Thomas Frey's Blog, page 40

2050 and the Future of Infrastructure

Much of the world around us has been formed around key pieces of infrastructure. Most see this as a testament to who we are as a society, and part of the cultural moorings we need to guide us into the future.

In general, infrastructure represents a long-term societal investment that will move us along the path of building a more efficient, better functioning, society. And usually it does … for a while.

But infrastructure comes in many forms and as we build our elaborate networks of pipes, wires, roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and waterways, we become very focused on the here and now, with little thought as to whether there might be a better way.

Virtually every piece of infrastructure creates jobs, revenues streams, and investment opportunities, as well as new laws, regulations, and industry standards.

The longer a piece of infrastructure is in place, the greater the resistance there is to replacing it. Much like an aging tree, the root system that feeds it becomes enormous. 

That said, the life-cycle of infrastructure is getting shorter, and teams driving the disruptive technologies are getting far more sophisticated.

Infrastructure projects represent huge paydays for someone, and the disruptors are determined to make it their payday.

Here are ten examples of how our core infrastructure are about to change and what this will mean to the nations and businesses at the heart of this revolution.

Traffic jams will become a thing of the past with driverless highways

1.) Driverless Cars and Driverless Highways

Even though the art of road building has been continually improving since the Roman Empire first decided to make roads a permanent part of their infrastructure, highways today remain as little more than dumb surfaces with virtually no data flowing between the vehicles and the road itself. That is about to change, and here’s why. 

Driverless technology will initially require a driver, and it will creep into everyday use much as airbags did, first as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually as a safety feature required by governments. 

The greatest benefits of this kind of automation won’t be realized until the driver’s hands are off the wheel. With millions of people involved in car accidents every year, it won’t take long for policy-makers to be convinced that driverless cars are a safer option. 

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

As cars become equipped with driverless technology, important things begin to happen. To compensate for the loss of a driver, vehicles will need to become more aware of their surroundings. 

Working with cameras and other sensors, an onboard computer will log information over 1,000 times per second from short-range transmitters on surrounding road conditions, including where other cars are and what they are doing. This constant flow of data will give the vehicle a rudimentary sense of awareness.

With this continuous flow of sensory information, vehicles will begin to form a symbiotic relationship with its environment, a relationship that is far different than the current human to road relationship, which is largely emotion-based.

Lane compression, distance compression, and time compression

all rolled into super fast driverless vehicles

An intelligent car coupled with an intelligent road is a powerful force. Together they will accelerate our mobility as a society, and do it in a stellar fashion.

Lane Compression – Highway lanes need only be as wide as the vehicles themselves. Narrow vehicles can be in very narrow lanes, and with varying sizes and shapes of vehicles, an intelligent road system will have the ability to shift lane widths on the fly.
Distance Compression – With machine-controlled vehicles, the distance between bumpers can be compressed from multiple car lengths to mere inches.
Time Compression – Smart roads are fast roads. Travel speed will be increased at the same time safety is improved.

In the driverless era, intelligent highways will be able to accommodate 50-100 times as many vehicles as they do today. Counter to traditional thinking about vehicle safety, the higher the speeds, the fewer the number of vehicles on the roads at any given moment. 

As we compress the time and space requirements of every vehicle, we achieve a far higher yield of passenger benefits per square meter of road resources. 

In addition to the benefits passengers receive, the road itself will greatly benefit from this technology. With cars constantly monitoring road conditions, the road itself can call for its own repair.

Rather than waiting until a road becomes a serious hazard, as is currently the case, and repair crews disrupt traffic for hours, days, or longer, micro repairs can happen on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. High-speed coatings and surface repairs can even be developed for in-traffic application.

Even treacherous snow and ice conditions will have little effect if deicer is applied immediately and traffic is relentless enough.

Tube transportation will haul both cargo and people, above and below ground

2.) Tube Transportation Networks

When Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk, mysteriously leaked that he was working on his Hyperloop Project, the combination of secrecy, cryptic details, and his own flair for the dramatic all contributed to the media frenzy that followed. 

Leading up to this announcement was his growing anxiety over California’s effort to build a very expensive high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco with outdated technology.

While the Musk media train was picking up steam, several reporters pointed out a similar effort by Daryl Oster and his Longmont, Colorado-based company, ET3, to build a comparable tube transportation system that was much further along.

Indeed both are working on what will likely be the next generation of transportation where specially designed cars are placed into sealed tubes and shot, much like rockets, to their destination. While high-speed trains are breaking the 300 mph speed barrier, tube transportation has the potential to make speeds of 4,000 mph a common everyday occurrence. 

As Daryl Oster likes to call it, “space travel on earth.” 

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

While many look at this and see the lack of infrastructure as a huge obstacle, at this point in time it is just the opposite, the biggest opportunity ever.

Constructing the tube network will be the biggest infrastructure project the earth has ever seen, with a projected 50-year build-out employing in excess of 100 million people along the way.

The Warka Water Tower can produce over 25 gallons per day for remote villages

3.) Atmospheric Water Harvesters

With all of the water we have in the world, only 2% of it is fresh water. To make matters worse, only one-forth of all fresh water is accessible to humans.

Until now, the entire human race has survived on 0.5% of the available water on earth. But that’s about to change.

We are seeing a fast growing trend towards harvesting water from the atmosphere, something our ancestors first began working on centuries ago. People in the Middle East and Europe devised the original air-well systems over 2,000 years ago. Later the Incas were able to sustain their culture above rain line by collecting dew and channeling it into cisterns for later use. 

Even though these techniques have been around for a long time, technology in this area has recently taken a quantum leap forward, and many are beginning to think in terms of houses that generate their own water supply, self-irrigating crops, and even “waterless” cities.

The earth’s atmosphere is a far more elegant water distribution system than rivers, reservoirs, and underground waterways. Our current systems involve pipes and pumping stations that are expensive to operate and maintain, and easily contaminated. 

There are roughly 37,500 trillion gallons of “fresh” water in the air at any given moment. The age-old problem has been getting it to people who need it at exactly the right time.

A new breed of inventors has emerged to tackle this exact problem. Using solar, wind, and other forms of passive energy, our future water networks will operate with far more efficiency and convenience than anything imaginable today.

Today’s steel pipes will soon be replaced with tomorrow’s air pipes, and we will forget what life was like when chlorine-tasting water was an everyday occurrence.

Future learning will take on many different forms in the future

4.) Micro Colleges 

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

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

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

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

Whether its Tesla Motors announcing the creation of a fully automated battery factory; Intel buying the wearable tech company Basic Science; Apple buying Dr. Dre’s Beats Electronics; or Google’s purchase of Dropcam, Nest, and Skybox, the business world is forecasting the need for radically different skills than colleges and universities are preparing students for.

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

With literally millions of people needing to shift careers every year, and the long drawn out cycles of traditional colleges being a poor solution for time-crunched rank-and-file displaced workers, we will be seeing a massive new opportunity arising for short-term, pre-apprenticeship training in the form of Micro Colleges.

Japan has announced a 25 year plan to build the first space based power station

5.) Space-Based Power Stations

Earth’s appetite for power continues to grow. Since the 1960′s, power consumption has quadrupled around the globe, with many countries opting to build large oil and coal plants to meet the demand.

But for Japan, a burgeoning economy without large oil and coal reserves, after the Fukushima disaster occurred, an in-depth review concluded the most viable long-term strategy was to focus on spaced-based power systems. 

For this reason, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) recently announced its 25-year plan to build the world’s first 1-gigawatt power plant in space.

The vision of harvesting solar power from space and beaming it to earth has been around ever since Dr. Peter Glaser first proposed it in 1968. After considerable research in the 1970′s, scientist concluded it wasn’t a viable concept just yet because technology hadn’t advance enough. The materials were far too heavy, and it would have required over 100 astronauts working with thousands of crude robots to create it.

Since then, technology has advanced in countless ways, not only making it doable, but for Japan, making it the best available option for controlling its own destiny.

What most people don’t realize is that solar panels in space are 10 times more efficient than those on earth because there are no day-night cycles, seasonal variations, or weather issues to contend with.

But here’s where it gets even more interesting. Many other countries won’t be comfortable with Japan having the world’s only expertise in building space-based power stations. Once the first one proves successful, it will become faster and cheaper to launch the next 10, or even 100 of them. 

6.) Drone Delivery Networks

According to the Association for Unmanned Vehicles International, once drones get okayed for commercial use, the first 3 years will produce a multi-billion dollar industry employing hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs. But more than just manufacturing, there will be a need for drone pilots, drone farming specialists, drone security, drone data analysts, drone mosquito killers, and much more. 

7.) Mass Energy Storage

We are now entering the early growth stages of what will surely become a huge global industry – energy storage. It will both support and compete with conventional generation, transmission and distribution systems. Over the coming decade as the industry evolves, it will lead to new business models and the creation of new companies that make, apply and operate storage assets to help the grid work more reliably and cost-effectively, while decreasing unwanted environmental impacts.

8.) Global Language Archive 

For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and find that our air is going extinct? Researchers estimate that over the last 500 years, half of the world’s languages, from Etruscan to Tasmanian, have vanished. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will disappear, as young people abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. Think of the Global Language Archive as the “Louvre of Languages” where culture and language collide in a way that all can experience. 

9.) Whole Earth Genealogy Project

The genealogy industry today consists of millions of fragmented efforts happening simultaneously. The duplication of effort is massive. While significant databases already exist on websites like Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, GenealogyBank, and the National Archives, there is still a much bigger opportunity waiting to happen, an opportunity to automate the creation of our genealogies. What’s missing is a Jimmy Wales-type entrepreneur to turn this project into their life’s calling.

10.) Our Trillion-Sensor Infrastructure

In the last six years, we’ve gone from 10 million sensors—in things like the Nintendo Wii and iPhones—to 3.5 billion. This is why Janusz Bryzek, an executive at Fairchild, organized the Trillion Sensor Summit, which took place last year in Palo Alto. Bryzek is projecting 1 trillion sensors by 2024 and 100 trillion sensors in the mid 2036 along with literally millions of new primary and secondary jobs to manage this emerging sector.

Future infrastructure projects will dramatically change our relationship with the world around us

Final Thoughts

The projects I’ve listed here merely scratch the surface of what’s possible. 

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

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

By 2050, we will see more changes to core infrastructure than in the combined total in all of human history. The fundamental shifts we will see to the way society functions will be nothing short of breathtaking.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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All Information, Ever Created, is Still in Existence

The date is July 14, 1986. Herbert Benson wakes up early, goes down to the kitchen and makes himself a peanut butter sandwich. This is a seemingly trivial incident that happened nearly 30 years ago.

How do we know today that this sandwich-making incident actually happened? Is there any kind of time-space record of it?

Making a nighttime sandwich is a seemingly inconsequential act, but what if Mr. Benson later committed some heinous act like killing a young girl, blowing up a bridge, or shooting the President? In these situations, whatever precedes an extremist act becomes critically important.

Was he alone in the house? Was he making sandwiches for more than one person? Did he add poison to the peanut butter? Why were there sandwich fragments at the crime scene? All of these details are critically important, but will this kind of information ever be accessible?

When we look into space we are actually looking back in time. This is because we are looking at old light traveling towards us at 186,000 miles/second.

We already know that if someone is watching us through a large telescope on the moon, they’re seeing events that happened 1.3 seconds earlier because that’s how long it takes light to get from the earth to the moon.

Similarly, if someone builds a giant telescope on Saturn, they will see things that happened 75-85 minutes earlier, depending on the orbits, because that’s how long it takes light to travel from the earth to Saturn.

Using this as a very crude proof, we already know that information does indeed transcend the here and now, but can we ever access it and reassemble it into a useful form? 

From what we know today, it’s not reasonable to think we could send a probe 20 light-years away from the earth just to see what happened 20 years earlier. But there may be other ways to reconstruct these fragments?

If people in the future somehow gain the ability to view past events, how will that change the way we live our lives? What changes would you make if you knew someone from the future might be watching you?

Knowing the Past

Every sunrise is followed by another sunset. Tides come in and wash back out. Seasons change from summer, fall, winter, spring, and back to summer again. We see trees growing in a repeatable fashion and clouds continually reforming themselves in the skies. Just as it has since the dawn of time, the metronome of life is rhythmically animating the world around us.

These are all things we associate with the movement of time, yet it is a topic we know very little about. From the standpoint of science, our understanding of time exists as a thimble full of wisdom in an ocean full of ignorance.

The earth is constantly radiating information, as is every other star and planet in the universe. At the same time, every living person is also radiating information. Throughout our lives we are spewing information of every kind in every possible direction including visual, audio, aromatic, kinesthetic, vestibular, thermoception, and countless more.

With literally thousands of forms of information traveling away from our bodies every second of every day, we are left with one unanswerable question. Where does it go?

Do these information streams simply get absorbed by everything around us? Does it bounce from one surface to another until it gets imbedded into walls, furniture, plants, and carpet? Or does it simply fade into obscurity?

More importantly, is there any record of it still in existence? My way of calculating this may seem like voodoo science, but with everything in the universe radiating thousands, possibly millions, of forms of information, the probability of at least one form still being recoverable later in time is nearly 100%.

My prediction is that future scientists will someday discover the formula for unlocking the recorded history of our entire universe.

Taking this assumption a few steps further, our ability to track people and events throughout history will unleash countless business, cultural, and societal opportunities in ways that currently cannot even be imagined.

Photo Stitching – This National Geographics photo of one of the largest trees in the world is a combination of 126 separate images blended together to capture the magnitude of this 3,200-year-old giant sequoia in California’s Sierra Nevada

Stitching History

One obvious starting point is to work with existing photo and video recordings.

When photography was first invented around 1826, no one imagined that we would be snapping over a trillion photos a year, but that’s exactly what has happened.

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

The first form of photo stitching involved time-lapse photography, taking snapshots a few seconds apart, to capture a fluid-looking animation of specific subject matter.

Over the years, photo stitching has evolved to include the blending of side-by-side and even overlapping images into large mosaics rendered into impressively large compositions.

Next generation photo stitching will involve morphing photos forwards and backwards in time using millions of data points, and millions of corollary assumptions, to fill in the information gaps.

Taking photo and video stitching one step further, by adding other data points and information fragments, we may be able to push the time envelope even further.

Cause and Effect Relationships

In 1969, chaos theorist Edward Lorenz used the theoretical example of a butterfly’s wings flapping, where that simple movement became the root cause of a hurricane forming several weeks later on the other side of the planet. This has become known as the “butterfly effect.”

This type of cause and effect relationship, in chaos theory, is used to describe a nonlinear system where the true sequence of events is so complex that it can only be sorted out after the fact.

But when it comes to chaos, the only chaos that really exists is our inability to comprehend the underlying cause and effect relationships happening in a hyper-complex world. Chaos is only chaos if we don’t understand it.

Assuming the complexities of chaos will eventually be solved, how will we leverage our newfound capabilities?

Finding Value in Old Information 

When it comes to answering the question of whether or not this technology is even possible, truthfully, I don’t know. But it’s rich fertile territory for exploration.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, I’ve identified five initial categories of use. These include criminal justice, spying, historical accuracy, biblical research, and genealogy.  Here are a few examples:

Would you rob a bank if you knew somebody could go back and find out exactly who did it? Would you start someone’s house on fire if someone could see you lighting the match? This will be a huge tool in the criminal justice world.

Spy agencies like the NSA will naturally have a heyday deciphering the roles of participants in various forms of espionage.

If this sounds somewhat frightening, rest assured any breakthrough in this area will come in baby steps, and pinpointing anything meaningful across time will require laser-like precision to sort through the murky universe of minutiae.

“I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.” ― Bob Dylan 

Final Thoughts

We’ve often heard the phrase, “hindsight is always 20-20,” but it really isn’t. Even though we’ve all personally experienced our own past, our understanding of the details represents only a tiny fraction of what happened.

Part of me wants to be immersed in the countless details that caused major shifts in my life, as well as the world, to happen. At the same time, there is great danger in knowing too much.

If someone offered to hand me the keys to unlocking the mysteries of my life, these keys would also unlock lots of things I’d rather keep hidden. It raises huge concerns about who or what controls this technology?

Being able to view the past brings with it an awesome responsibility for us to both preserve the integrity of the generations who have gone before us, and not denigrate our contemporaries. We all have the frailties of being human, and good judgment is everybody’s shortcoming at one time or another.

That said I’m very interested in your thoughts. Will this type of technology ever be possible, and do you personally know anyone doing research in this field?

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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When Everyone Becomes Blackmailable

On a recent driving trip, my wife and I became immersed in the audio version of one of Tom Clancy’s last novels titled, “Threat Vector.” Without giving away too much of the plot, a Chinese super-geek villain has hatched a plan to hack into our most secure networks and blackmail people with their darkest secrets to subversively cause chaos and disruption for the American government.

While most good authors have devious ways of thinking like a criminal, Clancy does an exceptional job of crafting this storyline as a plausible threat. 

For many of us, our reputation is one of the most important aspects of our lives. It’s central to everything we do.

Every time a TV courtroom drama plays out, whether it’s a trial featuring Eliot Spitzer, Martha Stewart, Clarence Thomas, or Monica Lewinsky, we instantly identify with the most embarrassing pieces of the testimony because it could easily be us. We are all terminally human, with enough of our own character flaws to make us the center character of a juicy reality show.

Recent revelations about the NSA PRISM program make this kind of paranoia even more justifiable. Virtually any person, put under a microscope, can be threatened with his or her own character flaws. 

But an even greater danger comes from knowing personal weaknesses, and in most cases, it’s the person or thing we care about most. People seeking leverage always want to know the one button they can push, and whether it’s a child, parent, valuable possession, or their reputation, one well-crafted threat can be instant blackmail. 

In much the same way Google’s personalized marketing system delivers targeted ads, an intimidation engine will be capable of delivering highly targeted threats.

As cyber crime escalates, we run the risk of having our social structures deteriorate into invisible mafia-style communities with the blackmailers ruling the blackmailees, and few, if any, capable of understanding the behind-the-scenes turf wars? 

Basic Human Right – The Right to be Forgotten

Ever since the European Union’s top court ruled in May that individuals have a “right to be forgotten,” tech companies have been scrambling to comply with the new rules. 

Google, as example, has received over 70,000 takedown requests from individuals who want 250,000 webpages removed from Google’s search results. This is requiring tons of human effort and manpower. Each request gets individually reviewed, and Google now plans to hire more staff to handle the extra workload.

But Google is not alone. Virtually every tech company is being forced to rethink their strategy. Not only do people have the “right to be forgotten,” they also have the perceived right to be positively remembered. As a result, we are seeing a massive surge in reputation management and consulting businesses to do just that, clean up our reputation. 

Reputation Management – The Hot New Industry 

Ever since word got out that prospective employers were scanning Facebook and Twitter before hiring someone, people started paying more attention to their online image. But the EU ruling added something akin to turbo boosters to the already fast moving reputation industry.

Reputation experts extend the work of yesterday’s publicists and image consultants deep into the highly nuanced digital world. Firms are now dedicating full-time resources to not only manage things that reflect negatively on a person’s character, but also work overtime to bolster the upside of their virtual rep.

For a fee that can amount to thousands of dollars a month, reputation professionals take on clients and scrub clean their search results with a wide range of techniques, that often include creating search engine-optimized content that dominates the first few pages of specific search results on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Clients ranging from CEOs of major corporations, to celebrities, lawyers, doctors, chiropractors, and restaurant owners all use these services to whitewash the negative and amplify the positive. According to media consultant BIA/Kelsey, small and medium-size businesses will spend $3.5 billion managing their online reputations in 2014.

The Need for Blackmail Insurance 

Kidnap and ransom insurance was first introduced by Lloyd’s of London in 1932 after the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son. But, the policies didn’t get much attention until the mid-1970s when the famous newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped.

Nowadays most large companies include K&R coverage as part of their insurance portfolio, and it’s especially popular among those who plan to expand internationally.

Blackmail is similar to kidnap and ransom because it involves holding someone’s reputation, identity, or family hostage digitally, with threats of harm if the victims fail to comply.

With cyber crime reaching epidemic levels in many parts of the world, most offenders have managed to stay one step ahead of the law. At the same time, cyber crime itself is evolving.

Last week, police in the Philippines arrested 44 Taiwanese who ran an online blackmail syndicate used to defraud victims in China and Taiwan by duping them into thinking their bank accounts had been used by terrorists to launder money. 

A recent Ponemon study, that gained attention at the 2014 World Economic Forum, stated the average time to resolve a cyber attack in 2013 was 32 days, with an average cost to participating companies of a little more than $1 million during that timeframe. Compared to 2012, this was a 55% increase over the average cost of $591,780 and 24-days to resolve.

Both the size and scope of these claims represents a huge opportunity for the insurance industry, and blackmail problems will soon be one of the fastest growing of all cyber crimes.

Final Thoughts

If someone threatened your child, either you deliver $2 million in jewelry and a certified hand-written bill of sale or your child will die, what would you do? Yes this may be an easy scenario to circumvent, but from a criminal standpoint, it only needs to work a small percentage of the time.

After spending several years considering the privacy vs. transparency debate, I see two of the most dangerous implications of our dwindling privacy as:

Losing our ownership ability
Becoming an easy blackmail target

As we move towards a radically transparent world, where everything is knowable about everyone, we lose our ability to even control our credit cards, bank accounts, and everything we own.

The implications of this are that ownership of anything valuable, can easily be stolen electronically. Since some of our most engaging and influential members of society are also held to a high transparency standard, our desire to know more about them and how they live makes them extremely vulnerable.

It’s no longer just Tom Clancy devising evil blackmail schemes. One person’s possessions, credit, influence, or leverage is almost certain to be another person’s blackmail opportunity.

So do we run the risk of having society deteriorate into the invisible mafia-style communities with the blackmailers ruling the blackmailees? The answer is yes, unless we act quickly.

From my vantage point, it’s easy to predict us reaching some crisis point in the very near future. A well-publicized incident will cause global outrage, and countries will band together to form an international task force, similar to a Geneva Convention, focused specifically on privacy. The implications of a global privacy task force like this will be huge, with global policing of violators and a dramatic shift in the rules for online business.

But for most of us, it boils down to timing. Without quick intervention, our risk of personally falling victim to some form of blackmail will soon reach 100%.

If you or someone you know has already been the victim of a digital blackmail scheme, please let me know. We are currently trying to compile more statistics in this area.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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The Laws of Exponential Capabilities

When people like Google CEO, Larry Page, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and X-Prize Foundation CEO, Peter Diamandis, talk about us entering into a period of abundance, there has been a natural tendency to assume we’ll be entering into a life of leisure. People won’t have to work as hard and we will all have more time for travel, vacations, and play. 

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

With these types of automation and AI (artificial intelligence) replacing human involvement, the discussion has focused on solutions like shared jobs, micro employment, and guaranteed income.

While those may be options, there’s also great danger in preparing for “slacker lifestyles” where people feel less significant, less certain about their future, and less connected to the value they have to offer. As a society we risk becoming soft and lazy.

There is great value in the human struggle, and when we fail to be challenged, our best-laid plans tend to fall apart at the seams.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s why this is so critically important.

 

 Automation increases our capabilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3.) Media: Before the time of Gutenberg’s printing press, our information sources were limited to person-to-person conversations and a tiny number of hand written scrolls and manuscripts. People who lived during the middle ages spent very little time consuming information simply because it wasn’t accessible.

By 1600, India’s Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, had accumulated a personal library of over 24,000 books. By comparison, in 1815, Thomas Jefferson had acquired the largest personal collection of books in the United States, totaling 6,487 volumes.

Both of these numbers are in stark contrast to the millions of title available today on Amazon. But when it comes to media, we consume far more than just books.

On a global level, a 2012 study showed that people on average spend 10 hours 39 minutes per day consuming information. This was broken into 260 minutes on the Internet, 150 minutes watching television, 77 minutes mobile Internet, 71 minutes listening to the radio, 43 minutes playing games, and 38 minutes reading print media.

In countries like the U.S., Korea, and Japan, the numbers are considerably higher – over 12 hours per day – and China is now working overtime to reign in a growing problem with people becoming addicted to the Internet. As a result, a number of anti-addiction treatment centers have cropped up to deal with the problem.

Building a global vacuum tube transportation network will be a future mega project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The 15-year difference in animation quality between

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

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

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

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

This raising of standards in quality, value, and usability can be seen all around us:

Printing – From large machine presses to photo-quality images at our desktop within seconds.
Music – From makeshift recordings inside seedy studios to producing symphony quality recordings without every leaving our computer.
Magazines and Newspapers – We can now subscribe to any magazine or newspaper on the planet and have it instantly sent to our computer.
Highways – From dirt roads, to gravel roads, to asphalt roads, to concrete Interstates.
Telecom – From wired phones with cranks on the side, to wireless everything.
Water Systems – From aqueducts, to wells, to running water everywhere.
Food Supplies – From crude little storefronts and farmers markets to the super-grocery stores we have today.
Emergency Services – From makeshift fire brigades and primitive doctors to highly sophisticated fire departments, rescue teams, hospitals, and medical services.

Crazy-Big Projects of the Future

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

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

If you’re still struggling with what the mega-projects of the future might be, here are a few to consider:

Recreating Infrastructure – Virtually every one of our current infrastructures is in need of total overhaul to meet the needs of future generations. This includes rethinking highways, mass transit, telecom, postal systems, water supplies, food supplies, and more.
Space Industries – Whether it’s space tourism, mining asteroids, space-based power stations, or colonizing other planets, space industries represent an endless challenge for humanity.
Controlling the Weather – We continually find ourselves the victims of forces of nature and have an obligation to mitigate the damage of hurricanes, tornadoes, massive hailstorms, and more.
Reaching the Center of the Earth – We currently know very little about the center of the earth, yet we continually fall victim to earthquakes, volcanoes, and other internal forces we don’t yet understand. Once again, we have an obligation to know more.
Controlling Gravity – The single greatest force of nature is gravity, yet we know very little about it. We not only need to understand gravity, but also need to learn how to control it.
Viewing the Past – How can we create a technology capable of replaying an unrecorded event that happened decades earlier in actual-size, in holographic form?
Traveling at the Speed of Light – The all time human speed record was set in 1969 and we have a long ways to go if we ever intend to travel to other planets.
Inexhaustible Power Supplies – Too much of the world’s economy is dependent upon a rather fragile global power system. The opportunities here are endless.

Final Thoughts

At this point, the “Laws of Exponential Capabilities” are a working theory that I’m hoping to refine over time.

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

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

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

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

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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The Growing Dangers of Technological Unemployment and the Re-Skilling of America

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

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

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

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

Whether its Tesla Motors announcing the creation of a fully automated battery factory; Intel buying the wearable tech company Basic Science; Apple buying Dr. Dre’s Beats Electronics; or Google’s purchase of Dropcam, Nest, and Skybox, the business world is forecasting the need for radically different skills than colleges and universities are preparing students for.

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

Last month, Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, announced his solution, the NanoDegree, where short-course training is carefully aligned with hiring companies, and virtually everyone graduating within the initial demand period is guaranteed a job.

Udacity’s NanoDegrees are very similar to the Micro College programs being developed by the DaVinci Institute that can rapidly respond to swings in the corporate training marketplace. More about DaVinci’s Micro College plans in the coming weeks.

Here’s why NanoDegrees and Micro Colleges are about to become the hottest of all the hot topics for career-shifting people everywhere.

At the Future Job Summit hosted by Peter Diamandis

The Growing Dangers of Technological Unemployment

Last weekend, Peter Diamandis, founder of Singularity University and the X-Prize Foundation, invited me to a 2-day summit along with some of Silicone Valley’s best thinkers to discuss future jobs and the growing dangers of technological unemployment.

In Peter’s way of thinking, even though we are headed toward a world of abundance, having a significant loss of jobs due to robots and automation has the potential of causing a near term backlash.

Every time 10,000 people are laid off their jobs, it creates a glass-half-full-half-empty kind of dilemma.

The layoffs increase our pool of available human capital, but we are left with the question of who, what, when, where, and how to apply this available manpower. Our challenge, designing a social system for reintegrating these “dangling particles of talent,” will be to match personal interests, aptitude, and training to the mix in a way that efficiently leverages and empowers people.

During this transition period, a very real danger exists in the form of protests and repercussion from displaced workers. Those who blame their deteriorating job prospects and overall loss of opportunity on automation, could indeed wage some form of war against technology.

Taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, and even airline pilots will eventually be supplanted by driverless forms of transportation. Construction workers, craftsmen, janitors, accountants, bankers, and retailers all run a very real risk of having their positions automated out of existence.

Recent protests and skirmishes involving Google’s employee buses could easily escalate into something worse and form the basis of a new-age Luddite rallying cry to slow down, even undermine, our future. With a combination of techno-sabotaging confrontations and pushing all the right labor-agenda political buttons, the fear of an unknown robot-infested future could take center stage as a rallying cry for top-of-the-mind policy-setting criteria, hampering, possibly even reversing, many of the recent advances we’ve made.

Even darker scenarios could play out as modern-day digital uprisings spread like wildfires turning the speed and capabilities of tech against itself. The damage caused by a single individual could be tantamount to an anti-tech ice age spreading its influence throughout the entire world.

The same Internet that delivers our news and heightens out awareness of the world around us can also be used to poison people’s thinking creating an anti-technology agenda that frames the conversation for the rest of the world.

Framing the Conversation First

No it’s not possible for the human race to actually “run out of work.” But the kind of skills needed to perform the “new work” will indeed change and without some form of retraining intervention, the techno-illiterates run a real danger of having their prospects permanently compromised.

The re-skilling process is only as bright as the glimmers of hope and well-illuminated career path at the end of each participant’s transitionary tunnel.

The assumption that low-skilled janitors, drivers, and dockworkers cannot be retrained for more technical work is not only false, but the first of many social objections that will need to be overcome.

Rapid re-skilling programs designed to build individual competencies, one micro-capability at a time, coupled with hands-on apprenticeships and on-demand tutorial support, are all pieces of the learning environments that will be needed to elevate the caliber of workers to meet the vital workforce needs of tomorrow. 

Ironically, the STEM talents that have prevented most of these workers from landing today’s better paying jobs will be automated into the AI operating systems of tomorrow’s most ubiquitous equipment and therefore play a less significant role.

Placing Humans First

Our economy is based on people. Humans are the buying entities, the connectors, the decision-makers, and the trade partners that make our economy work.

Without humans there can be no economy. So when it comes to automation:

A person with a toolbox is more valuable than a person without one.
A person with a computer is more valuable than a person without one.
A person with a robot or a machine is more valuable than a person without one.

Automation does not happen simply for the sake of automation. It’s intended to benefit people.

If we only look at what automation will eliminate, we’ll be viewing the world through a glass-half-empty lens.

Though we have a hard time understanding the exact role of tomorrow’s worker bees, even our most sophisticated machines in the future will require human owners, human controllers, human customers, and human oversight when things go wrong.

Disruptive Vs. Constructive Technologies

In the 1700s, nearly 97% of employment in the U.S. was related to agriculture. Today, that number hovers around 2%.

This means that over the past two centuries, over 95% of all ag workers were displaced by technology.

Any industry today that is being forced to do more with less is working through a similar process of having their workers automated out of existence.

All industries form a bell curve

As with everything in life, all industry lifecycles forma bell curve with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s important to understand that all industries will eventually end and get replaced by something else.

Usually the starting point can be traced to an invention or discovery such as Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone or Henry Bessemer’s process for making cheap steel in large volumes. The end comes when a new industry replaces the old, like calculators replacing the slide rule. 

At some point along the way, every industry will experience a period of peak demand for their goods or service. 

Many industry are entering the downside of the curve

Many of our largest industries today are entering the second half of the bell curve.

Leading indicators that industries are entering their top-of-the-curve midlife crisis are when the disruptors, a growing cadre of startups and their process-altering technologies begin attacking key profit centers.

Prior to reaching peak demand for these goods or service, often several decades earlier, industries will experience a period of peak employment. 

Peak Steel

Using “Peak Steel” as an example, the peak demand for steel is projected to occur sometime around 2024. This is when composite materials will gain enough of a foothold and the overall demand for steal will begin to decline.

Yet, peak employment for the steel industry happened in the 1970s. The 521,000 employed in 1974 was automated down to a mere 151,000 by 2000 even though the amount of steel produced is now more than triple that of the 1970s. 

In this context, any reduction in employment is a lead indicator of an industry cresting the bell curve, foretelling a downturn in the overall demand for goods or services, as the industry enters its waning years.

Finding the Seeds of Opportunity in Automation

According to a May 2011 study by the McKinsey Global Institute titled “Internet matters: The Net’s sweeping impact on growth, jobs, and prosperity,” the Internet has accounted for 21% of GDP growth over the previous five years.

They also concluded the Internet is a key catalyst for job creation. Among 4,800 small and medium-size enterprises surveyed, the Internet created 2.6 jobs for each one lost to technology-related efficiencies.

We are now transitioning from room-size automation that only large companies could afford, to desktop automation that allows small and even one-person businesses to be part of.

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

Final Thoughts

As with every 12-step program, everything begins with acknowledging we have a problem. But, the problem today is miniscule in comparison to the problems that lay ahead.

Matching displaced worker’s interests with the right opportunities for retraining, apprenticeships, and jobs will be a delicate balancing act at best.

The dangers of lapsing into low-challenge solutions that undercut a person’s drive and ambition can also be problematic, setting the stage for even longer-term problems.

Asking the Trekkiest question of all – “What is humanity’s Prime Directive?” – should we be focused on more grandiose goals like traveling at the speed of light, colonizing other planets, controlling gravity, or mitigating the impact of earthquakes and hurricanes?

With automation and AI, we will experience exponential growth in human capabilities. But without a big picture perspective and overarching goals, the path of individual opportunity runs the risk of being hijacked by other interests – political interests, corporate interests, religious interests, and national interests.

We still lack imagination for what future generations will need. To get to this point, a mountain of work still remains.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Disrupting Government – Why Countries Will Soon Have to Compete for their Citizens

In 2002, Roger Ver was honing his entrepreneurial skills by selling products on eBay. It was in the aftermath of the Twin Towers disaster when one of his products called “Pest Control Report 2000” hit the radar of Homeland Security and he was charged and convicted of selling 14 pounds of explosives without a license.

He dismisses the product as little more than a “firecracker to scare birds from cornfields,” but ended up serving 10 months in federal prison.

While his computer-parts business made him a millionaire by age 25, Ver became truly wealthy after investing tens of thousands in Bitcoin in 2011, a crypto-currency that he bought for $1 each and trades in the neighborhood of $600 today.

Now, at age 35, Roger Ver has adopted the moniker “Bitcoin Jesus” and is one of the currency’s most ardent supporters as well as a major investor in Bitcoin startups. 

At the same time, he has another agenda. He is now traveling the world, explaining to wealthy people everywhere how they can invest as little as $400,000 in the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitt and become a citizen there. 

After finishing his probation in 2006, Ver moved to Tokyo to stay off of the radar of U.S. officials. Earlier this year, on Feb 13, 2014, he got his St. Kitt’s passport, and renounced his U.S. citizenship that same month. 

“I didn’t hurt anybody. I had nothing but happy customers, and the U.S. government locked me in a cage,” he said. “So I want nothing to do with those people. I don’t want to support them. I want them out of my life.”

St. Kitt has become a magnet for wealthy people around the world because they only require an investment, not residency, to gain citizenship.

With transportation systems growing more efficient, and intrusive technologies leaving many feeling hyper-exposed and alienated by their government, conditions are now ripe for a massive wave of governmental disruption where wealthy individuals choose to “vote with their feet,” and abandon their home country.

Here’s why a massive shift is about to occur, that will force countries to compete for their own citizens.

 

The Story of Iraq

In 2003, President George Bush let the world know that the U.S. military was planning to attack Iraq and capture Saddam Hussein.

During that ramping up period, it didn’t take a genius to understand what was about to happen, and many wealthy and professional people proceeded to abandon their homeland of Iraq. The country suffered a massive brain drain as lawyers, dentists, engineers, architects, professors, and business owners all gathered up their families and moved to other countries.

This exodus of talent has had a long-term residual effect since most of these families have not returned over a decade after the official war ended making the rebuilding of the country far more difficult. 

Growing Migrant Populations

Migrant populations around the world continue to grow. In 2013, 232 million people, or 3.2% of the world’s population, were international migrants, compared with 175 million in 2000 and 154 million in 1990.

Europe and Asia combined are the home for nearly two-thirds of all international migrants worldwide. Europe is the most popular destination hosting roughly 72 million international migrants in 2013, followed closely by 71 million in Asia.

In 2013, half of all international migrants lived in 10 countries, with the US hosting the largest number (45.8 million), followed by the Russian Federation (11 million); Germany (9.8 million); Saudi Arabia (9.1 million); United Arab Emirates (7.8 million); United Kingdom (7.8 million); France (7.4 million); Canada (7.3 million); Australia (6.5 million); and Spain (6.5 million). 

Abandoning Citizenship 

The United States is one of only two countries that taxes citizens or permanent residents wherever they reside, including an estimated six million Americans living outside the country. (The other country, incidentally, is Eritrea, a single-party dictatorship.)

Citizens or permanent residents of every other country end their obligation to pay income tax after a sustained period of non-residence from that country, generally one year or longer.

Taxes are just one of many reasons people choose to abandon their citizenships, and the numbers tend to drop during Presidential election years. Here are the official numbers for people renouncing U.S. citizenship over the past seven years:

2007 – 467
2008 – 231 (Presidential election year)
2009 – 742
2010 – 1,534
2011 – 1,781
2012 – 932 (Presidential election year)
2013 – 2,999

Even though the numbers are climbing, in a country of 320 million people, they are still too small for leaders to dedicate much attention to.

However, in addition to renouncing citizenship, people can simply relinquish it. Relinquishing citizenship is a process that no one seems to be tracking, and some are estimating the numbers to be as much as four times higher.

If the actual number in 2013 were 4 times higher – 12,000, it would still be considered a tiny number. But if a high percentage of them were high-profile, super wealthy millionaires and billionaires, the whole world would begin to take notice.

Change is Coming – Shift #1

Within a decade, if you participate in a demonstration or protest, the probability of being personally identified will soon reach 100%.

Recent protests in Turkey have many wearing gasmasks or the ever-anonymous Guy Fawkes masks to conceal their identity. At this point in history, masks are probably sufficient.

However, in a few short years, people will become infinitely more traceable and simply using face paint, masks, or other theatrical disguises will offer little to shield them from the scrutiny of those with infrared scanners and other mask-penetrating technologies that take time to investigate.

Young people involved in the Turkish protests find it easy to get caught up in the moment, and are often involved in the destruction and burning of property in the streets.

To be sure, the dividing point between a protest participant and those officially labeled a “terrorist” becomes an easily swayable judgment call. 

As we move further down the path of automating justice, the use of drones for surveillance, identification, and capture will be greatly expanded. And once a person is labeled a terrorist, it will be a designation that haunts them the rest of their life, regardless of where they live, anywhere on the planet.

So rather than standing up and protesting a bad decision by the government, it will become infinitely safer and easier to simply move to another country.

Change is Coming – Shift #2

As we look closely at the advances made in transportation systems over the past couple decades, it’s easy to see that we are on the precipices of a dramatic breakthrough in ultra high-speed transportation. Businesses are demanding it. People are demanding it. And the only things standing in our way are a few people capable of mustering the political will to make it happen.

The first wave will come with driverless cars and their ability to drive far faster and safer than with human operators.

The second wave will come in the form of Personal Rapid Transit Systems (PRTs) that can be constructed over existing highways dramatically automating our commute times.

Within 10-20 years, your dreaded 7:00 am commute that takes 2 hours and half a tank of gas could be shortened to as little as 20 minutes using virtually no gas.

As transportation networks expand, the definition of a metro area will expand as people begin to routinely commute 500 – 1,000 miles each way for their jobs. A city like Milwaukee may be considered a suburb of Chicago as travel time is reduced. The entire Boston to Washington corridor could be massively linked into one large metro area. 

The result of this will be a far more fluid global populations with people routinely having breakfast in Tokyo, lunch in Paris, and dinner in Seattle. 

This also means that people who become frustrated with their government will have a far greater tendency to vote with their feet and move to another country.

Final Thoughts

In the past, countries were defined by a distinct geographical area and the people who lived there. 

The Internet is dramatically increasing our awareness of the events and actions of those in charge, as well what’s happening in other countries around the world.

When a wealthy person like Roger Ver renounces his citizenship in favor of St. Kitt and becomes a citizen of the world, millions of people around the world take notice.

Every country on the planet is about to undergo heightened levels of scrutiny, both internally and externally as our awareness grows. This will, in turn, force governments to rethink virtually every system, process, and strategy as it relate to their citizens.

As awareness grows, counties will soon find it necessary to compete for their citizens, something they’ve always taken for granted in the past. 

Late adopters to this strategy will quickly find themselves losing the talent pools needed to compete in the global marketplace. 

As a result, governments will be much different in the future. 

Please take a moment to weigh in on this critically important topic. Your children’s children, who haven’t even been born yet, are depending on you.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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‘Situational Futuring’ and 44 Mind-Stretching Scenarios to Learn How to Use It

Last week I got into a discussion with a friend about the concept of self-contained water. If you think in terms of picking up a bottle of water, only without the bottle, you get the picture. 

Rocks are self-contained, baseballs are self-contained, so why can’t we devise some way to make water self-contained? Yes, we have ice, but a more usable form of water.

As an example, if water itself could be used to form a somewhat hardened skin around a small quantity of water, we could create 100% consumable water with zero waste.

An industrial design team in London has come the closest with something called “Ooho,” a blob-like water container made out of an edible algae membrane. While it still involves using something other than water, it does give us clues on how to make a container out of what we’re trying to contain, in this case water. 

As we imagine our way through this design problem, many more questions come to light. Should it be flexible like a plastic bag or a bit more ridged like a typical water bottle? What is the ideal shape? Should it be a cube for easy stacking, have a handle for easy holding, or spherical just because it looks cool?

Even a container made of water will get dirty, so how do we clean the dirt from the side of a solid water container? More water?

More importantly, what is the optimal size for a self-contained water container? Should it be cup sized, quart-sized, gallon-sized, or larger? Or maybe marble-sized or pea-sized water pellets would work best. 

Should the water be “eaten” like tiny liquid snacks that could be popped into your mouth at any time? Perhaps we would want flavored water like cherry water, tea water, coffee water, or chocolate water. 

Maybe we don’t actually eat or drink the container. Once the inside water is gone, it may be possible to just discard the bottle onto a lawn or flowerbed, as a form of enviro-littering, and wait for it to re-liquefy, sending a few drops of moisture to the thirsty plants below. 

How would we fabricate the container part of water? Would it somehow be molded, pressed, 3D printed, or simply sprayed onto a form? 

The process I’ve just described is what I call “situational futuring,” where we begin to explore the implications of some future technology. Here’s how this can be used as an effective futuring tool. 

Situational Futuring

Much like dropping a rock into still water and watching the ripples form in every direction, situational futuring begins with a central idea, which grows into a series of rippling thoughts, issues, and questions expanding in every direction.

Unlike the study of macro or megatrends, situational futuring is a micro-futuring process that begins with a single invention, tiny idea, or what-if condition and expands from there.

The process begins with an initial scenario and asking some of the standard who-what-when-where-how-and-why questions. Probing deeper, questions formulated around things like timing, monetary implications, disruptive effects, symbiotic partners, who-wins-who-loses, wild cards, policy changes, and strange bedfellows will help expand your thinking even further.

This works particularly well in a brainstorming environment where thoughts and ideas can be quickly sketched out, described, or clarified so more can be added.

Inside these moments of micro futuring is where the real treasures live. Companies wishing to expand their product line, service agencies seeking to streamline their processes, or design engineers wishing to gain a new perspective will all find this to be a valuable tool.

 

44 Examples of Situational Futuring

It all starts with the initial idea, so here are some examples of starting points designed to begin the conversational thread of situational futuring.

1. 3D Ice Printers – A 3D printer designed to work exclusively with ice could be used to make ice sculptures, ice containers, ice cubes with your favorite liquor inside, ice logos for companies, and much more.

2. Water Harvesting Irrigation Spikes – Will it someday be possible to add atmospheric water harvesting ground-spikes next to every plant or tree in our garden? These devices will pull water from the air to irrigate nearby plants.

3. Quantified Self Skills Analysis – As employers lose confidence in traditional transcripts and college degrees as a predictor of success, they will turn towards more sophisticated attribute-matching systems for sorting through the ultra-granular quantifiable-self and finding the closest fit. People who don’t make the shortlist for a job opening will be given an auto-generated overview of their skill deficiencies and ways to improve upon them.

4. Real-Time Healthcare Monitors – Rather than doing the snapshot-in-time testing that doctors do today, analyses will increasing be made in real-time through sensor networks that pull data over an extended period of time from our skin, organs, and even our brain as these tools evolve into hyper-analytical portals into our own metabolism.

5. Wireless Power – Will having users linked to wireless power networks in the future be similar to linking to Wi-Fi networks today?

6. Swarmbots – Groups of flying drones that move like flocks of birds, schools of fish, or swarms of bees have become known as swarmbots. How long will it be before we see the newspaper headline that reads: “10,000 tiny flying swarmbots perform flawlessly together?”

7. Cure for Aging – Life expectancy is getting longer, but the usefulness of the human body has traditionally maxed out somewhere around 120. Will it someday be possible to find a cure for aging?

8. Driverless Cars – How long will it be before we see the first highway in the U.S. to be designated as a “driverless-cars only” highway?

9. Space Colonies – In what year will there be an election for the first President of the Moon?

10. Billion-Cam Video Project – What kind of business will be needed to connect 1 billion live video cameras to the Internet? What can a billion-cam network do that a million-cam network can’t?

11. Centralized Law Project – Very few countries have their laws posted in a central repository. In the U.S. the laws, rules, and regulations are so numerous and obscure that few people know what laws are governing them at any given moment. How would that change if all laws were required to be posted on one central online website?

12. Dream Recorder – It’s easy to forget our dreams, even before we wake up. Is it possible to create a “hit-play-to-record” device that would allow us to visually or mentally archive our dreams?

13. Reviving the Extinct Species – Should extinct species be brought back to life? If so, where would they live, and who would manage their existence?

14. Self-Cleaning House – This long-time dream of housewives is finally within reach as smart home technology, combined with the Internet of Things, begins to invade our lives. What are the current missing pieces and what technology could be used to fill the gaps?

15. Animal Communicator – With early stage natural language translators already in existence for humans, the next step will be a technology that bridges the communication gap between humans and animals. Will this ever be possible and how would this affect our human-animal relationships?

16. Global Elections – When will we see the first global election with over 500 million people voting from at least 50 different countries? Will they be voting for a person, or voting on an issue? If it’s a person, what position will that person be running for? And, if it’s an issue, what issue will be so compelling that everyone wants to vote on it?

17. Human Cloning – Science fiction movies often show cloned bodies grown over a long period of time. But 3D printing of replacement bodies will likely be a quicker option. How long will it be before someone 3D prints their own replacement body, and what are the implications of this kind of technology?

18. Space Based Power Stations – The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) recently announced its 25-year plan to build the world’s first 1-gigawatt power plant in space. Is it possible that another country will build one before Japan, and what effect will this have on today’s power industry?

19. Your Future Self – How much, and in what ways, should you invest in the person you will become 5-10 years from now? What are some different ways for you to quantify the return on your investment?

20. Future Countries – One hundred years from now, will we have more countries in the world or less? Will it someday be possible to create micro-nation states, and how could they be leveraged to influence global thinking?

21. The Age of the Dismantler – Every industry will eventually end, and this requires talented people who know how to scale things back and dismantle things in an orderly fashion. How long will it be before we begin a full-scale effort to dismantle the national power grid?

22. Controlling Weather – Weather control technology is still in its infancy. In what year will we see the first hurricane stopped by human intervention and what is the technology that will be used?

23. Hyper-Individualized Medicine – Professor Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow believes we will soon be using 3D printers to replace traditional pharmaceuticals with hyper-individualized medicines that are printed specifically for the person at the time they ordered them. What are the likely health and business implications from this kind of technology?

24. Crypto Currencies – Bitcoin is the first crypto currency to make major inroads as an alternative to national currencies. What will be the first major banking system to accept deposits either from bitcoin or some other crypto currency?

25. Atmospheric Water Harvesters – Several new technologies have been developed to extract moisture directly from the air. These have become known as atmospheric water harvesters. How long will it be before we see the first city to harvest 100% of its water supply from the atmosphere?

26. Ultra High Speed Transportation System – Today’s high speed trains max out around 300 mph. However, vacuum tube transportation systems, like the one being proposed by ET3, have the potential to exceed 4,000 mph. Once implemented, how will a technology like this affect the airline industry?

27. Genetically Engineered Athletes – Will genetically engineered designer babies, often referred to as super-babies, grow up to become super-humans? Will the prospects of creating bigger, faster, stronger humans change the rules for professional sports?

28. Mass Energy Storage – We are now entering the early growth stages of what will surely become a huge global industry – energy storage. In what year will we see the first mass energy storage system capable of storing enough energy to power a city of 1 million people for over a month? How will that impact the price of power?

29. Large Scale 3D Printing – In April the Chinese company, WinSun Decoration Design Engineering, created the first 3D printed house. They not only printed a house, they completed 10 houses in a single day using a massive printer that was 490 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 20 feet deep. How long before this same technology can be used to 3D print much larger items such as ships, stadiums, aircraft, and even floating islands?

30. Water Bullets – Non-lethal weapons employ many different technologies, but using water bullets could be the easiest to use and also the least dangerous. Are water bullets a likely candidate for non-lethal weapon technology, and how long before police forces are equipped to use them?

31. Crowd-Sourced Court System – If a court system were developed using crowdsourcing to form its jury decisions, what things would have to change in our current justice system? Would this be a fairer kind of justice and who would be the early adopters?

32. Instant Sleep – The workaholic’s dream. People who need to finish an important project, but are feeling exhausted, would simply walk into the instant-sleep chamber, and Voila! In a few seconds they would walk back out, fully rejuvenated and raring to go. Is this possible?

33. Global Language Archive – Over the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will disappear, as young people abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. Do we have a moral obligation to begin archiving our languages in a central repository as a way to preserve our cultures, and in many ways, our humanity?

34. Legalized Marijuana Movement – Tracking very similarly to the end of prohibition in 1929, the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington is paving the way for other states and counties to follow suit. How long before the marijuana is as prevalent as alcohol in nightclubs around the U.S. and around the world?

35. Perpetual Self-Filling Canteen – In a world where people continually die from lack of hydration, one of the most-needed devices is a handheld canteen that is constantly extracting moisture from the air. What are some of the ways a technology like this can be used and how large of market could a technology like this create?

36. Downloadable Personalities – If you had the ability to create a new “personality” for your conversational computer, with some new personality-builder software, what features would you want it to have? Who are some of todays best-known celebrities that would likely show up as downloadable personalities for your computer, car, or robot? How would this affect your relationship with your machines as well as other people?

37. Nano-Netting – Using super strong fibers so small that they are invisible to the human eye, nano-netting will provide a fibrous support structure that is visually non-intrusive but capable of keeping out insects, birds, and other unwanted animals. But this technology will also enable objects to be suspended in air with seemingly invisible support. Invisible fences, invisible screens, invisible cars and windmills will all be possible. What kind of market will there be for invisible netting like this?

38. Electron-Based Information Storage – Yes, Moore’s Law is still in effect, but we are still a long ways from using electrons as the basis for our storage medium. How long will it be before this happens and how will achieving this milestone for ultra tiny storage particle change the tech industry?

39. Seed Capitalists – In the startup business world there is a huge gulf between initial concept and fundable prototypes. This dearth of funding options will require an entirely new profession. How will the introduction of seed capitalists, who specialize in high-risk early stage startups, change the entrepreneurial landscape?

40. Avatar Relationship Managers – As the foibles of humanity enter the realm of autonomous, freethinking avatars, people will find it necessary to both manage and limit the often-dangerous relationships that our avatars get us into. Will this be a near term problem?

41. Anomaly Zero – The medical problems most people have can be traced to changes in a single cell. Anomaly Zero is the first detectable sign that something is wrong. We may not be able to spot a change in a single cell, but can get far closer than what we detect today. So how can we use our pursuit of Anomaly Zero to intervene before major damage begins?

42. Robotic Earthworms – The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills because that is where we have buried our most valuable natural resources. In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil.

43. Movable Holes – If you drill a hole in the wrong place, will it someday be possible to simply move the hole. Will this type of technology ever be practical? If so, how will movable holes be advertised and sold?

44. Flashdark – As a device that works the opposite of a flashlight, the “flashdark” can be used to shine “darkness” onto any surface. So if you’re getting too much sun on the beach, shining darkness on yourself becomes an easy solution. Does the invention of the “flashdark” violate our current laws of physics? Even so, is it still a viable technology?

Final Thoughts

How much power and influence do predictions have? Do predictions sometimes influence an event to happen? Are some more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a prediction?

The answer depends on many factors. Who is making the prediction, how credible are they, how many people are actually paying attention to it, and are there other factors we may not be aware of?

As with most predictions, some of the ones above are far more likely than others. But the true value in this kind of list comes from giving serious consideration to each one of them and reaching your own conclusions. And situational futuring is a fascinating tool that can help you do exactly that.

In this context predictions become an important tool, even when they are wrong.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Artificial Intelligence will be Crashing the Stock Market in 3, 2, 1…

A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking opened the world’s eyes to the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), warning that it has the potential of outsmarting humans in the financial markets. But few people realize that we are already in imminent danger of this happening.

The stock market is a system for assigning value to companies through the buying and selling of stock. It’s a human-based system, assigning human value, to corporations owned and operated by humans. Well, at least that is how it was supposed to work until the machines started taking over. 

In the 1960′s, an average share of stock was held 4 years. By 2000, average ownership dropped to 8 months, and in 2008 it dropped even further to 2 months.

Today the average share is held a scant 20 seconds and within a few months, it will drop to less than 10 seconds. 

At the center of this rapid buying and selling of stock are a series of high-frequency trading machines run by the quants, the math-whiz kids who are a type of hackers only on Wall Street.

Without having people at the center of these trades, we have lost the core ingredient, our ability to accurately assess value. 

The invasion of high-frequency trading machines is now forcing capitalism far away from anything either Adam Smith or the founders of the NYSE could possibly find virtuous. 

We’re not about to let robots compete in the Olympics, driverless cars race in the Indianapolis 500, or automated machines play sports like football, basketball, or baseball. So why is it we allow them to play a role in the most valuable contest of all, the world wide stock exchange? 

With crude forms of AI now entering the quant manipulator’s toolbox, we are now teetering dangerously close to a total collapse of the stock market, one that will leave many corporations and individuals financially destitute. 

Here is why this should be ringing alarm bells all over the world.

 

The Flash Crash of 2010

Few things explain the dangers of AI manipulations of the stock market quite like the Flash Crash of 2010. Here’s a quick overview:

The date was May 6, 2010 and by all outward appearances, everything on the markets appeared to be normal. Yes, people in Greece were protesting austerity but there were no other indicators of what was about to happen. 

Cheap credit had been pushing stocks higher for months, but the mood was changing. Every time disgruntled workers in Athens hits the TV screen, the Dow Jones would drop a bit more. By 2:30 p.m., it was down 2.5%, a moderately bad day, but that’s when everything was about to go crazy.

It began as a ripple in the price of E-mini futures contracts, traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but almost nobody noticed. This tiny ripple quickly morphed in a major ripple, and with very little forewarning, the tail quickly started wagging the dog to pieces.

Within seconds, the Dow has lost 100 points, then 200, 300, 400, and 500. 

It’s important to know that the internal self-limiting mechanisms designed to halt trading after unnatural price swings only works until 2:30 p.m. EST. 

At 600 points down, the Dow had fallen further than it did on news of Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008. But that crash took a full day, this was killing the market in a matter of seconds. 

When the market goes into a freefall, traders start to panic, vomiting into trashcans and mentally preparing themselves to leap off tall buildings. Even the 9/11 disaster hadn’t rocked the market like this.

Those close to the action started demanding that someone “break the glass and hit the emergency stop button on the wall,” but this button doesn’t exist. 

At 2:47 pm, with the Dow racing towards an unprecedented 1,000-point loss and almost $1 trillion being wiped from the balance sheets, an even bigger surprise happened. The market switched directions and began to rise.

The 600-point loss suddenly became 400, then 300, and 200.

The craziest part of all was that this entire episode, the most dramatic in stock market history, had occurred in just 10 minutes.

After a short period, rumors began pointing fingers at the supposed culprit – Waddell & Reed, an asset management firm based in Kansas. But this was later disproven.

In the background were the quant-hackers managing the strings for some other puppet-master. These people are also experts in blame-shifting and deception so we will probably never know what actually happened.

(Here’s a more detailed account of the Flash Crash of 2010.)

Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs

Even the most egregious abusers of the stock market have no interest in killing the system that has become their central playground, the goose that continually lays the golden eggs. But they have no problem with extracting wealth from it at every turn, often harming individual companies quite severely in the process.

The tactics used in the flash crash of 2010 are similar to a denial of service (DoS) attack. On this day servers became so overloaded that quotes for some shares experienced as much as a 36 second delay.

This is a black-hat technique known as “quote stuffing” where machines begin placing and canceling unrealistic orders 10,000 times in a second, or stepping from one share all the way to 100, one at a time, and then marching back down again in milliseconds, over and over and over.

Keep in mind this is a very crude form of artificial intelligence. Imagine the type of exploitations that will be possible when higher forms of AI begin entering the system.

Manipulations like this are only a problem if we continue to let the puppet-masters guard the marionette stage. Much of this problem quickly goes away if we return to a system where human “authority” is used to curb abusive practices.

The Need for Human Authority

Many of our free-market thinkers have long advocated automating human authority out of the equation.

Trades can happen faster and in greater volume if we remove the gatekeepers from the system. However, we still need humans to oversee the system. It may be automated human, but still humans. 

As an example, Google’s largest computer data centers are built around thousands and thousands of flawed machines that individually fail time and again. With systems for circumventing failures when they occur, the overall machine, in its entirety is more than a little impressive.

People are very similar. We are all flawed individuals, mired in an ocean of personal chaos. But the same imperfections we see on the micro scale change dramatically when we transcend to look at humanity on a macro scale.

In much the same way that Google operates a massively complex machine by changing out individual units on the fly, we will eventually be able to create superhuman intelligence by connecting our own individually flawed brains with a massively coupled super brain.

No, this would not be a 24/7 link that limits our individuality or free will, but the human equivalent of a moral machine that we can choose to be part of. I’ll save the details of this for a later discussion.

Final Thoughts

We are currently walking on dangerously thin ice. Artificial intelligence is already creeping into our lives on a daily basis, but even with its current Neanderthal-level intellect, it can do incalculable levels of damage.

I would compare the current stock market to The Borg on Star Trek, but it’s even more sinister than that. The deeper we probe, the more we appear to be pawns on someone else’s financial chessboard.

I’d like to extend an open invitation for you to weigh in on this topic. Am I being too alarmist in my assumptions? Are there protective measures in place to prevent this type of abuse from happening? What am I missing?

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Six Radical Trends Redefining the Hotel of the Future

A few nights ago, I arrived at a very nice Radisson Blu Hotel in Minneapolis for my talk on the “hotel of the future.”

My client was the good people on the Board of Carlson & Rezidor Hotels, the group responsible for a large number of impressive hotels and travel operations around the world.

When I first arrived on the property and entered my hotel room, the staff had prepared a very nice fruit plate, topped with peaches, apricots, and chocolates. This was a very nice gesture, but these were all things that my dietary restrictions would not allow me to eat.

The thought occurred to me that the hotel probably would have appreciated knowing up front about my food allergies, but it kinda ruins the moment if they have to ask lots of questions before they surprise you.

So I spent time considering this dilemma. What kind of anticipatory system could be created to broadcast the needs and preferences of guests to a hotel without turning it into a lengthy discussion?

It occurred to me that this is the exact space where smart building technology is intersecting with the Internet of Things.

In the past, hotels built their business around employing highly attentive people. In the future, they will replace many of their staff with highly attentive buildings.

Here’s a quick scenario that will explain the symbiotic relationship that will develop between people and a building that can attend to their every need. 

 Automated luggage attendant

1.) Highly Attentive People Replaced by Highly Attentive Buildings 

The Anticipatory Hotel Scenario: As soon as you register for your stay, the hotel begins to track and understand you. On the day of your arrival, the hotel knows where you are and anticipates your arrival.

When you get within 10 miles, the hotel automatically adjusts the temperature and humidity levels to your liking so it will be perfect when you arrive. 

Upon arrival, you will be greeted by an automated luggage attendant designed to whisk your bags to your room. Since each of your bags has auto-tracking tags, you’re not concerned about losing any of your bags.

At all times, helpful people are just a button-push away, but the building itself has been optimized around its automated peopleless systems.

Upon entering the lobby, you are automatically registered without having to check-in. Your room number and directions are displayed on your smartphone. “Proceed 50 feet in the direction of the arrow and take the elevator on the right.”

Virtual receptionists will be positioned at key intersections to help out whenever the need arises.

As you approach your room, the door will automatically unlock and you will see your luggage already waiting for you.

Upon entering your room, you’ll instantly begin to appreciate the anticipatory nature of this building.

Since it knows what mood you are in, it will automatically be playing music that syncs with your personality at the perfect volume. This music will change along with every shift in mood or activity, and will disappear completely when you no longer want it. You need only think it, and it’s gone.

Temperature and humidity have been dialed in specifically for you. Window shades will open or close depending on your position in the room, time of day, and intensity of the sunlight.

If you’re in the mood, a fire will automatically appear in the fireplace, and the color of the flame will automatically adjust to match your ever-changing whims.

Walking into the bathroom, you need only say, “hello mirror,” and a display will appear behind the glass. A quick scan of weather reports, headlines, your personal agenda, and a few fitness facts such as heart rate, weight, and body temperature will only scratch the surface of what’s possible.

2.) “Greenliness” to be Replaced by Hyper-Cleanliness

Gone are the days when hotels need to constantly remind you of their commitment to the environment. The new trend is to remind you of their commitment to cleanliness.

The “quantified self” is enabling us to monitor precise inputs and outputs of the human body. So having a set of monitors displaying air quality, water quality, radon levels, pollen counts, noise and vibration histories will become very common.

Stepping into the shower, not only will the controls anticipate your desired temperature, spray selection, and intensity, but will display readouts of everything from chlorine levels to bacterial counts.

When it comes to toilets, toilet paper flushing commodes will no longer be good enough. Next generation Japanese-style electronic toilet-bidets will attend to your every need.

3.) Rethinking Baseline Expectations

When was it that customers began expecting every hotel to have a hair dryer? How about cable TV, hair conditioner, coffee pots, or shower robes?

Over the centuries, hotels have evolved from the basic four-wall flophouse to a highly sophisticated luxury stay facilities, with a growing list of essentials to accommodate our increasingly complex needs.

Even though a few things like stationary and postcards have started to disappear, the list of expected amenities continues to rise, complicating the hotel operation immensely.

As an example, Wi-Fi today is not only an expected amenity; customers expect it to be free. With most customers bringing many different devises, even services that offer: “buy one connection, get five devices connected,” is not enough.

Along with increasing levels of paranoia about water quality, hotels that do not offer free bottles of water will be relegating guests to drink unfiltered tap water, an without water-quality monitors, in many people’s minds, this is as good as asking them to drink poison.

Once hotels get past charging for Wi-Fi and bottled water, they will begin to discover a whole new range of premium services that will more than offset any revenue loss.

4.) Well-Balanced Operations Replaced by the Great Imbalance

Hotels are becoming the center of the universe for a much larger ecosystem that involves branding, retail, and entertainment products.

While Gucci, Lamborghini, Absolut, and Dior all represent premium brands, they each have something else in common. They lack a sense of place. Premium hotels attract a customer base that all top brands are anxious to align themselves with.

This has led to the current “shopfronting” craze, but slick storefronts displaying premium brands are often not authentic enough for the raw, real-world experience being demanded by today’s selfie-shooting bucketlisters.

For this reason, the well-balanced hotel operations of the past are being replaced by the great imbalance. Yesteryears cookie cutter approach to designing hotels is being swapped out for one-of-a-kind designs that highly leverage the strengths and identity of the local community.

As a case in point, the Radisson Blu Hotel I stayed at in Minneapolis was attached directly to the Mall of America, and the lobby was filled with unusual coworking spaces as a way to leverage the indoor work/play environments needed to offset Minnesota’s harsh winters.

5.) Reinventing the Sharing Economy Hotel 

As sites like Airbnb, Crashpadder, and TravelMob continue to grow, and the sharing economy becomes engrained in our everyday thinking, it’s easy to envision many kinds of virtual hotel operations made up of condos, small houses, and various kinds of living units spread out around a city.

Naturally these will vary considerably, but we will soon see Virtual Marriotts, Virtual Hiltons, and Virtual Radissons adding to their hotel mix. Many will do this to dampen the proliferation of Airbnb and sign exclusive rental agreements on the best units.

Starting with a “front desk” operation located near a high traffic intersection, the operation will have both physical and online presence. Each unit will have to meet a set of standards, and all housekeeping, maintenance, and insurance will be handled by the hotel company.

For the premium hotel, the appeal of this kind of operation is that there will be very little investment in bricks and mortar, and owners of the rental units will receive a percentage of each night’s stay.

At the same time, running a distributed hotel operation comes with its own set of problems. Telling guests their room is still a 20-30 minute drive away, responding to late night maintenance calls or noise complaints, or providing any kind of room service will be problematic.

For most it will be a relatively easy brand extension, without the capital outlay, and it will enable them to quickly enter markets they currently don’t exist in.

Disney’s MagicBand

6.) The Emergence of “Magic” Payment Systems

When Disney’s MagicBand technology first appeared, it was like the unveiling of the first iPhone. The digital world made its first major inroad into the theme park business in a significant way. 

Disney has made a $1 billion investment in the MagicBand system, so don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

Similar to keyless car entry, MagicBands store tickets, hotel keys, debit and credit card information and can be used anywhere just by tapping a sensor.

With their embedded RFID chips, MagicBands also enable Disney to track guests as they move around the park, send special alerts when wait times for rides get too long, and even address children by name or wish them a happy birthday.

A similar type of magic bands for hotels will enable guests to access their room, track their workouts in fitness centers, buy drinks at the bar, attend a concert, go shopping, rent a car, book an excursion, or even pay for a taxi with the flip of their wrist. The ease of making a transaction will increase overall sales dramatically.

MagicBand is very much a precursor to the face-recognizing smart-room technology described in the Anticipatory Hotel Scenario above. But a Radisson Blu MagicBand, as example, will have the ability to extend the hotel’s influence far into the local community, and even across country lines. 

Final Thoughts

Smart home technology is baby stepping its way into our lives, and at the same time, elevating our expectations for hotels. In fact, we expect hotels to be ahead of the curve.

For them, this whole upgrade begins by creating a new operating system capable of incorporating smart hotel features far into the future.

None of this will be easy. Every new master plan will begin to feel totally outdated six months after it was first discussed, but someone will figure it out.

These six trends will indeed seem radical, upon first glance, to the hoteliers of today. But this kind of technology is coming, and it will happen much sooner than we think.

Personally, I can’t wait.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Will there be Swarmbots in Your Future?

Imagine stepping out of the shower in the morning, and rather than reaching for a towel, a swarm of thousands of flying drones will surround you and begin to dry you off.

A few seconds after drying your skin, the same swarm will begin to attend to other morning prep duties such as shaving, applying makeup, drying and fixing your hair, adding lotions, deodorant, and powder where necessary, and completing everything in only a few seconds.

Once the face-prep is finished, the swarm will assemble itself as your clothing, rearranging itself into the color, style, and fashion most appropriate for your day’s activities. 

The swarm will be in constant communication with you, anticipating your needs, responding to voice commands, replying when necessary through tiny ear-bots or projection eye-bots. 

The swarm will handle many duties, simultaneously serving as body armor to protect you from injury, adjusting temperatures to keep you warm or cool, constantly communicating with the rest of the world-wide swarm network, attending to every bodily function, keeping you fit and trim in the process.

These same bots will also serve as your short-range transportation system. Much like a scene from a Superman comic book, the swarm will physically lift your body and fly you to where ever you want to go.

If this sounds like science fiction, it’s because this scenario just leapfrogged 10 generations of swarmbot development. At the same time, we are quickly moving into unchartered territory, and swarmbots like this will soon have capabilities we can’t even imagine. 

Swarmbot Operating Systems

Following natures lead, swarmbots operate much like a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a swarm of bees. Each animal knows what the others are doing and instinctively knows where they need to be at any given moment.

“Swarm robotics” is a term first coined by University of California Professors Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989 to describe the idea of swarm intelligence used to operate multi-cell robotic systems.

In swarm robotics, the thinking is that 200 metal heads are much better than one. In other words, a large number of simple robots can perform complex tasks in a more efficient way than a single machine.

The attributes or characteristics of swarm intelligence can be broken into three areas:

1. De-centralization means there is no command center or single leader for the group. It also means there’s no single failure point. The overall complexity of the system can be reduced to tiny, simple robots that operate together like a fluid, constantly reorganizing brain.

2. Self-organization. A self-organizing swarm is infused with “emergent intelligence” which gives it the ability to react. Each tiny robot in the swarm operates like cat whiskers, sensing any micro change in the surrounding environment and reacts accordingly.

3. Parallel Distribution. The parallel distribution of tasks, once again means there’s no single failure point in the system. Instead of a single highly intelligent robot, each member of the swarm can step in and take over if any other members fail.

In this type of system, each robot maintains a history of the activities performed by other robots based on observation, and independently performs a division of labor using this history. It then can modify its own behavior to adapt to each new situation.

Today’s State of the Art

Some of the early influences on swarmbot development occurred as a result of the Transformer Toy line produced by the Japanese company Takara beginning in 1984. These transformable toys led to more complex thinking about multi-cell robotic systems and later, swarms. 

Since the early work in the 1980s, swarms have become far more sophisticated. From harvesting crops to monitoring the environment, from crawling through a rubbish dump looking for useful materials, to swimming through your veins delivering medicine, swarms are destined to become a growing part of everyday life.

While several teams have demonstrated ground-based drones working together, the first quadcopter swarm, flown as a synchronized flock, happened in March 2014. The Hungarian research team behind this effort demonstrated a grouping of ten autonomous robots leaving from an airfield outside Budapest, zipping through the open sky, flying in formation, and at times even following a single leader, all without any central control. 

But even before this, the US military already had its first swarm squadron on order. In 2008, the US Army Research Laboratory awarded a $38 million contract to BAE Systems to develop a swarm of spy-bots to be used on reconnaissance missions. The project, known as MAST (Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology), is now underway and BAE hopes to unveil something soon.

Admittedly, we still have a long ways to go to create the future I’m envisioning. But it is through today’s crude capabilities that we can begin to envision an entire universe of swarmbot possibilities.

Will swarmbots offer human flight capabilities?

Future Capabilities

After watching a number of swarm videos, creative minds begin to imagine a vastly different world. 

Having swarms cook our food, clean our homes, mow our lawns, wash our dishes and keep track of our children is just scratching the surface.

These same swarms will someday paint our homes, walk our dogs, scratch our itches, find lost objects, and unclutter our offices.

Acting simultaneously as our doctor, nurse, teacher, lawyer, banker, insurance and real estate brokers, they will intervene on our behalf, arbitrate difficult situations, provide us third party impartiality, and give us advance warning when something is about to go awry.

But even more than that, they will serve as our personal bodyguards, shielding us from severe weather, shading us from bright sunlight, silencing loud noises, amplifying whispers we wish to tap into, peeking around blind corners, and entertaining us when we’re bored.

They will leverage our capabilities, help us overcome our shortcomings, and keep us physically fit without strenuous workouts. For most of us, they will become our best friends, constantly encouraging us, a champion of our accomplishments, and a shield that will quickly rise for whatever kind of defense we may need.

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to conclude that once we have our own personal swarm, life will suddenly become easy. But that would be wrong.

The scenarios I‘ve described are perhaps 10 generations from now, maybe 2-4 decades away. There will be many baby steps of improvement between here and there.

Swarmbots will be the Internet of Things on steroids.

Each improvement will increase human capabilities, and those with more capabilities will simply be asked to do more.

Just as with all technology, there will be unintended consequences, and people with devious minds will figure out ways to use them for evil purposes.

Yes, on some level we will have bad swarms fighting good swarms, and swarm hackers plotting to corrupt even our most advanced technologies. But still, on balance, the forces of good will outweigh those with criminal intent.

As always, I remain optimistic about the amazing future unfolding before us. Personally I can’t wait to have my own personal swarm. 

Naturally, painting images of a future technology like this is an inexact science and I’d love to hear your thoughts. So feel free to comment below on things I’ve missed, overstated, or gotten completely wrong. 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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