Thomas Frey's Blog, page 43

33 Dramatic Predictions for 2030

Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history.

By 2030 the average person in the U.S. will have 4.5 packages a week delivered with flying drones. They will travel 40% of the time in a driverless car, use a 3D printer to print hyper-individualized meals, and will spend most of their leisure time on an activity that hasn’t been invented yet. 

The world will have seen over 2 billion jobs disappear, with most coming back in different forms in different industries, with over 50% structured as freelance projects rather than full-time jobs. 

Over 50% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will have disappeared, over 50% of traditional colleges will have collapsed, and India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world.

Most people will have stopped taking pills in favor of a new device that causes the body to manufacture it’s own cures.

Space colonies, personal privacy, and flying cars will all be hot topics of discussion, but not a reality yet.

Most of today’s top causes, including climate change, gay liberation, and abortion, will all be relegated to little more than footnotes in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia itself will have lost the encyclopedia wars to an upstart company all because Jimmy Wales was taken hostage and beheaded by warring factions in the Middle East over a controversial entry belittling micro religions.

Our ability to predict the future is an inexact science. The most accurate predictions generally come from well-informed industry insiders about very near term events.

Much like predicting the weather, the farther we move into the future, the less accurate our predictions become. 

So why do we make them? 

In the segments below, I’ll make a series of 33 provocative predictions about 2030, and how different life will be just 17 years in the future.

I will also explain why predictions are important, even when they are wrong.

“Our greatest motivations in life

come from NOT knowing the future.”

 

Why Understanding the Future is Important

Ignorance is a valuable part of the future. If we knew the future we would have little reason to vote in an election, host a surprise party, or start something new.

Once a future is known, we quickly lose interest in trying to influence it. For this reason, our greatest motivations in life come from NOT knowing the future. 

So why, as a futurist, do I spend so much time thinking about the future?

Very simply, since no one has a totally clear vision of what lies ahead, we are all left with degrees of accuracy. Anyone with a higher degree of accuracy, even by only a few percentage points, can achieve a significant competitive advantage.

“Humanity will change more in the

next 20 years than in all of human history.”

 

The Power of Prediction

If I make the prediction that “By 2030 over 90% of all crimes will be solved through video and other forms of surveillance,” a forecast like that causes several things to happen.

First, you have to decide if you agree that a certain percent of crimes will be solved that way. If so, it forces you to think about how fast the surveillance industry is growing, how invasive this might be, and whether privacy concerns might start to shift current trends in the other direction.

More importantly, it forces you to consider the bigger picture, and whether this is a desirable future. If it reaches 90%, how many police, judges, and lawyers will be out of a job as a result of this? Will this create a fairer justice system, a safer society, or a far scarier place to live?

Please keep this in mind as we step through the following predictions.

“Risk factors will increase exponentially!”

 

33 Dramatic Predictions

By 2030 over 80% of all doctor visits will have been replaced by automated exams. Details here.
By 2030 over 90% of all restaurants will use some form of a 3D food printer in their meal preparations. Details here.
By 2030 over 10% of all global financial transactions will be conducted through Bitcoin or Bitcoin-like crypto currencies.
By 2030 we will seen a growing number of highways designated as driverless-vehicle only. Details here.
By 2030, a Chinese company will become the first to enter the space tourism industry by establishing regular flights to their space hotel.
By 2030, the world’s largest Internet company will be in the education business, and it will be a company we have not heard of yet.
By 2030 over 20% of all new construction will be “printed” buildings. Details here.
By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will have disappeared, freeing up talent for many new fledgling industries. Details here.
By 2030 a new protest group will have emerged that holds anti-cloning rallies, demonstrating against the creation of “soul-less humans.”
By 2030 we will see the first city to harvest 100% of its water supply from the atmosphere. Details here.
By 2030 world religions will make a resurgence, with communities of faith growing by nearly 50% over what they are today.
By 2030 over 50% of all traditional colleges will collapse, paving the way for an entire new education industry to emerge. Details here.
By 2030 we will see a surge of Micro Colleges spring to life, each requiring less than 6 months of training and apprenticeship to switch professions. Details here.
By 2030 scientists will have perfected an active cross-species communication system, enabling some species to talk to each other as well as humans.
By 2030 we will see the first hurricane stopped by human intervention.
By 2030 we will see wireless power used to light up invisible light bulbs in the middle of a room. 
By 2030 we will see the first demonstration of a technology to control gravity, reducing the pull of gravity on an object by as much as 50%.
By 2030 democracy will be viewed as inferior form of government.
By 2030 traditional police forces will be largely automated out of existence with less than 50% of current staffing levels on active duty.
By 2030 over 90% of all libraries will offer premium services as part of their business model. Details here.
By 2030 forest fires will have been reduced to less than 5% of the number today with the use of infrared drone monitoring systems. Details here.
By 2030 over 30% of all cities in the U.S. will operate their electric utilities as micro grids.
By 2030 we will have seen a number of global elections with the intent of creating a new global mandate, forcing world leaders to take notice. Details here.
By 2030 traditional pharmaceuticals will be replaced by hyper-individualized medicines that are manufactured at the time they are ordered. Details here.
By 2030 we will have seen the revival of the first mated pair of an extinct species. Details here.
By 2030 swarms of micro flying drones – swarmbots – will be demonstrated to assemble themselves as a type of personal clothing, serving as a reconfigurable fashion statement. Details here.
By 2030 marijuana will be legalized in all 50 states in the U.S. and half of all foreign countries. Details here.
By 2030 cable television will no longer exist.
By 2030 a small number of companies will begin calculating their labor costs with something called “synaptical currency.” Details here.
By 2030 it will be common to use next generation search engines to search the physical world. Details here.
By 2030 basic computer programming will be considered a core skill required in over 20% of all jobs. Details here.
By 2030 we will have seen multiple attempts to send a probe to the center of the earth. Details here.
By 2030 a form of tube transportation, inspired by Hyperloop and ET3, will be well on its way to becoming the world’s largest infrastructure project. Details here.

 ”Our children’s children, who haven’t

even been born yet, are counting on you!”

 

Final Thoughts

Reading through the prediction above you will likely have experiences a number of thoughts ranging from agreement, to amusement, to confusion, to total disagreement.

As with most predictions, some will be correct and others not. But the true value in this list will come from giving serious consideration to each of them and deriving your own conclusions.

If you were expecting me to aggressively defend all these predictions, then this column will certainly disappoint you. It has been a lifetime journey for me to formulate my thoughts about the future, but there are far too many variables to build a defensible case for any of them.

That said, I would love to hear your thoughts. What’s missing, too aggressive, or simply misguided? Sometimes my crystal ball is far too fuzzy, so I’d love to hear what ideas come to mind.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Technology’s Threat to the Future of Sports – Part 1

Recently I returned from a trip to Seoul, Korea where I was asked to speak at the Global Sports Marketing Forum on the “future of sports.” This event was part of a series being planned to draw attention to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Korea.

Here’s how I began my presentation in Seoul. 

In 1980, Carnegie Mellon University announced the formation of the $100,000 Fredkin Prize, named after computer pioneer Edward Fredkin, for anyone who could develop a computer capable of beating a world chess champion. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue team took up the challenge and proceeded to beat Gary Kasporov, the reigning world chess champion.

In 2011, IBM waged a similar battle on the TV game show Jeopardy. This time they pitted their Watson Computer against Ken Jennings and Paul Rudder, the all-time top Jeopardy champions. Again the computer came up the winner.

So if computers can win at chess and Jeopardy, are we about to see similar contests between robots and basketball players, driverless cars and NASCAR drivers, or robots and golf champions? More importantly, do we run the risk of automating these sports out of existence?

Yes, we will see many more human-vs-machine staged competitions. But no, this won’t jeopardize the sporting industry. We’re asking is the wrong question.

Even though the human-vs-machine competitions won’t be an issue, there are several possible threats around the corner for professional sports. Here’s why.

The Ultimate Form of Story Telling

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

As a result, sports have become the ultimate form of fresh content in a world where relevance is gauged by timeliness and hyper-awareness is our competitive edge. 

The value of sports broadcasts degrades exponentially faster than virtually any other form of content, so as a result, it assumes center stage as we plan our days. Most media companies view sports as an anchor event around which every other program is scheduled.

But that doesn’t mean the likes of baseball, football, and hockey are immune to change. Far from it.

Over the course of this series we will at many of the looming variables that will dramatically change how we value sports over the coming years.

Future Athletes

An athletic competition is only interesting if the athletes are relatively evenly paired, and if either team has the potential to win or lose their next competition.

We lose interest in lopsided competitions like America’s 1992 Dream Team with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Scottie Pippin facing off against far less-qualified national teams in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. People may have found it amusing for a few games, but it wasn’t a sustainable business model.

At the same time, teams with superior athletes have an advantage. So it’s in their best interest to do the best possible job of selecting, developing, and coaching each of their athletes.

While there is tremendous improvement being made to sporting equipment, protective gear, and training simulators, we are seeing many instances where technology goes too far. These include everything from performance enhancing equipment to genetically reengineering the athletes themselves. 

Oscar Pistorius, with his artificial legs, became the first double leg amputee to participate in the 2012 Summer Olympics where he proceeded to win 2 gold and one silver metal. But this wasn’t without controversy.

Having gear that stimulates muscles, improves field awareness, or adds any unusual competitive advantage, will first lead to debate and later to a league ruling before being allowed or disallowed.

Much like the difference between performance enhancing drugs and legitimate drugs, many hair-splitting rulings will have to be made between acceptable and non-acceptable tools and equipment both inside and outside of the body.

Perhaps the most difficult decisions will have to be made when it comes to genetically engineering athletes from birth.

“Are super humans really still human?”

The Super Baby Problem

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

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

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

Will these so-called super-babies grow up to become super-humans? And how long before we start seeing these fully grown offspring entering college and professional sports?

Once we are able to see how different they are, and over time the process for creating them will become increasingly complex, we’ll be faced with some difficult questions? During the ensuing debate we’ll hear questions like, “are they really still human?” and “since they weren’t conceived naturally, do they still have a soul?” and “what kind of grotesque things will 2nd and 3rd generation designer baby morph into?” and “how can we possibly compete against soul-less humans?”

On numerous occasions, officials will have to decide if these new lab-generated super-humans should be allowed to compete. Every decision will weigh heavily on whether people will want to continue watching and participating in the sport.

“Are designer babies destined to become soul-less athletes?” 

Final Thoughts

While it may appear from the outside that professional sports, as an industry, is conducting business as usual, a number of competing forces are threatening the nature of the entire industry.

Over the coming weeks we will be looking at the changing nature of the equipment itself, future types of sports, competing forms of entertainment, the fickle nature of audiences, sports apps, and the ever evolving economies at the heart of this industry.

One possibility I find very intriguing is the rapid rise of video game competitions, and whether they will become part of the future sports industry.

In the end we will probably end up with far more questions than answers, but there is a whole new generation of kids kicking around on the playground wanting to know if their dreams can ever come true. Somewhere in all this there needs to be a ray of hope.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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When Wasting Time becomes a Crime

Every time I delete spam from my inbox, I feel a tiny piece of my life flitter away.

Sitting needlessly at stoplights, or watching the minutes tick away as I wait in some line, or being forced to fill out yet another form, our precious time is being coopted by everyone from inconsiderate businesses, to overbearing government, to painful security checks at the airport.

This is what I call “time pollution.”

Little by little, whatever tiny amount of control we thought we had over our day becomes infested with some new life-sucking barnacle that congests our mind and adds surface-scratching aggregate to the smooth day we had planned.

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

We live with two basic currencies – time and money – and we make countless time-vs-money decisions, each based on the running math equation we have going on in our heads. 

If someone steals our money, it’s an obvious crime. So why isn’t it an equally obvious crime if someone needlessly squanders our time? 

Here are some thoughts on how we can rewrite what I’m calling the “Formula of Acceptable Interference” and regain control of our lives. 

 Doing the Math 

If you were to live to 80 years old, you have exactly 29,220 days, including leap years, to work with. But not all of those days are really usable. So subtract:

Your first 18 years of working through adolescence. (-6,574) = 22,646 days
Minus 8 hours a day, of those remaining, for sleeping (-7,549) = 15,097 days
Minus time at work. If we begin work at age 18 and work until retirement at age 65, 9-hour work days for a total of 47 working years with 4 weeks vacation a year (-4,230) = 10,867 days
Minus commuting to and from work – 60 minutes a day (-470) = 10,397 days. 

Suddenly two thirds of our discretionary life is gone. Now consider how much of our life is being eaten away by other notorious time wasters. These are only rough estimates but you’ll get the picture. (Note, I’m accounting for leap years):

Cleaning – ourselves, our homes, our cars, etc. – 60 minutes a day (-944*) = 9,453.
Staying informed – news, social media, emails etc. – 60 minutes a day (-944*) = 8,509.
Personal inefficiencies – getting dressed, makeup, delays, etc. – 60 minutes a day (-944*) = 7,565.
Viewing TV commercials – 18 minutes per hour X 2 hours a day (-566) = 6,999.
Deleting spam emails – 30 minutes a day (-472) = 6,527.
Waiting for traffic lights – 10 minutes a day (-157) = 6,370.

So in rough terms, each of us is left with a mere 6,370 days worth of discretionary time spread out over a 62-year lifespan (after age 18), with a large percentage of this discretionary time (2,679 days**) coming after we retire at age 65. 

Admittedly this is very crude math, but at the same time, it’s thoroughly depressing!

The point I’m trying to make is that our time is very precious and we should be very guarded against anyone who tries to mess with it.

* – ((62 years X 365 days) + 15 days for leap years)/24 hours per day = 944 days

** – 704 min flex per day after age 65 – ((15 years X 365 days) + 4) X 704 flex min per day)/60 minutes per hour/24 hours per day = 2,679 days

“We live in a culture that has been

universally dismissive of our time costs”

Every Time-Crime is a Math Problem

Whenever a petty criminal sits in front of a convenience store trying to decide whether he should brandish a gun and rob the place, he’s going through a series of math calculations to determine if the risk outweighs the reward. However skewed or demented his math skills may be, virtually every criminal goes through the same process.

This is not unlike almost every other decision we make in life, “will the cost outweigh the benefits?”

Will the momentary pleasure this candy bar brings outweigh the weight gains that are sure to follow?
Will the group-envy I cause by buying this purse outweigh the hefty price I have to pay for it?
Is driving over the speed limit to get somewhere on time worth the risk of getting a ticket if I get caught?
If I throw this trash on the ground when no one is looking, is it really littering?

Few of us realize we have a rolling calculator that appears in our head whenever a decision is being made. While we may tack on a few emotional variables to override our first results, this image of clicking of calculator keys is a very close analogy to how we make decisions.

However, one element missing from most of our calculations is the cost of time. We live in cultures that have been universally dismissive of our time costs.

Virtually everyone from businesses to government has had free reign to impose a time-tax on our lives with little regard as to whether it’s acceptable to us.

This needs to change!

Arriving at the “Formula of Acceptable Interference”

Whenever our doctor insists on us having another checkup, or our dentists insists on yet another cleaning, or our neighborhood quick-lube place insists on an oil change every 3,000 miles, we cynically ask, “Is this more for your benefit or mine?”

In the past, whenever I went onto GoDaddy to buy a domain name, I was hit with close to 400 attempts to up-sell me on additional items. The transaction time involved in making what should have been a 2-minute purchase quickly mushroomed into 10-15 minutes. Clearly this approach, and all the bad press they received as a result of it, ended up costing them more in the long run than the increases they were making in the short run, and they have since simplified their process.

So when the government insists on us registering for a new healthcare plan, or taking a test to get a license, or have the emissions checked on our car, how much time-interference do we consider reasonable?

Whether or not you’re a Christian, the story of Mary and Joseph having to travel several days with a mule, while she was pregnant, across the barren Israeli countryside to Bethlehem to comply with the orders of Caesar Augustus for conducting the world’s first census, is the epitome of onerous government interference.

While that level of interference is rarely demanded anymore, as our systems have become far more efficient, the question remains, how much “time interference” is acceptable?

So let me answer that question with a single word. The acceptable level of “transactional time leakage” is always “LESS,” less than what we’re spending today, and even less in the future.

Virtually every business in the world is being asked with doing more with less, so why shouldn’t we be applying that same of metrics to our time costs?

Should Wasting Time Become a Crime?

Business and industry knows a lot about scarcity and works hard to manipulate the math problem in our head so the perceived value of a product, based on its scarcity, closely aligns with the momentary deficiencies we, as consumers, are trying to compensate for. Scarcity, translates into urgency, which in turn translates into a little voice inside our head screaming “NOW!”

Once a purchase has been made, a few nasty businesses have found unusual ways to turn “time” into penalties, extra charges, and reasons to charge more. In fact some have become so blatant in their misrepresentations, with all the customer landmines they’ve put into place, that government has to step in.

Yet the government has a poor track record, at best, for regulating and guarding against monetary system abuses, and they have an even worse record for guarding against time abuses. In fact, most governments, and in the U.S. we have slightly less than 90,000 forms of government, have become the chief perpetrators of time-crimes.

On one hand they use time as a punishment (i.e. 2 years in jail), as a threat (i.e. you have 30 days to comply), or a dangling carrot (i.e. 90 day to reinvest without penalty). At the same time they are stealing our days, even our lives, with an insane number of laws, rules, and regulations to conform with.

So should wasting our time become a crime? Yes, because it is a much-needed checks-and-balance offset to the scale-tampering money-dominated society we find ourselves immersed in today.

Final Thoughts

We all know how important time is. Every time we turn around there are deadlines, time limits, stopwatches, stoplights, speed limits, and warnings to slow us down. 

Yet the rhythm of life is constantly pulsing to keep up with our pervasive time culture, a culture that makes us feel like our fast, is never fast enough. 

So where does that leave us?

I had hoped to end with a theoretical proof that conclusively states that “time is our scarcest of all commodities.” But I spent all my money on other things, and now I can’t afford the time to make that point.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Where do great ideas come from? More importantly, where do they go?

 

Recently my wife Deb came up with a rather comical phrase to describe her occasional memory lapse, referring to it as her “photogeriactric memory.”

A quick Facebook post later and she had released this brilliant new phrase into the wild.

Naturally this got me thinking about where original ideas come from, and whether or not this was truly an original idea.

After a few Google searches, I found a total of 83 results for the term “photogeriactric” and an obscure 2007 reference to the phrase “photo-geriactric memory.” So it wasn’t totally original, but the question continued to plague me.

When an creative idea appears in our head, is this a form of manifest destiny, divine providence, a piece of intuition, or something more like a ripple in the force?

Original ideas can be tremendously valuable, so if we know where they come from, our inclination has always been to create more of them.

But we all have ideas. Each of us is an idea-generating machine. We are radiating ideas similar to the way the sun radiates light.

Yes, very few are truly original ideas, but some are. So then what?

We now have over 7 billion people radiating ideas, every second of every day, casting pieces of inspiration and brilliance in every possible direction. The question we should be focusing on is, where do they go? 

Meet the Idea Expert

A couple years ago I had a chance to meet Steven Johnson, author of the book “Where Good Ideas Come From.” This is a book that focuses on the Eureka moments, the imagination sparks, the epiphanies where brilliant insights suddenly appear in our heads.

He concluded that people’s so called “moment of inspiration” usually took place over an extended period of time and rarely happened all at once. In his way of describing it, most discoveries start with a “slow hunch” that builds through a series of micro-epiphanies until the entire breakthrough puzzle has all its pieces in place.

During our short discussion, Steven mentioned that idea people often create their most fertile environments working with what he called “liquid networks,” much like the mastermind groups I’ve been running. With the right collections of minds focused on a topic, a well-executed discussion can lead to synergistic mind-bolts that can quickly be fashioned into completely functional ideas.

Personally, I find my most fertile moments to be ones where my body is stimulated through exercise, bicycle riding, or taking a shower while listening to the right music at the right volume. Sometimes a caffeine stimulant helps. With the right combination, I’m able to create what I call epiphanies-on-demand.

Over time I’ve started ranking epiphanies on a comparative scale and have found that it’s hard to understand the significance of an idea when it’s first occurring. It’s hard to uncover early what often becomes a fatal flaw later.

Most of these tend to be little ideas, micro-epiphanies. But in every cluster of micro-epiphanies is one with marquee-flashing-headline potential, then the question always become, “now what?”

Creating a Fertile Growing Environment for Epiphanies

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Today, good ideas can go from zero to

Facebook entry in 0.9 seconds!”

Creating a Picture of the Bigger Picture

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s far less about where ideas come from and far more about

where they go as they enter into our emerging idea ecosystem!”

Final Thoughts

Our massive data centers have become a pulsing life form, a vibrant extension of human thinking, fueled by the relentless pipeline of ideas flowing to and from servers, much like synapse firings, to find an adjoining memory cell.

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

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

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

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

As always, those with the most creative ideas are only part of the equation. It’s far less about where ideas come from and far more about where they go as they enter into our emerging idea ecosystem.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Optimizing Evil

 

Would the world be a better place if Adolph Hitler never existed?

While many people will argue over who exactly was the worst of the worst, with names like Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, Nero, Osama bin Laden, Attila the Hun, and Hirohito entering the conversation, it’s easy to attribute a face to the evil we all despise.

But when we take a more philosophical approach and ask what the world would have looked like if our own poster child for evil had never existed, we begin seeing human progress in a whole new light.

Rest assured, I’m not a fan of Hitler or any of the other psychopaths who’ve splattered blood over the pages of history. But evil does play an important role, and often times, a positive one.

As an example, some of our biggest advancements in science and industry happened during World War II when our backs were up against a wall and the word “deadline” actually referred to the time when more people would die. 

Similarly, many drawings from DaVinci and Archimedes were dedicated to creating better war machines, which also gave us much of our foundational thinking for advancing mathematics, physics, medicine, and engineering.

Our ongoing struggles with evil are never ending, and it’s up to us to stop it wherever and whenever possible. And it may be ludicrous to think we’ll ever be in danger of having “too little” evil. But knowing that we are driven by adversity, and that hardship and difficulty often brings out the best in us, is it reasonable to think there may be ways to actually “optimize evil?”

The Arm’s-Length Philosopher

For most of us, we find ways to distance ourselves from all the terrible things happening in the world. The inner voice in our heads is telling us things like: “They shouldn’t have lived is such a crappy neighborhood,” or “if they’d raised their kid right, he wouldn’t have joined that gang,” or ‘they should have never bought that gun.”

These are all pieces of the conversations floating through our heads to convince us that we’re ok and the bad stuff only happens to “those people.” After all, it’s easy to spot the bad guys on TV because they all look evil.

Naturally everything changes when the flames of evil begins to singe the hair on our own head. Our arms-length philosophy takes on a distinctly different tone.

Our Need for Resistance

As humans we have an insatiable need to compete. As kids we compete for attention, we race to be first at the dinner table, and in school we compete to be smarter, better liked, better dressed, and better athletes. 

Once we enter the job market we compete to become more hirable, better at getting things done, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. 

Competition brings out the best in us and pushes us farther and faster than we are ever able to motivate ourselves.

But bad things also create a form of competition, forcing us to dig deeper and tap our inner resources to overcome adversity. 

We tend to lose our focus when there’s no one to compete against, no worthy adversary.

However, too much resistance is not good either. Whenever we face overwhelming odds it tends to throw us into a tailspin.

Fifth graders don’t want to race against professional athletes and having the world chess champion playing a chess match against the world’s best golfer would make for a terrible contest.

So how do we keep “evil” sufficiently in check to serve as a worthy adversary?

Enter the Privacy-Transparency Debate 

One of government’s primary roles is to protect its citizens. Every country has created layers of security with guards, police, and armies to deal with any threat that may arise.

Over the past couple decades the amount of information available to these security forces has exploded exponentially, and some of our leading thinkers are presupposing what it would be like to rid society of criminals altogether.

Recent accounts of NSA’s ultra-spying capabilities show them watching and listening to conversations everywhere. Using that information and tying it to anticipatory computing systems we suddenly have Minority Report-like abilities to spot crimes before they ever happen.

Perhaps even more disturbing will be the justification for this type of system, as we hear justifications like, “we’ll actually be able to save people from themselves.”

On one hand, we probably want to prevent people from being killed. But on the other end of the spectrum, we may not want to arrest someone for stealing food because they have a starving family.

In between are thousands of grey areas requiring judgment calls.

But perhaps the bigger question we need to wrestle with is why we think we should be making any of these nuanced decisions in the first place. 

Our ability to collect data far exceeds our ability to make good decisions with it.

So how do we draw a line in the sand and preserve the fallible nature of our humanity? 

“Our ability to collect data far exceeds

our ability to make good decisions with it.”

Our Fallible Heroes 

We have many examples of criminals who turned their lives around completely. If we had prevented their crimes before they were committed, they would have ended up completely different people. 

Here are a few examples:

Frank William Abagnale was a world-famous con man by age 21. Now he runs a fraud consulting company. His story was made into the film “Catch Me If You Can,” which was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.
Kweisi Mfume had several stints in jail before becoming a Congressman and serving as president of the NAACP. When Mfume was 16, his mother died from cancer and that caused things “to spin out of control.” He went on to graduate from John Hopkins University, was elected to the Baltimore City Council, and later to Congress, and eventually become president of the NAACP.
Judge Greg Mathis was in a gang and served time before launching his own TV show. When Mathis was a teenager in Detroit, he joined a gang and ended up in jail. At age 17, his mother was diagnosed with colon cancer and Mathis turned his life around. He went on to graduate from law school. His television legal reality show has been on the air since 1999.
Actor Danny Trejo spent 12 years robbing stores, but now he only plays ‘the bad guy’ in movies. Trejo has been in nearly 200 films playing “tough guy” characters, but earlier in his life he spent some time behind bars for drugs and robbery.
Stephen Richards spent nine years in prison for selling marijuana before becoming an author and professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. During his nine-year stint in prison, Richards had a tough wake-up call after witnessing suicides, beatings, and shootings.
Junior Johnson went to jail for smuggling alcohol before becoming a famous NASCAR driver. In the 1940s and ’50s, Johnson learned how to drive fast transporting illegal alcohol in North Carolina. Johnson competed in 313 races, won 50 of them and finished in the top 10 in the rest.

Final Thoughts

The privacy – transparency debate has no end in sight.

Just because we have the ability to gather tons of data on people, or even suspected criminals, doesn’t give us the big picture framework for interpreting it.

Our black and white justice system is ill-equipped to deal with an omni-pervasive monitoring system that could easily find something criminal in the lives of virtually every human being. 

At some point in the freedom vs. protection arguments surrounding this issue, I would suggest any thoughts of ridding us of evil completely are misguided. Our attempts to prevent everything from going wrong will do exactly that, make everything go wrong.

Much like thinking we need to solve every problem, every solution brings with it entirely new problems.

That said, we should always be striving to create a better world. But we can only achieve that by finding a way to “optimize” both good and evil.

In a perfect world, some things just have to be imperfect!

“In a perfect world, some things just have to be imperfect!”

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Have we reached peak employment? 24 future industries that will lead to an era of super employment!

 

It’s easy to spot signs of desperation in people’s eyes. With unemployment rates at persistently high levels and young people unable to find jobs from one year to the next, we have become a society seething with anxiety.

I often get asked if we are headed into an era of 50% unemployment because we’ve automated all of the jobs out of existence. There are two parts to the answer.

Every time we download one of dozens of “level apps” on our smartphone, we eliminate the need to own this tool. Levels have traditionally been a tool made of metal with a small elliptical-shaped glass tube for accurately measuring horizontal balance. But the app is far easier. It eliminates the need to produce the metal and glass components, assemble and package the product, ship components halfway around the world, and retail stores no longer need to carry this line of products.

So yes, we are automating tons of jobs out of existence and we will continue to do so. Every downloadable app has the potential of eliminating small fractional jobs. But cumulatively, this amounts to millions of positions around the world.

The second part of the question, however, is a bit more complicated. “Have we simply run out of work?” And the answer is, of course not! 

In fact, we will never run out of work. But there aren’t always jobs associated with the work that needs to be done. And that’s where we find ourselves today – plenty of work, not enough jobs.

Here are some thoughts on how we can escape the downward employment spiral and 24 future industries that will lead to an era of super employment! 

The Crux of the Problem: “People-less” Wealth Creators

The purpose of business is to create wealth. Similar to how our blood supply is the primary circulatory system for sustaining our life, the flow of money is the primary mechanism for keeping a business alive.

Money that is used to fuel a manufacturing business with 10,000 employees and create $100 million in revenue each year is treated the same as an investment business with no employees to produce a similar $100 million revenue stream each year. 

In fact, “people-less” businesses are far lower risk, making the routing of money to these kinds of entities much more appealing.

We have created systems that place people-intensive businesses on an even playing field with businesses that employ no people, and that’s why so many potential job creators have been sidelined. 

Without the right checks and balances, banks are not able to justify lending money to the riskier catalytic innovators. It’s far easier to make money off of money rather than labor-intensive work.

As a result, many of our best and brightest entrepreneurs have been relegated to small lifestyle business operations with little ability to grow.

The solution? We can either penalize the negative or incentivize the positive. Most governments are quick to use taxes as a disincentive. But another option may be to create a system to multiply investments into job-creating businesses with low interest matching funds, based on the number of people employed. This kind of approach would instantly shift investment dollars towards the labor-building side of the equation.

Catalytic Innovation

Unlike “disruptive innovation” that disrupts an existing industry, “catalytic innovations” have the ability to produce entirely new industries.

Any technology that becomes a catalyzing agent for opening doorways into a world never before seen, falls into this broad new category of catalytic innovation.

Examples of catalytic innovations in the past included: 

Photography
Automobiles
Electricity
Airplanes
Telephones

Each technology went on to form a massive new industry that never existed previously.

Naturally everyone is interested in knowing what innovations are on the verge of creating massive new industries, so I’ll mention a few.

24 Future Industries primed for creating the jobs of the future

Future jobs are being created every hour of every day in the minds of visionary thinkers. But only the true catalytic innovators are creating entire new industries.

Many traditional occupations like accounting, management, and sale will be reworked to fit the context of these new industries. Other more creative positions like wizard of light bulb moments, brand warrior, digital overlord, mobile sensei, code monkey, derma-pigmentation technician, overseer of order, godfather of talent, beervangelist, or number ninja are creative occupational titles designed around the new breed of skills needed to succeed in these businesses.

Here are a number of both emerging and rapid growth industries that will be employing millions of people in the coming years.

1.) Atmospheric Water Harvesting – The earth’s atmosphere is a far more elegant water distribution system than rivers, reservoirs, and underground waterways. Our current ground-based systems involve pipes and pumping stations that are expensive to operate and maintain, and easily contaminated. Since we all depend on the rains to provide the water we need, what if we could extract this rain at the very time and place we need it? On-demand water harvesters are being developed by a new breed of inventors wanting to tackle this exact problem.

2.) Commercial Drone Industry – The U.S. Congress has mandated the FAA develop a plan to incorporate drones into national airspace by Sept. 30, 2015. Many in this new industry are chomping at the bit to get started. According to the Association for Unmanned Vehicles International, once drones get okayed for the national air space, the first 3 years will produce $13.6 billion in economic activity along with 34,000 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. China is moving faster than we are on this one. 

3.) Software Developers – With a programming universe comprised of over 8,000 different languages, dated languages like Fortran, Jovial, and Cobol that lie buried inside corporate IT departments are coming back to haunt their host companies. As an example, the day-to-day operations at the Mellon Bank of New York are based on 112,500 Cobol programs – 343 million lines of code – that run core-banking functions. Mellon Bank is not alone. Thousands of other companies have similar issues. The ticking time bomb behind this problem is that the people familiar with this code are nearing retirement age. For companies that wait until that the institutional knowledge is gone, the costs for converting over may be as much as ten times higher than it would have been beforehand. There is now a massive push to teach coding as a fundamental skill like math, reading, and writing. Developers will be our chief innovators in the future. The push for new talent is driving salaries well into the six-figure range.

4.) Mobile Apps – When Apple introduced their iPhone software developer’s kit on March 6, 2008, no one had a clue about the tectonic plate-shifting nature of this announcement. In just a few short years the number of apps has mushroomed into a force of nature, radically shifting how products are created, and more importantly, how people in the physical world interface with information in the digital world. With over 2 million apps currently available for download on smartphones, next generation apps will be for smart shoes, smart homes, smart guitars, and much more.  

5.) Our Trillion-Sensor Future – 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 recently in Palo Alto. Bryzek is projecting 1 trillion sensors by 2020 and 100 trillion sensors in the mid 2030s along with literally millions of new primary and secondary jobs to manage this emerging sector.

6.) 3D Printing – 3D printing was recently named by Goldman Sachs as one of eight technologies destined to creatively destroy how we do business. Currently making inroads into everything from pharmaceutical drugs, to food, to antibodies and new life forms, to clothing and shoes, it’s projected to reach $3.1 billion worldwide by 2016 and $5.2 billion by 2020. As an industry making inroads in thousands of different businesses simultaneously, former Wired editor Chris Anderson is famously quoted as saying, “3D printing will be bigger than the Internet.”

7.) Cancer Immunotherapy – Immunotherapy will train your immune system to attack cancer cells, giving it an advantage over traditional cancer therapies like chemo, which can kill healthy cells, and “targeted” therapy, against which cancer cells often develop resistance. Tumor response rates are usually in the mid-20% range but can get up to 50% with immunotherapy. The market potential is projected to be $10-15 billion by 2025, with lung cancer being the primary focus.

8.) LEDs – Industrial-scale light emitting diodes (LEDs) enjoy three main advantages over regular light sources: energy savings of up to 85%, a longer lifetime, and being more easily programmable. LED sales will reach $11 billion by 2015, and will see a compound annual growth rate of about 40% over the next five years in the industrial and commercial market. From a lighting perspective its expected to represent 36 percent of lumen-hour sales on the general illumination market by 2020, and 74 percent by 2030

9.) Big Data – Social media, blogs, web browsing, and firms’ security measures are generating enormous quantities of data, and it needs to be stored somewhere. The overall market currently stands at $11 billion, with a projected 32% compound annual growth rate over the next five years. According to McKinsey and Company, “the United States alone will face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data.” 

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

11.) Natural Gas – Compressed and liquefied natural gas is increasingly being used in industrial and commercial fleets. So far penetration remains relatively confined to about 3% of all vehicles. However, by 2020 natural gas engines will comprise 10-15% of total truck sales, for a penetration rate of 20-30% of our over-the-road hauling fleets. And that’s only part of the story. 

12.) Wind Power – Wind energy today still only accounts for a small percentage of global electricity production even though we have seen many more wind farms popping up over the last few years. Wind power currently generates 2.6 percent of the world’s electricity, but according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, that number will grow significantly over the next few decades.

13.) Solar Power – Solar PV was invented nearly 60 years ago and has been growing ever since. As an industry it now employs nearly 120,000 Americans. Driven by both state and national incentives, dropping prices, and a constant stream of new innovations, solar is hot, and it will become even hotter in the future.

14.) 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. Full report here. 

15.) Micro Grid Conversion – Along with massive new power storage systems, the electric utilities world is about to begin the transition from national grids to micro grids. This will open up a huge number of opportunities along the way. First, micro grids will need to be planned, set up, and prove they’re self-sufficient and sustainable. Second, micro grids will begin disconnecting from the national grid. And third, we will begin dismantling the national grid, a multi-decade process creating tens of thousands of jobs along the way.

16.) Hyperspeed Transportation Systems – With its ability to travel upwards of 4,000 mph, ET3 founder Daryl Oster calls it, “space travel on earth,” but it also has the potential to be the world’s largest infrastructure project. Vacuum tube transport is not just a great idea; it’s becoming a moral imperative. Ships and planes are polluting our oceans and skies faster than nature can clean it up. This is a solution that will not only solve all those problems; it will create over 100 million jobs along the way. And, most importantly, it will pay for itself.

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

18.) Driverless Everything – Our dependence on cars has been growing. In 1960, about 41 million workers commuted by private automobile. But by 2009, that number has grown to a whopping 120 million. The average time spent driving each day, roughly one hour, is rarely productive since we’re closely focused on driving and little else. Four companies — Audi, Mercedes, BMW and Volvo — will have automated cars in the market in the next 12 months. Over time this will expand far beyond cars to trucks, buses, taxis, limos, and every conceivable form of delivery vehicle. Driverless cars will be every bit as disruptive as the invention of the automobile itself. 

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

20.) Micro-Colleges – The systems used to create colleges centuries ago seems justifiably primitive by today’s standards. Learning formulas for nearly every degree are based on hours, one of the least important considerations when it comes to assessing talent. Colleges today cost far too much, and they take far too long. Micro-Colleges are any form of concentrated post-secondary education oriented around the minimum entry point into a particular profession. 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 are seeing a massive new opportunity arising for short-term, pre-apprenticeship training.

21.) Smart Homes – The programmable home is still in its early stages but it’s gathering strength, driven by three complementary trends: first and foremost, the smartphone revolution; second, improved standards for low-power, inexpensive and highly reliable wireless communications; and finally, ever-decreasing barriers to invention due to increased automation of manufacturing technologies. These three forces are converging to create a tipping point that will lead to mass penetration of connected devices in homes during the next ten years.

22.) Senior Living – With almost 10,000 Americans turning 65 each day, the number of seniors who need specialized housing will only increase the need for more options and better solutions. A recent study by HUD concluded there are over 1 million seniors currently fall within the guidelines for “worst case housing needs” and increasingly more seniors are falling below the poverty level. Most affordable senior apartments have long waiting lists and new inventory in this category is not being created nearly fast enough to keep pace with demand.

23.) Home Delivery – The same-day delivery space is getting pretty crowded. Amazon, Google, and eBay offer local, same-day deliver services (in limited markets), as do startups like PostMates, Deliv, TaskRabbit and WunWun. As same-day delivery shifts from a premium price to the same price as standard, demand will increase, volume will increase and costs will come down even further. But here’s the twist: Retailers who have retained their national chain of stores and built a web/mobile presence are actually in the box seats. Stores like Sears and Wal-Mart that already have locations within five miles of 95% of the buying public with their brick and mortar stores will have a huge advantage.

24.) 24-Hour Cities – As we continue down the path of automation, virtually every city will have 24-hour convenience stores, 24-hour libraries, 24-hour banks, 24-hour churches, 24-hour schools, 24-hour movie theaters, 24-hour bars and restaurants, and even 24-hour shopping centers. The same machines that will be replacing retail workers will also be creating new jobs for 24-hour business operations.

Final Thoughts

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

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

Tomorrow’s history books will show us that we are immersed in patterns that are meant to be broken, based on cycles waiting to be transformed.

But I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and other future industries. What have I missed and how do we go about unlocking their true potential faster?

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Competing for the World’s Largest Infrastructure Project: Over 100 Million Jobs at Stake

Elon Musk and Daryl Oster, competing for what could become

the world’s largest infrastructure project

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 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. But in addition to these impressive projections, there’s far more at stake than just jobs and superfast transportation. Here’s why. 

Transportation Trends

According to Richard Florida, author of the best seller “Rise of the Creative Class,“ average transportation speed in the U.S. in 1850 was 4 mph. As more cars and trains came into use, by 1900 speeds had doubled to 8 mph. Driven by the Henry Ford car era and an emerging airline industry, by 1950 the pace of travel tripled to 24 mph. With airline travel becoming far more common, by 2000 the average was boosted all the way to 75 mph.

Following this trend line, the logical next iteration of travel will boost averages to 225 mph or more.

So what is the breakthrough in transportation that will move us to a whole new level of speed and efficiency? Many are beginning to think tube transportation is the logical next step.

 

Published in Popular Mechanics in 1957, this image came with the caption, “Honeywell engineer

predicts that by 2000 cars will zip through a network of crash proof pneumatic tubes.”

Early History – The Vactrain

For nearly a century, this form of future travel was being referred to as the “vactrain concept.”

Russian professor Boris Weinberg proposed a “vactrain” concept in 1914 in his book Motion without Friction. He also built an earlier model at Tomsk University in 1909.

The vactrain concept was also being studied in 1910 by American aerospace pioneer, Robert Goddard, who created a detailed prototype with a university student. His train was designed to travel from Boston to New York in 12 minutes, averaging 1,000 mph. The train plans were found only after Goddard’s death in 1945 and shortly thereafter his wife filed for the patents.

Vactrains later made headlines during the 1970s when a leading advocate, Robert M. Salter of RAND, published a series of elaborate engineering articles in 1972 and again in 1978.

Vactrains also appeared in science fiction novels, including Arthur C. Clarke’s Rescue Party (1946), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1950), and Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday (1982).

ET3 vacuum tube transportation concept

Getting ET3 Started

Daryl Oster’s epiphany moment happened back in the 1980s in a mechanical engineering class in college when he was calculating the drag coefficient on various shaped objects in a wind tunnel and made a mistake with air-density. On a lark he dropped the air-density to zero and it suddenly occurred to him how beneficial it would be to travel in a vacuum.

Over the following decades, designing ET3’s vacuum tunnels and maglev tracks became an obsession for Oster, as he oriented his work and research around the massive benefits of frictionless travel, forming the original company in 1997.

In 2012 Oster formed the ET3 Global Alliance to serve as a licensing consortium to create an open opportunity for key companies and individuals around the world to participate. The Alliance allows for easy pooling of technology and intellectual property along with equally simple licensing of the technology.

There are three differentiating features in the ET3 design. First it’s built around a narrow tube diameter to reduce weight and maximize vacuum efficiency. Narrower tubes, only 5’ in diameter, mean less vacuum pumping, lighter pylons and bridge supports for elevated segments and less drilling when going underground or through mountain ranges.

Second, Oster’s capsules are relatively small, designed around the dimensions of a midsize car, 4’3” high and 16’2” long. Small capsule sizes mean lower costs for things like the yttrium barium copper oxide ceramics on board to maintain superconductivity, and less cost for life-support and entertainment systems. Each capsule will have room for up to six seats for passengers or three pallets for cargo. The maximum weight including passengers, baggage, and cargo: 1,212 pounds. Minimal sized capsules means less stresses and lower costs throughout the entire system, translating into massive cost savings, operating at one-tenth that of high speed rail or a quarter of the cost of cars on a freeway.

The third differentiator is the use of high-temperature superconducting maglev, which ET3 licensee Yaoping Zhang pioneered at China’s Southwest Jiaotong University. The technology uses liquid nitrogen rather than liquid helium as a coolant, which lets the system run somewhere between 63 and 77 Kelvin – minus-321 to minus-346 Fahrenheit – the zone in which nitrogen neither boils nor freezes solid. Traditional maglev runs on helium which is much more expensive. The capsules will have the superconductor material onboard.

Two of the Hyperloop drawing released by Elon Musk

Hyperloop’s Background

Elon Musk first mentioned that he was thinking about a concept for a “fifth mode of transport”, calling it the Hyperloop, in July 2012 at a PandoDaily event in Santa Monica, California. He described several characteristics of what he wanted in a hypothetical high-speed transportation system: immunity to weather, cars that never experience crashes, an average speed twice that of a typical jet aircraft, low power requirements, and the ability to store energy for 24-hours of operation. He estimated at the time that the cost of the Castro Valley-Sylmar Hyperloop would be about US$6 billion.

Musk has likened the hyperloop to a “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table,” while noting that it has no need for rails. He also noted it could work either above or below ground.

From late-2012 until August 2013, an informal group of engineers at both Tesla and SpaceX worked on the conceptual foundation and modeling of Hyperloop, allocating some full-time effort to it toward the end.

The tubes would maintain a vacuum-pressure equivalent to an altitude of 150,000 feet. This is very thin air, but still 1,000 times denser than ET3’s proposed vacuum, and therefore easier to manage leakage and entry and exit of capsules through airlocks. But even that tiny amount of air is enough to dramatically increase demands on the capsules, which include a vacuum engine powered by a 436-hoursepower motor.

A high-level alpha design for the system was published on August 12, 2013, in a whitepaper posted to the Tesla and SpaceX blogs. Musk also invited feedback as an open source design project to “see if people could find ways to improve it.”

The following day he announced a plan to construct a demonstration of the concept.

The Meeting Between Oster and Musk

On Sept 18, 2013, Daryl Oster and his team from ET3 met with Elon Musk and his engineers at the Space X headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

After a brief tour of Musk’s rocket facility the two got into a detailed discussion of evacuated-tube transport systems, a topic both feel is worth fighting for. Through their discussions, ideas began to converge, and Oster told Musk he was working on securing a site for a three-mile, $30 million ET3 prototype and hopes to break ground before the end of 2013.

Musk wished him luck and offered one piece of advice: “Just build the three miles. And you’d better be careful — don’t hurt anyone.”

He also indicated he may be interested in investing in ET3, but he didn’t want to be the lead investor. 

Proposed global trunk line for ET3

The World’s Largest Infrastructure Project

Assuming the pilot project goes well and no one gets hurt along the way, it’s easy to envision a mad scramble between countries vying to be next. Once a technology sets a new standard, no one wants to get left out.

Like any radically new technology, it starts with a level playing field.

The pilot project will lead to the first city-to-city project, and once successful, a rush-to-be-next will ensue. A global consortium will be assembled to map out plans for international trunk lines, and individual countries will begin thinking through feeder line strategies to connect to the cross-continent central system.

Within a few years the vision will morph into a tangible reality, and like road-builders in the past, schools and training systems will crop up around the world, and construction will begin.

Even before the main trunk lines are complete, an entire network of feeder lines will begin to crop up both for bragging rights and to help countries gain a better grasp on this new form of transportation.

It’s important to understand that even with the most optimistic scenarios, it will still take decades for the complete build out. 

All told, this new transportation system will cost well over $1 trillion to construct, creating over 100 million jobs over the next 50 years.

Vacuum tubes proposed to route traffic around the world

The Value of a Super Connected Society

Besides cutting pollution and dramatically lowering our carbon footprint, faster and cheaper transportation will lead to a far more connected world. The number of people crossing country boarders each year will grow from millions to billions, and conducting business on seven continents simultaneously will become as routine as our cross-cultural thinking.

A super-connected society is also a dependent society. More than ever people will learn to need and respect each other. That’s not to say there won’t be outliers who want to destroy much of what is being built, but the majority of people will shift their thinking from micro-neighborhoods to macro-neighborhood.

At the same time, unique talent will become more discoverable. Artisans and craftsmen will all be able to carve out their own niche. Serendipity will grow exceedingly long arms and once-in-a-lifetime meetings and events will begin happening with far greater frequency.

Along with increasing levels of both physical and digital awareness, the IQ of the entire planet will climb significantly.

Final Thoughts

Back in 1972, RAND’s Robert Salter wrote, “We no longer can afford to continue to pollute our skies with heat, chemicals and noise, nor to carve up our wilderness areas and arable land for new surface routes. Nor can we continue our extravagant waste of limited fossil fuels.”

Today, the U.S. population is 50% larger; U.S. airline passenger miles have leapt by a factor of 20; we drive, collectively, 250% more miles in more than twice as many vehicles; and our atmosphere is laden with 21% more carbon dioxide.

Vacuum tube transport is not just a great idea; it’s becoming a moral imperative. Ships and planes are polluting our oceans and skies faster than nature can clean it up. This is a solution that will not only solve all those problems; it will create over 100 million jobs along the way. And, most importantly, it will pay for itself. 

If it were on this year’s ballot, I would vote yes.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Introducing Synaptical Currency Theory – Assigning Value to Brain Capital

 

What has been the hardest problem you’ve had to solve in your life? As I step you through this question, just focus on the ones where you actually found a solution. 

For some of you, this may have included things like finding a job, finding a cure for a disease or medical problem, or dealing with major family issues.

When you had to solve the problem, how much time, energy, and brainpower did you commit to coming up with an answer?

Now consider how different your life would have been if it only required half as much effort – half as much stress, anxiety, and mental turmoil.

In his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell focused on two key variables as to why people have become successful – effort and opportunity. The effort part coincides with what he calls the “10,000-Hour Rule” where true experts expend at least 10,000 hours studying and learning their craft, and that alone is not enough unless they also fall into the right opportunity. 

Taking the “10,000-Hour Rule” a few steps further, how many synapse firings inside the brain have to occur to achieve the equivalent of this 10,000-hour mastery?

Assuming there is a physical limit to the number of times a synapse triggered signal can pass through the human brain in one day, the way we expend our “synaptical currency” becomes a crucial element in our personal success formula. 

So how do we go about assigning monetary value to the finite resource I’m calling “synaptical currency” that will eventually determine our value in society? 

How much is Brain Power Worth?

When it comes to finite resources, brainpower is an obvious one. Every one of us runs into natural barriers in our ability to consume and process information.

If we were able to place some sort of synapse monitor next to our heads that actually counted the number of signals passing through our neurotransmitters on a daily basis, a number that I’m sure varies widely from person to person; we would begin to see quantifiable limits on our individual capabilities. 

It’s easy to speculate that those with higher limits are the brightest, but that’s probably not the case. What’s more important though is that there are limits, and how we expend any of our finite resources becomes a critical component to personal achievement. 

“The Writer” by Pierre Jaquet-Droz

The Story of Pierre Jaquet-Droz

An eighteenth century watchmaker, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, considered by many to be the Albert Einstein of his age, became best known for the ultra sophisticated animated dolls, or automata, he designed using thousands of miniature gears and levers to guide their movements.

In this video, the BBC demonstrates one of his best-known automata, “The Writer.” Constructed between 1768 and 1774, Jaquet-Droz and his assistants used over 6,000 intricately crafted pieces to create a boyish looking doll, quill in hand, sitting a writing table. Simply wind the main spring and the boy comes alive.

With elaborate eye and hand movements, the boy carefully writes characters onto paper until his message is complete. 

To make this even more impressive, Jaquet-Droz added a programmable wheel on The Writer’s backside so users could actually change the message the boy is writing. This is a form of programming that even predates Charles Babbage by several decades.

An amazing fete of human engineering, and it happened 240 years ago.

His intention was never to sell his automata, but rather to use them to lure in more customers for his watches. His marketing genius was only exceeded by his engineering prowess.

In today’s world, using computers and 3D printers, Jaquet-Droz would have been able to build a similar device in a fraction of the time. In other words, the amount of synaptical currency he spent would have been far less. 

But for him, this was his greatest personal accomplishment.

Personal Accomplishments

What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment in life?

This question is similar to the previous one I asked about the hardest problem you’ve had to solve because it forces you to become introspective, viewing yourself from the inside out. 

Most people have great difficulty with this question because what we’ve personally accomplished seems rather minor to what most would consider worthy of being called the “greatest.” 

However, if you reframe the question around what you’d like to accomplish, and compare it to what you have already accomplished, you begin to see the gap between the two.

In the past, most people’s greatest accomplishment was simply survival. The vast majority of their day was spent on finding food, water, shelter, and staying one step ahead of predators, extreme weather, or whatever it was that could kill them.

In that era, very little time was dedicated to what we would term a significant accomplishment in today’s world.

As society progressed and became more systematized, far less time was being dedicated to survival, allowing more energy to be directed towards more esoteric endeavors like what we want to accomplish.

How do speed up our neural signal transmissions?

Twice as Much in Half the Time 

Do all of our synaptical expenditures have value? Perhaps internally to ourselves, but not externally. 

We spend our synaptical currency both when we learn and when we work. We also spend it on fun and entertainment, every time we make a decision, and even while we are sleeping.

Most of us hold little regard for how we often squander this limited resource until it comes to work. The synaptical currency that we sell to others, in the form of work, typically has to come with a paycheck commensurate to the value of our work.

As we add unique and different forms of automation to our lives, the amount of synaptical currency we dedicate to accomplishing individual tasks begins to decline, and our output becomes less brain intensive.

According to neuroscientist Astra Bryant, a rough number for neural signal transmissions in the average brain ranges from 86 billion to 17.2 trillion actions per second.

With the automation of work, the expenditure of synaptical currency per accomplishment will decline, but so should our expenditures for learning. If we can accomplish twice as much in half the time, we should also be capable of learning at a comparably quicker pace.

Final Thoughts

Certainly I don’t claim to be a brain expert even though I’ve been using mine for well over 10,000 hours. I’m not even an expert on using my own brain since there are countless ways I could be using it more efficiently.

If we take Gladwell’s 10,000-Hour Rule and subdivide it into synaptical transmissions, we will end up with a very large number. But even though it’s a massively large number, it’s not infinite.

Similarly if we assign a dollar value to our synaptical currency, yes it would seem infinitesimally tiny in comparison to the number of neurotransmissions needed to equal a single dollar. But again, it’s not zero.

Over the coming decades we will be creating a world that works with exponentially greater precision than how we operate today. Accomplishments that can be completed through a fraction of today’s synaptical expenditure will give rise to far greater accomplishments in the future.

So will “synaptical currency” eventually be used to determine our value in society? Yes, I think it will.

Admittedly, my theory of synaptical currency is far from complete and I’d love to hear your thoughts on better ways to frame it. Or if you think I’m off in left field, please let me know that as well.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Libraries That Create Their Own Economy: Opening the Door to Premium Services

Yesterday my wife Deb and I took a tour of the amazing Queensland Library in Brisbane, Australia and were thoroughly impressed with both the size and scope of their facility.

With an aggressive plan to archive the history of Queensland, the library has preserved literally millions of artifacts including documents, maps, music, ephemera, photos, recordings, and videos. They’ve even begun work on a language archive to preserve many of the dying aboriginal tongues.

Majestically positioned along the Brisbane River in the heart of the city’s cultural district, the library offers a full restaurant serving wine, beer, and hard cider; an event center and auditorium spaces for rent; their own boat dock along the riverfront; coworking spaces; cultural exhibits; and their own library shop to purchase books, games, and souvenirs.

Over the past few weeks I’ve followed a number of discussions among librarians, many lamenting the state of their profession. Our once highly credentialed specialists are being replaced with techies and unpaid interns, creating a rather frustrated librarian community.

Ironically though, libraries are firmly positioned at the intersection of information, education, and business, the same intersection where new billion dollar startups are being launched on a regular basis. While libraries have been stubbornly resistant to charging for basic services, as they should, the encroaching do-more-with-less climate is leaving few options for traditionalist thinking.

Library services are never free. It’s only a matter of who pays. Taxpayer funding streams will grow increasingly competitive over time. Since libraries have little control over public subsidies, it may be the right time to consider generating some of their own. For this reason I’d like to open a discussion on the topic of premium services.

 

Queensland Library, Brisbane, Australia

The Changing Nature of Libraries

People go to libraries for information. In the past it was all about stationary, physical forms of information. Today, information has taken on many new forms, making it simultaneously digital and physical as well as fluid and stationary.

Proximity still matters, but not in the same way.

When we seek answers, the time and distance involved in getting the answers weighs heavily on our decision to pursue them. So does the sorting, screening, cross-correlation, discernment, discrimination, pattern-matching, and form-translation processes we must go through to unlock the hidden gems that mesh with what we’re after.

Information is never instantaneous, self-evident, or in any respect, free.

If synapses were money, we’d be spending a boatload to find the truly remarkable stuff.

Libraries have evolved to reduce our expenditure of physical currencies as well as the synaptical kind. With resources at every turn and search experts an arms length away, the “finding” process gets as short as its ever going to get. Well, at least until the next information evolution. Or until we can pay physical money to replace our “synaptical expenditures.”

Premium Services

If you walked into a library and could greatly speed up the “finding process,” what services would you be willing to pay for?

Here are a few option for what may be possible in a world of premium services:

Professional Search – Virtually every library subscribes to a variety of databases that the average visitor has little understanding of. Beyond the obvious areas of digital search lie non-digitized books, manuscripts, photos, videos, and other documents. Comprehensive search coupled with detailed reporting is perhaps the most obvious premium service to offer. 
Build-Your-Own-Website Coaching Service – For those who have never done it, creating even a simple presence online seems like voodoo magic. 
Create-a-Video Coaching Service – Recording video clips has become as simple as pushing a button. But cropping, editing, adding music, and adding text remains outside the scope of most amateurs. 
Create-a-Podcast Coaching Service – Audio-capture, audio-editing, and audio archiving made simple.
Launch Your Own Business Toolkit – Starting a new business requires everything from filling out forms, filing documents, to registering with certain government agencies. Virtually every form of government has its own set of requirements and a little hand-holding on the front end can save a ton of time on the back end. 
Photo and Image Enhancement – Old and torn photos repaired, black and white images colorized, archiving paper photos converted into digital form, building genealogical collections, and more.
3D Printer Services – Where to look for existing 3D printable objects, how to modify, customize, enhance, and what materials to use when printing.
Legacy Building Services – In a digital world, your legacy can live on long after you die. In fact, it’s never too early to begin managing your legacy and there are a variety of tools that will make it easy for you to get started. This could also include a basic will-writing service.

These are but a few of the possible premium services that a library could offer. I’m sure I’ve missed many, so please feel free to jot down additional ideas in the comment section below.

Queensland Library, Brisbane, Australia

Final Thoughts

Yes, some libraries already charge for premium services, some private and some public, but it’s rare and not the norm.

Libraries will continue to evolve as the form and nature of information goes through its many phases. Future forms of information may take on characteristics totally foreign to anything in existence today.

However, for professional librarians to continue to exist in the future, it’s important to consider the creation of new economies to fuel growth. Adding premium services, known affectionately as freemium services in the online world, would seem to be the natural evolution of both the librarian profession as well as libraries, the institution.

These are human-based systems, designed by-people-for-people, and always subject to change.

What will libraries look like 1,000 years from now? It’s hard to imagine. But rest assured, they will be different.

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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The Future Favors the Bold – 8 Backcasting Scenarios for Understanding the Future

 

Did you hear about the spy who was caught stealing huge amounts of data by hiding it in the DNA of his skin? Officials couldn’t find any trace of the information on him so they eventually had to let him go.

If you haven’t heard of that story, it’s because it hasn’t happened…. yet. The technology is still a few years away from being viable, at least at a price anyone could afford. As an emerging technology, DNA storage, with it’s ability to store over 2 petabytes of information on a gram of DNA, may not be practical for another decade or so.

However, knowing that it’s not only possible, but also likely, even with this brief mention of it, changes our understanding of the future.

Ideas are like pixels floating in space. With only a few, they look like random dots on a thousand mile canvas. But with the right lens these ideas can form recognizable patterns, turning random dots into clear visions of what’s coming next.

The clarity with which we see into the future is directly related to the number of idea fragments we manage to piece together.

Once our ideas reach critical mass, that’s when the fun really begins. Idea pixels, properly arranged, create a working model of the world to come, along with a roadmap for both business and personal strategies. 

But here’s the most amazing part. Those with the clearest vision of the future will naturally rise to the top, becoming critical influencers, industry leaders, and voices of authority.

The future favors the bold! Are you sufficiently well-informed to act boldly?

If not, here are a series of backcasting scenarios specifically designed to help you start connecting the dots and add to your own understanding of what the future holds. 

Backcasting Scenarios

Backcasting is an often used forecasting technique that starts with defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify technologies, policies, and operational plans needed to build a path between the present and the future.

With backcasting, a successful outcome is imagined and the question is asked: “what do we need to do today to reach that vision of the future?”

Backcasting from scenarios is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle through which a shared picture of the future is created, and pieces are put together to get there. 

Here are a series of eight rather diverse examples of backcasting scenarios along with a series of lead-in questions to help stimulate a discussion.

Scenario #1: Newspaper headline reads: “First hurricane ever controlled by humans”

Mankind has been employing various techniques for controlling the weather ever since we first set foot on the earth. Every time we wear clothing, build houses, or put a roof over our heads, we do it to control the weather on a micro-scale.

However, controlling the weather on a macro-scale, such as the weather over a city or an entire country, is still a ways off. 

A number of people have already filed patents on technologies they claim will mitigate the impact and damage associated with hurricanes, including one with Bill Gates name on it.

Questions:

How long before we have the ability to control an entire hurricane?
What are the likely technologies needed to make this happen?
What methods would we use to test and validate the effectiveness of the system or technology being used?

Scenario #2: Newspaper headline reads: “Doctor visits declined 20% over the past year.”

Every industry has its own set of gatekeepers and the medical profession is no exception. At the same time, disruptive entrepreneurs are working overtime to circumvent the status quo.

Many startups are focusing on the concept of “our empowered self” – self-diagnostics, self-monitoring, self-treatment, and more generally, self-aware healthcare.

Questions:

With humans living longer, and enjoying a more sedentary lifestyle, is it realistic to think our relationship with healthcare professionals will decline?
What are the technologies most likely to make this happen?
Will the current healthcare debate in the U.S. congress be rendered moot with future technologies?
How long before we actually see this headline? 

Scenario #3: Newspaper headline reads: “Wireless power used to light up invisible light bulbs in the middle of a room”

Binary power is a term used to describe two otherwise harmless beams of energy intersecting at some point in space, creating a source of power. Think in terms of two invisible beams intersecting in a room and the point at which they intersect is a glowing point of light.

This technology could also be used to beam energy to moving vehicles – cars on the road, planes in the air, and flying drones everywhere. Keep in mind the first demonstrations of wireless power happened well over 100 years ago.

Questions:

Will having users link to wireless power networks in the future be similar to linking to Wi-Fi networks today?
Can we make wireless power safe and easy to use, so it’s not harmful to birds, animals, and insects?
How long before we can eliminate the power lines into houses altogether?

Scenario #4: Newspaper headline reads: “New gravity-controlling technology demonstrated, reduces gravity by as much as 50%”

Newton’s laws of gravity provide us with a description of how the forces of gravity affect us, but not what gravity is. Even today, gravity remains a mysterious force, whose nature and attributes have confounded researchers for centuries.

Anti-gravity has been an ongoing theme among science fiction writers ever since H.G. Wells talked about the gravity blocking substance “Cavorite” in his book The First Men in the Moon, but even as researchers have made some inroads, the field of gravity remains poorly understood.

Questions:

If someone actually invents a gravity-reducing technology, what is the best way to demonstrate it?
What are some of the ways a gravity reducing technology will be used in business and industry? Also, what are the potential abuses?
How long before we see headlines like this?

Scenario #5: Newspaper headline reads: “10,000 tiny flying swarmbots perform flawlessly together”

Groups of flying drones that move like a flock of birds, school of fish, or swarm of bees have become known as swarmbots. They have become the subject of much fantasy and speculation.

“Flying swarmbots will someday serve as our clothing, flying into ‘clothing formation’ on command, reconfiguring themselves according to our fashion moods, changing color on a whim. Once we step out of the shower in the morning, the swarmbots will dry our skin, fix our hair, and take their place as part of our ever-changing wardrobe.”

Questions:

Is swarmbots clothing a realistic scenario?
What are some of the likely ways this type of technology will be abused?
How long before average people own their own swarmbots?

Scenario #6: Newspaper headline reads: “Mary Williams (generic name) is the first person to live past the age of 200.”

Life expectancy is getting longer, but the usefulness of the human body has traditionally maxed out somewhere around 120. If we manage to break through the 120-barrier, can we also maintain a good quality of life past that age?

Many researchers believe so and are working on exactly those issues.

Questions:

Is it possible to alter the body chemistry and cure age-related illnesses so we can begin experiencing radical life extensions?
Is it conceivable to eliminate death completely?
How long before we hear about people living past the age of 200?

Scenario #7: Newspaper headline reads: “World’s first 3D printed housing subdivision breaks ground on Monday.”

Using 3D printers to print small objects is easy, but printing something as big as a house will force people to rethink the entire housing industry.

Currently there is a race afoot to see who can 3D print the first house. After the first house, we will see the first bridge, the first commercial building, and perhaps even an effort to print the world’s tallest building.

NOTE: The term being used for 3D printing a building is “contour crafting.”

Questions:

How long before an entire house can be “printed” within a single day?
Will it also be possible to print the windows, cabinets, sinks, toilets, and other fixtures?
When will we be able to grind up an existing house, reuse the material, and reprint it in the same location?

Scenario #8: Newspaper headline reads: “First highway in the U.S. to be designated as driverless-cars only”

Driverless technology will be implemented in the auto industry in baby steps, first with driverless features and later with totally hands-off navigation systems. Over time the number of driverless vehicles will grow, primarily driven by the aging baby boom generation not wanting to lose their freedom.

As the number of driverless vehicles increases, the difficulties of managing half-driver, half-driverless traffic systems will eventually give way to driverless-only highways where cars can drive closer together at much faster speeds.

How long before we see our first driverless-only highway?
What effect will driverless cars have on driver jobs – bus drivers, limo drivers, taxi drivers, etc.?
How will this affect car ownership, traffic accidents, traffic courts, and parking lots?
What effect will driverless cars have on the auto insurance industry?
Who are the winners and losers in this scenario?

Final Thoughts

Humans use a fascinating set of metrics for making decisions, and one of the key metrics is our vision of the future. 

Similar in some respects to a movie projector flashing images of the future on the back side of our brains, our process for making decisions today involves a quick scan of our perceived future to unconsciously insure we’re making a good decision.

Human biology employs any number of internal checks and balances, and this happens to be one of them.

People make decisions today based on their understanding of what the future holds. In fact, our vision of the future permeates virtually every decision we make in our lives. So if we change our vision of the future, we actually change the way we make decisions, today.

At the DaVinci Institute we have a consulting arm called The Vizionarium designed specifically to help companies discover their future.

The methods we use are not about generating lightning bolts ideas from thin air. Rather, it’s a very well conceived process that people enjoy and are quick to embrace. Catalytic innovation occurs when different types of people, ideas, perspectives, and insights collide and mix in new and interesting ways, and that’s exactly what happens inside The Vizionarium. 

Once started, it can be used repeatedly over time and will even become part of a company’s DNA.

No, this is not the same DNA that I talked about in the opening paragraph to store information, but rather the internal culture so important in today’s world.

But, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Is backcasting something you’ve used in the past? Were any of these examples helpful? Let us know if you’d like to discuss this further.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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