calls
Ameritrade, eTrade, and Scottrade for trading stock 

Every new dependency adds one more possible failure point to the mix. Depending on the situation, our growing levels of fragility can either increase or decrease our job prospects for the future. 

5.) The Power of One

In our increasingly connected world, it’s easy to see how much power and influence the individual has today. This kind of power can be used to disrupt industries, make a difference, or even change the world.

While there have been countless examples in the past, motivated people today are making changes everywhere:

Grace Choi – This Harvard Business School graduate recently invented Mink, a sub-$300 3D printer that prints custom makeup pigments on demand, a product that will radically transform the high-end cosmetic industry.
Fatou Doumbia – When it comes to creating sustainable farming and food supplies, the people of Mali, West Africa still have a long ways to go. Fatou’s plan is to empower women, teach them the best farming techniques, and overcome the challenges of a male-oriented society. 
Ben Kaufman – This 27 year old founder of the NY-based invention company, Quirky, has raised over $90 million to turn social invention into a faster way to bring great ideas to market.
David Allerby – 33 year old founder of HomeCare, a company that provides temporary in-home assistants for seniors and children with developmental disabilities.
Sean Kelly – This 29 year old two-time freestyle snowboarding national champion now runs HUMAN Healthy Vending, a chain of franchised vending machines filled with healthy foods, like fresh fruit and sports supplements. 

As people come to grips with their own wielding of power, the result will be unique and unprecedented. They will consciously decide to do something extremely positive, like those listed above, or something extremely negative.

What we are seeing is the balance of that power shifting from large corporations into the hands of individuals. But when it comes to people losing their job, we will need to be ever vigilant to insure those who find themselves on the outside, don’t resort to using the dark side of this power.

 

6.) Our Overprotected “Nerf Generation”

Will our grandchildren grow up to call their grandchildren lazy?

It seems that every generation has a cynical view of their kids and grandkids. They don’t try hard enough, make the right decisions, plan well enough, and simply don’t have any common sense.

At the same time, we have seriously overprotected our kids. There are no longer real chemistry sets and schools aren’t allowed to let students use a scissors. Every sport requires helmets, chin guards, mouth guards, kneepads, and a nurse or doctor on call in case something goes wrong. And playgrounds have to be designed so no one can possibly get hurt, meaning no swings, no teeter-totter, no merry-go-round, and padded surfaces everywhere. 

Since we’ve chosen to make all kids feel special, no one actually feels that way anymore. We can’t have winners without losers. In the real world, people will never care about your kid unless your kid gives them a reason to care.

In the U.S. over 29% of those under 35 still live at home with their parents. Other places in the world it’s worse. In Italy, as example, over 60% of men under 35 still live with their parents.

Dealing with an overly-coddled Nerf generation will have long term implications on tomorrow’s job market, both in terms of maturity, employability and overall resilience when it comes to dealing with adversity. 

Final Thoughts

Is our system for creating new jobs a “self-organizing complex system?”

Will our exponential systems compensate for declining birthrates? Will our growing levels of awareness compensate for our growing levels of fragility? Will the “power of one” compensate for our overprotected “Nerf Generation?”

In many cases yes, but not always.

Are people spotting and responding to the opportunities in ways where the future will somehow take care of itself? Or do we need to send something similar to the “Triple Revolution” letter to the President of the U.S. warning him/her of the trials ahead? 

Not everyone agrees there will be problems.

MIT economics professor David Autor describes it this way. 

“Journalists and expert commentators tend to overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities. The challenges to substituting machines for workers in tasks requiring adaptability, common sense, and creativity remain immense.”

Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, offers another fascinating point of view:

“If ‘displace more jobs’ means ‘eliminate dull, repetitive, and unpleasant work,’ the answer would be yes. How unhappy are you that your dishwasher has replaced washing dishes by hand, your washing machine has displaced washing clothes by hand, or your vacuum cleaner has replaced hand cleaning?

My guess is this ‘job displacement’ has been very welcome, as will the ‘job displacement’ that will occur over the next 10 years. The work week has fallen from 70 hours a week to about 37 hours now, and I expect that it will continue to fall. This is a good thing.

Everyone wants more jobs and less work. Robots of various forms will result in less work, but the conventional workweek will decrease, so there will be the same number of jobs (adjusted for demographics, of course). This is what has been going on for the last 300 years so I see no reason that it will stop in the decade.”

There is solid evidence that many low-skilled employees are working less, but the reverse is not true for high-skilled employees. In other words, the low-paid routine jobs just aren’t paying enough, and that’s an incentive for employers to replace people with machines.”

It’s easy to see how things are different this time around, but are they different enough to warrant concern?

From my perspective, the job market is indeed a self-organizing complex system, and for the most part it will take care of itself. However, the main problems we face will stem from those feeling personally betrayed, waging a private war against either companies or systems they deem responsible. The power of the individual should not be underestimated.

Sadly, these one-off incidents are rarely predictable, and from a systems-thinking perspective, are the least preventable.

That said, I’d love to hear your thoughts on why this time may or may not be different.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Establishing the Central Bank of Bitcoin

The year is 2024. It seemed like a piece of nostalgia to open a new bank account and get a free toaster, but this wasn’t any ordinary toaster, and it certainly wasn’t any ordinary bank. The new Internet of Things Toaster was one of the coolest gadgets of all times, and the Global Bank of Bitcoin was a charter member of Bitcoin’s new Central Bank based in Luxembourg.

Having launched as a Kickstarter project in 2022, raising millions in the process, this kitchen appliance elevated “toast” to the level of a new communal food with a designer flair. Old-fashioned bread could have 3D-printed toasted-inlays ranging from jams and spreads, to vitamins and dietary additives, to sweeteners and energy laces.

But what people found most magical was its ability to have animated hi-res images print-toasted onto the surface and brought to life through the use of edible electro-jellies. This next-gen food-tech had given rise to a myriad of party games, where “players” told stories about the animated scenes and “toasted” the other participants by eating the face of their favorite protagonist, one bite at a time, until both the story and the food were totally consumed.

For this new crypto-bank, it was the perfect crypto-gadget to draw attention to their crypto-currency. Similar to traditional banks, accountholders could apply for home mortgages, car loans, and establish retirement accounts. But unlike today’s highly monitored, highly regulated banking world, the Central Bank of Bitcoin’s charter was to be more of an anti-central bank, serving as a pass-through shell without taking ownership of the currency, but rigorously guarding the anonymity of the accounts and transactions, as well as the integrity of the networks, at the same time, adding a systems layer to promote wider scale adoption.

Even the super-libertarian backers of cryptocurrencies had begun to realize the limitations of operating without a support structure, and in its absence a myriad of proprietary technologies, destructive thinking, and bad actors had begun rearing their ugly heads.

While the original purpose of Bitcoin was to build a counterculture currency and transaction network free from the intrusion and prying eyes of big government, its role has begun to evolve into more of a checks-and-balance system to offset abuses by the worlds existing banking system.

Here’s why creating a Central Bank for Bitcoin may be the next logical step. 

Crypto Currencies Today

The first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was created in 2009 by a mysterious developer using the pseudo-name Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2010, the secretive Satoshi handed the reigns of Bitcoin over to Gavin Andresen, a like-minded developer who now manages the operation along with a team of five senior developers.

Less than a third of the original Satoshi code still exists. The rest has been rewritten by Gavin and his team to plug security holes, improve usability, and make it operationally more efficient. Andresen is the one who conceived of the nonprofit Bitcoin Foundation—established in 2013—which is the closest thing to a central authority in the world of Bitcoin.

While we hear a lot about Bitcoin there are many other cryptocurrencies entering the startup arena.

Last week a total of 26 new crypto-currencies were added to the public lexicon with names like Nimbus, Vaultcoin, Darkfox, DeafDollars, and QuietCoin all screaming to be heard above the frothy growing pains of this newbie environment. With Bitcoin’s original source code now open to the public, the number of new cryptocurrencies that have entered the marketplace is over 1,000, averaging well over a dozen new players every week. 

Even though most will make little more than a blip on the currency world’s radar screen, a full 27 crypto-coins have cap rates of over $1 million, with Bitcoin far outpacing the rest of the pack with a valuation of over $6.4 billion.

Rounding out the top ten are Bitcoin, Ripple, Litecoin, NXT, BitShares X, Peercoin, Darkcoin, Dogecoin, NameCoin, and MaidSafeCoin.

Will other cryptocurrencies be more aggressive than Bitcoin?

Tenuous Legal Status

Cryptocurrencies are legal in all countries except Iceland, due primarily to Iceland’s freeze on foreign exchange. In Feb 2014, a cryptocurrency called Auroracoin was launched in Iceland as an alternative to Bitcoin and the Icelandic króna, but so far is exhibiting all the telltale signs of being a complete failure.

Controversy over the misuse of cryptocurrency has also led to restrictions in certain countries. As an example, regulators in China banned the handling of Bitcoins by financial institutions during an extremely fast adoption period in early 2014. In Russia, even though cryptocurrencies are perfectly legal, it is illegal to actually purchase goods with any currency other than the Russian ruble.

On August 6, 2014, the UK announced its Treasury had been commissioned to do a study of cryptocurrencies, and what role, if any, they can and will play in the UK economy. The study will also decide on whether they should be regulated.

With the UK and others on the verge of issuing some kind of regulation, the primary tool to avoid piecemeal laws and directives will be to develop a Central Bank to serve as the interface for each nation’s watchdogs.

The Purpose of a Bank

Typically a bank is a financial institution that is involved in borrowing and lending money. Lately, however, the lending side of the equation has turned into more of a bizarre shell game where banks have become so massively risk averse that the only lending happens to government-backed borrowers and over-collateralized businesses and people.

The primary purpose of traditional banks is to:

Keep money safe for customers
Offer customers interest on deposits, helping to protect against money losing value against inflation
Lend money to firms, customers and homebuyers
Offer financial advice and related financial services, such as insurance

Creating a Business Model for the Central Bank of Bitcoin

Most countries have some form of Central Bank serving as the principle authority for their nation’s financial matters. In this role, a Central Bank implements monetary policy, promotes economic stability, manages the production and distribution of the national currency, and keeps the public informed about the overall state of the economy.

However, a Central Bank for cryptocurrency will have the latitude of performing an entirely different function. This bank will have neither the accountability of managing, influencing, or keeping a specific economy afloat, nor will it have a constituency relying solely on its performance.

From a business standpoint, cryptocurrencies need to watch out for their own users and are primarily accountable for their network, the integrity of their system, and the technology driving it. But from a global systems perspective, a Central Crypto-Bank governing one or more cryptocurrencies will have a completely different charter. 

In a globally competitive banking environment, where cryptocurrencies are the new kid on the block, part of the Bank’s role will be to establish the ground rules to coexist in today’s global monetary systems. Declaring war against current banking systems is in no one’s best interest.

Operating without the benefit of an existing legal system, the Bank will need to establish its own forms of mediation, arbitration, and virtual courts for resolving disputes.

It will also need to become the chief evangelist, advocate, and enabler of both current and future cryptocurrency technology. In this capacity the Bank’s role will be to envision and anticipate future technologies and design systems and architecture that allows for a wide range of implementation strategies.

Today’s Central Banks have ways of lending money into existence, but cryptocurrencies typically use a system for “mining” their coins into being. One of the new Central Bank’s mandates could be to discover new and better options for expanding the existing money supply.

Some of the Central Bank’s other roles may be better understood through the following scenarios.

Possible Scenarios

There are many analogies that can be drawn between today’s cryptocurrencies and the Arpanet in the 1960s. While we suspect we’re on the verge of something great, we don’t exactly know where it will take us.

Here are a few not-so-obvious questions to help us think through what may be possible.

How long before Bitcoin is accepted at our biggest retailers like Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Target?
How long before a person can live for an entire year using no money other than Bitcoin?
How long before someone is able to take out a home loan, car loan, or business loan in cryptocurrencies?
How long before we see a political candidate announce that they will only accept donations through Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies?
How long before people can purchase a $10 or $100 Bitcoin card in grocery stores and use it online?
How long before a cryptocurrency is formally adopted as an individual nation’s official currency?
How long before we see financial instruments and contracts encrypted with a blockchain from Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency to avoid the prying eyes of governments and industrial espionage?
Is the intrusiveness of governments forcing people underground? Is there a point at which cryptocurrencies will be considered a threat to national security?

“How long before a person can live for an entire year

using no money other than Bitcoin?”

Final Thoughts

Cryptocurrencies are an organic technology. Much like planting a thousand new seeds into the ground, a significant percentage of these fledgling new currencies will begin getting traction.

With Bitcoin being the flag bearer for this emerging industry, it will bear the brunt of most of the attempts to control it.

The same cryptography that makes cryptocurrencies secure, is what makes it anonymous. Even though many think that “fiat” money, based on trust, has no inherent value, the same cryptography that makes every transaction safe, gives it its inherent value.

In a digital age where cash is the only remaining form of anonymous currency, and even cash is being heavily monitored, cryptocurrencies have become a solution to “intrusive big government” issues.

Even though many Bitcoin transactions are for nefarious purposes, the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages. Cryptocurrencies are on the verge of reinventing our global monetary systems in ways we can’t yet imagine. And the Central Bank of Bitcoin will be one of the key players making that happen.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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The Future Library – A Liquid Network for Ideas

At a recent conference on the “Future of Libraries” put together by the American Library Association at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, I proposed a rather unusual mission for libraries, that of becoming “liquid networks” for our ideas.

Unlike our not-so-distant-past, the world’s most important information is no longer solely in books.

Whenever a great idea forms in our head, we look for a place to put it. Is it something useful, that we can turn into a product, add to a document, tell to our friends, include in a presentation, or attach with magnets to the front of our refrigerator? 

Ideas, much like parasites, need a host. If we don’t manage to gaff them before we slip into our next stream of consciousness, they will be forever lost. Without a host, these squirming little idea-fish will have a very limited shelf life.

If we manage to cluster enough of them together, they have a bit more staying power, but they still need to somehow reach critical mass before they become noteworthy. 

In the past we had very few options. We could jot them down in a notebook, mention them to friends, or make a few drawings or sketches. But even then, most ideas died of isolation. We had very few “places” to appropriately store these flashes of brilliance. 

Today our options have grown exponentially and good ideas can now go from zero to Facebook entry in 0.9 seconds. They can be fashioned into tweets, infographics, photos, podcasts, PowerPoints, LinkedIn discussions, Quora forums, YouTube videos, submitted to blogs, or turned into interactive charticles.

We literally have thousands of placeholders for our momentary flashes of brilliance. Much like planting seeds into the freshness of damp soil, these memes have the organic potential to spring to life bursting into a colorful bouquet. 

However, even with our very best ways of posting and hosting ideas today, the reality is that most public and private companies tend to have a rather short life expectancy, and some concepts come with a far longer gestation period. That’s where the more stable storehouses of information at public libraries comes into play. 

Archiving Twitter

When the Library of Congress initially took on the task of archiving Twitter in 2010, there were already a daunting 21 billion tweets filled with words, hashtags, geolocation info, and other metadata. Today the Library has access to more than 600 billion tweets. With about half a billion tweets now flowing into the archive daily, the biggest immediate challenge is finding a way to make all this information coherent and usable.

If you think this is out of character for the Library of Congress, I should point out a few of its other unusual collections:

3,530,036 audio materials (discs, tapes, talking books and other recorded formats)
5,507,706 maps
16,816,894 microforms
1,697,513 moving images (film, television broadcasts, DVDs)
6,751,212 items of sheet music
14,472,273 visual materials, as follows:
13,728,116 photographs
104,879 posters
639,278 prints and drawings

The Twitter archive is yet another example of the Library’s commitment to collecting first-person accounts of history. The logical next step will be forming more elaborate “liquid networks” for our ideas, a term first proposed by Steven Johnson, author of the book “Where Good Ideas Come From.”

Creating a Picture of the Bigger Picture

Every social network, discussion forum, or live webcast has become a cosmic breeding ground for “liquid networks” and how ideas often have sex with other ideas. 

So it’s analogous to thought-blocks giving birth to other thought-blocks. Ideas have a way of creating structures in our minds, and these structures become self-assembling and self-constructing in ways that we have never imagined possible.

Our future is being crafted with human genius in an organic sea where the best of the best have a way of rising to the top. 

We have seriously shortened the distance between problems and solutions, pain and comfort, and products and ideas. Over the coming years these timeframes will shrink even further and become far more organic. 

The better we become at filtering the signal to noise ration of human epiphanies and leveraging these storehouses of ideas, the quicker we reach what’s on the other side. 

A Minimum Viable Idea

How big does an idea have to be to live on its own? If we think of an idea being an organism, what are the elements that make it a living, breathing, self-explanatory, reusable thinking-tool? 

As an example, if the ideas was simply “blue,” we would need to know the who, what, when, where, and how to give it context and self-sufficiency.

Famous quotes are a great example of self-sufficient ideas:

“I need a nap… And by nap, I mean a small coma so I can hide from my life!”
“Women spend more time thinking about what men are thinking, than men actually spend thinking!”
“The best way to get even, is to forget!”
“My clever comebacks usually surface an hour too late!”
“An ugly personality destroys a pretty face!”
“Some people are like clouds. When they go away, it’s a beautiful day!”

Yes, these are rather funny examples, but they say just enough to get their message across.

If a quote has ample meaning, sufficient importance, offers just enough perspective, and is clever and funny, it has the potential to go viral.

So what do we need to create minimum viable ideas that hold sufficient meaning in the lives of others? More importantly, how can one idea be couple to another and used as a building block for something bigger? 

That’s where liquid networks come into play.

Our Emerging “Liquid Networks” Ecosystem for Ideas 

Our massive data centers have become a pulsing life form, a vibrant extension of human thinking, fueled by the relentless pipeline of ideas flowing to and from servers, much like synaptical firings, intent on bridging their way to adjoining memory cells. 

A recent report from Google indicated that roughly 20% of all searches are ones that have never been conducted before. While it’s not likely that any of us will reach 20% originality in our ideas, it’s far more than zero. 

As a result, a constant stream of original ideas are flowing into our data centers, and these ideas are assuming a level of prominence and influence with many poised to explode back into our physical world. 

This level of human-computer synergy is still poorly understood. Any form of symbiotic intelligence will be different than we imagine, but at the same time, it’ll be exactly what we imagine.

Similar to an exoskeleton for our brain, it will be the super-participants, those with an innate affinity for tilling the idea gardens, who manage and harvest the fruits of today’s meme forests, that will rise to the top. 

As always, those with the most creative ideas are only part of the equation. It’s far less about where ideas come from and far more about where they go as they enter into our emerging “liquid networks” ecosystem. And that is the virgin territory where libraries have a critical role to play long into the future. 

Final Thoughts

The New York City based invention company Quirky, has developed a highly iterative process for people to submit inventions and have others add comments, insights, and additional perspectives to the original concept until it becomes sufficiently refined for an implementation team to start building prototypes.

Business models like this were never possible in the past because social networks didn’t exist, creating a transparent process wasn’t possible, and the time delays of slogging through a snail mail network would cause everyone to lose interest.

Using libraries as a focal point for idea sharing is something new, and creating an environment for clustering great epiphanies could be hugely valuable. Unlike private companies with life expectancies measured in decades, libraries have a more far-reaching purpose, serving their constituencies over lifetimes measured in centuries. 

We’ve never really had the benefit of tapping into an idea archive in the past, so this will be unchartered territory for the world ahead. It will also be a breeding ground for sparking new epiphanies.

Every new business that gets launched happens as a result of an epiphany. Similarly, every new product idea happens as a result of an epiphany. For this reason, when it comes to solving some of the world’s biggest problems, it’s in our best interest to create new epiphanies faster, better, and cheaper than ever before. And libraries can become the catalysts for these liquid networks of the future.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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