In September 1989, GE Chairman Jack Welch flew to Bangalore, India for a breakfast meeting with an Indian delegation that included Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. The purpose of his trip was to sell airplane engines and medical equipment to India, but the meeting took an interesting twist along the way. 

Rather than buying what GE has to sell, the Prime Minister Gandhi proposed that GE buy software from India. After looking at the amazingly low labor costs, Welch decided instead to outsource portions of its business starting with Bangalore’s first call center. This short meeting led to an outsourcing revolution that would dramatically transform both the Indian and U.S. economies. 

We are now on the verge of another business transformation, but this time workers are not being replaced by low cost labor in other countries. Rather, they are being replaced by machines. 

Science fiction writers have led us to believe that humanoid robots, with all the nuanced skills and talents of humans would be walking among us today. But rather than some Stepford Wife-like creation appearing at our door and telling us they were taking our jobs, the true job-stealing culprits have been far more subtle, appearing under the guise of automation, without any clear relationship between the machines and the people they’re replacing.

Hidden inside this menacing movement to display labor is a far more complicated shifting of social order. What appears on the outside to be little more than executives with blinders chasing higher profits may instead be mankind’s biggest opportunity. 

Over the past few weeks I’ve been sketching out ideas on how to think about redirecting the energies of mankind. Here are some thoughts on how this may unfold.

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The first time I rode on a Segway, I was confused. Even though I loved the experience, I couldn’t quite figure out how it would fit into my life. It wasn’t going to replace my car and it certainly wasn’t a substitute for my bicycle, so what exactly was it? 

When it came down to pulling out my checkbook, I was left in a quandary, “How could I possibly justify spending money on it?”

I soon found out that I was not alone. Talking to local city officials I was told that virtually no one had a policy for alternative vehicles, such as electric scooters, hybrid skateboards, fuel-cell motorcycles, Segways, and Segway knockoffs. They opted to let the police department decide. When I asked the police department about it, their comment was that if it wasn’t a car or a bicycle, “we just ban everything else.”

From a public safety standpoint, “banning everything else” was an easy way of managing what has become an increasingly complex marketplace for alternative transportation. At the same time, the easiest approach is rarely the best one. 

Today, literally thousands of alternative transportation vehicles are coming out of the woodwork and they nearly all have the same problem – no place to drive them. Most are banned from biking and hiking trails, and they are neither licensed, nor licensable, for use on the streets. 

For these reasons, I’d like to discuss some new possible solutions and why Colorado is poised to take the lead in the alternative transportation marketplace.

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As a futurist I spend much of my time tracking failure. Why failure? Because they are the unforgiving anchors around which society changes directions.

In the U.S. we are now witnessing a record number of failures taking place. Just look around. Failed businesses, failed systems, failed jobs, and failed marriages.

Some failures are easily predicted, where a known problem looms larger and larger until a solution is found. Most, however, are not so easy. In many respects, failures are nature’s own system for checks and balances.

Failures attract attention. Much like a car accident causing a gawker’s block along the highway, failure attracts onlookers, some with offers to help, others moving quickly to avoid being painted with the same failure brush.

So what causes failure? Turns out that failure is just one relentless driver being perpetuated by a series of other relentless drivers. As we lift up the hood on this eight cylinder engine, here is what’s really going on.

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Hearing aids are for old people. At least that’s what I thought when I was young and invincible attending rock concerts far louder than they should have been.

Even though I still have most of my hearing relatively intact, I’m also part of the aging baby boom generation whose sheer size is already beginning to tax the limits of today’s healthcare systems.

People over the age of 65 typically spend 3-5 times more on healthcare than those who are younger, so unless we figure out ways to radically disrupt this trend, we may all be dealing with some rather dire affordability issues. 

As a tiny pebble being dropped into the massive pond of healthcare costs, one of the first truly disruptive technologies for the hearing aid industry may be Google Glass with its conductive-bone audio transmission capabilities. 

Three features that give it such disruptive potential are the elimination of an earpiece, the processing capabilities of its onboard microprocessor, and an open API that allows the geeks of the world to develop apps far more ingenious than anything in existence.

Here are a few thoughts on why this tiny sub-category of Google Glass will likely have such a massive impact.

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Fifteen years ago in an article I wrote for The Futurist Magazine, I made the prediction that once we had talking computers, we would soon have downloadable personalities to create a more human-like experience. I went on to suggest that most of us would actually download multiple personalities so we could interact with the right persona at any given moment.

Machine-like voices tend to grate on us after while, and the notion that the heartless pile of equipment we currently spend our days with could somehow be magically transformed into a warm and engaging human-like organism is rather alluring. Many of us would like to see that happen.

However, an interactive voice is only a small part of the “personality” equation. 

As we’ve seen from some of the early entrants in this space, most notable the smartphone duo of Siri and Robin, current technology leaves much to be desired. A few inquiries into a test run and you’ll find that most responses totally miss-the-mark.

Most GPS systems allow users to change the voice of their commands. But like Siri and Robin, these are one-dimensional voice-only manifestations of a personality, lacking the emotional queues, non-verbal expressions, and the intellectual prowess to answer anything more than a common factoid. 

Human-like personalities are hard to define, and since we don’t have any good examples of them, no one has any sense as to the needs or desires of a personality marketplace. 

For this reason I’d like to take you on a journey into the unchartered territory of downloadable personalities. 

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In the late 1980s, I was an engineer working as part of an IBM team to build a mobile satellite command and control center for monitoring missile launches from space. This contract was part of Regan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system.

Whenever a missile is launched, the heat plume coming out of the back of the rocket produces a distinct heat signature instantly detectable by satellites with infrared sensors.

The technology we were using over 25 years ago could instantly distinguish between types of rockets, calculate trajectory, and give information on time of impact.

Since those early years of working with infrared sensors I’ve often wondered if it would be possible to monitor people from space by tracking their personal heat signatures.

Two overarching trends that get little attention today are those of rapidly increasing precision and awareness. As both travel up the exponential growth curves of the emerging big data industry, what inevitably becomes possible is an ability to distinguish a person’s identity from a distance, even space.

On the surface this may be a frightening prospect. Having someone know where I am at any moment of the day, does indeed make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

But at the same time, there is an undeniable convenience factor. If a person is suffering a heart attack or stroke, being kidnapped, or otherwise in a condition of extreme stress, a monitoring system that can shave minutes off emergency response times can mean the difference between life and death.

As with many of today’s emerging technologies we have to sort the good from the bad. Here are a few thoughts on what may happen in the future. 

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“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it” – Albert Einstein

As a futurist, I’ve always been interested in our relationship with the future. But lately I’ve become obsessed with understanding more about the dividing line between the present and the future.

I constantly find myself asking questions like, “when does the future end and the present begin?” and “how does the future become ‘now’ and where does it go from here?”

When thinking about this topic it’s easy to slip in thoughts about premonitions, ESP, and similar unexplained phenomena. But that’s not what this is about. Instead, I’m searching for a hard-science approach to the unveiling of the present.

Over the past year I’ve been developing a theory about what I call the “Field of Knowability.” Parts of this were described in a column I wrote on the “12 Laws of the Future.”

My theory begins with the assumption that there is a small gap in time between when the future is formed, and when we know about it. The point when we become “aware of the present” is what I refer to as the field of knowability.

This means that the “present” would exist for a tiny period of time, perhaps just a fraction of a second, before we ultimately experience it. Think of it as a staging area for what occurs next.

Here’s why I think this is important. 

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A couple years ago I was on a weekend outing in Vail, Colorado and ended up attending a kayaking tournament taking place on the Gore Creek in the heart of town.

Fascinated by this sport, which I knew very little about, I had a chance to talk with some of the participants and found out that several were attending a special kayaking high school.

As it turns out, this was a private traveling high school for students who wanted to earn their education while exploring unique rivers and cultures around the world. At the heart of their education was the sport of kayaking.

There are no doubt tons of other niche schools that I’m currently unaware of, but this one was a refreshing example of how today’s mass market education system is a colossal mismatch for the hyper-individualized social structures being developed in the online world.

Over the coming years we will be seeing a mass disassembling of traditional schools, with pieces reassembling around a new system architecture.

Some of the missing elements are testing centers, micro-credits, and credit banks. Here is a brief overview of how and why this transition is about to occur.

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A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up at the corners of the room to give them the contextual dimensions of the space they’re in. 

He went on to explain that since domes have no corners, that from the inside they appear larger than what they really are, and from the outside, they appear smaller than the space of another house with a comparable footprint. 

This notion of context has followed me throughout my life, into virtually every topic I’ve come to wrestle with. Once I can find the “corners of the room,” I can begin to make sense out of whatever subject I’m dealing with.

However, when we dive into the “why” topics of how time and space began, and even the size of the universe, I find myself struggling to even formulate good questions.

Perhaps this is nothing more than a form of therapy for me, but I’d like to take you along on a rare inner personal journey into how I think about the biggest of all big picture issues. And it all starts with one simple question. “Why are there exceptions to every rule?” 

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Like many others, I’m a fan of TED Talks and a Feb 2013 talk by Stuart Brand titled “The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?” has caught much of the world off guard.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this topic, biotech is currently accelerating four times faster than digital technology, and the revival of extinct species is not only becoming possible, but is imminent. Stewart Brand plans to bring many extinct species back and restore them to the wild with his Revive and Restore Foundation.

Brand is well aware of the moral and ethical controversies surrounding this topic – the can-we-should-we debate – but the issues go far beyond the ethics of de-extinction. What he is proposing is an “unleashing” of human reengineered species that only closely approximate those who have become extinct.

So how long will it be before we see a revived version of the passenger pigeon (extinct in 1914), the Tasmanian tiger (extinct in 1936), and the woolly mammoth (extinct over 3,000 years ago) roaming the earth again? 

It will probably come as a surprise to most to learn that the first revival of an extinct species has already occurred. It happened in 2003 when scientists cloned a bucardo, an Iberian wild goat, that had gone extinct three years earlier, by inserting its DNA (which they got from frozen bucardo skin) into the eggs of an existing goat. The cloned bucardo was born, but then died just ten minutes later.

To put this into perspective, the Wright Brother’s first flight only lasted 12 seconds. 

Perhaps the most controversial comment made by Brand during his talk was, “the results won’t be perfect but nature isn’t perfect, either.”

So we will only be creating close proximities to existing species, effectively new forms of life. Here are a few thoughts on what comes next.

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