Even a little ding can cause the dominoes to fall

Ever have one of those days?

Run a day late on a credit card payment, you’re dinged a $39 late fee.

Miss a traffic sign on our way across town – right in front of a cop – and get dinged another $150.

There are ways to compound your grief, too. Park under the red no parking sign for that lesson. Let’s not even go to a conversation about the IRS.

Is it me, or does it seem like we’re rowing with the slaves on a ship of some Egyptian taskmaster. We are constantly being whipped. Lash! Penalty for early withdrawal. Lash! Fine for driving while dialing a cellphone. Lash! Ding for this. Lash! Ding for that. Physical abuse may no longer seem to be part of the equation, but I clutched my heart the last time I received a letter from the IRS.

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“The economy’s greatest hope may be in its aspiring entrepreneurs”

Traditionally it could be predicted that for every 100 people who join the ranks of the jobless, seven will attempt to start a business. Some find business niches, others invent and still others find a better way to do something markets are craving. Ingenuity and daring often are the catalyst for setting business and commerce in motion. Though nothing overcomes inertia like the lure of cash.

The slow trickle of business starts is about to swell into a tsunami. Legions of former auto workers, mortgage processors, school teachers and others will be forced to do something unusual and that’s hire themselves.

Overnight, an undetermined number, but assuredly greater than 7 percent, are about to become entrepreneurs and perhaps herald a new era of great wealth building. The problem: This is a nation ill-prepared to serve these burgeoning numbers.

With a dearth of funding options available to startup entrepreneurs, many of the startup ideas won’t make it past the cocktail napkin stage.

Don’t hit the panic button just yet, though. A host of new trends are coming that offer aspiring entrepreneurs new opportunities.

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No person should ever die… EVER!

Is that our goal? Is that the direction we are headed in?
 
Futurist and author Ray Kurzweil is convinced an end to disease and possibly death by trauma may be here in a matter of decades. He’s taking vitamins like they are candy on a personal quest for the ultimate prize, immortality.

Kurzweil and others have been talking about the possibilities of vastly extended life spans for more than a few years now. The questions that come with these considerations are jarring. And, these questions deserve a thorough look to be sure, because radical, species-altering change is what is on the table. We should consider this prospect very carefully in the largest possible context.
 
We should ask the first question. Is the goal of the medical community to improve health, or to completely eradicate health problems? In Star Trek speak: What we are talking about is a prime directive.
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Life is a game. Every day we find ourselves in the middle of the game, involving the work we do, the people we hang out with, and the social structures that surround us.

But who exactly created this game? Each day we live our lives as animated playing pieces, playing by rules that others created. Conformity is a constant force, imposing a lifestyle that most of us were born into, saddled with goals that often go cross-grain with our personal strengths. All of this, however, is about to change.

In the future, the very near future, nothing we hold dear today will remain sacred. Not even the rules for our own game of life. 

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Artificial intelligence in the past has been a top-down exercise of simulating the actions and behaviors of people. Given the wide range of decision-making processes that the average person uses in their day to day activities, the problem-sets that needed to be solved in order to replicate all of the possibilities became staggeringly impossible.

However, the online world has given us insight into some new approaches for developing artificial thought, and these new approaches center around the concept of capturing real pieces of human intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

Findability Vs Spyability

Has this ever happened to you?
 
Over the years, my eyes have grown progressively myopic. I don’t mind my fuzzy view of things distant. My short range vision is still nearly perfect. Just need the specs for driving. Wouldn’t you know it? I step away from my computer and a moment later discover my glasses magically vanished. (For me, the glasses disappearing act, similar to losing socks in a dryer, is a recurring annoyance.)
 
Now, several days later, I’m still looking and my imagination has shifted into full gear, conjuring up thoughts of a sinister KGB plot to mess with my head.
 
I wish I were looking for something online. I could simply turn to a search engine, type in a few words, and on a good day find my subject.  But we have no search engines for the physical world.  Not yet.

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Creativity is coming from unusual places these days. I snipped this from David Levinson’s blog post dated Feb 13, 2008, one of the earliest mentions of this topic (http://bit.ly/ma1Ur): …

“I’m proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years. This investment will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs … we’ll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead.”

The National Infrastructure Bank is making a lot of noise inside the Beltway. Not difficult to imagine why. Here is another big-ticket item that is bound to keep lobbyists and politicians in hyperbole mode for months.

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I’m a bit like film director Robert Zemeckis who co-wrote the screenplay Back to the Future. I notice those little things that have disappeared, fond memories of my chilldhood, like service stations that actually had people who provided service.

Other pieces of Americana that have disappeared include the drive-in theater. And, the barber shop is going the way of the buggy whip, too. The barber has lost business to the hair stylist, perhaps because the social setting depicted by Norman Rockwell has largely disappeared. Too, styled cuts were favored by fashion-conscious customers who were not too shy to go to a hair stylist.

I’m one of those strange guys who cuts his own hair.  When my kids were little, I tended to experiment on them in the kitchen, using techniques that I had gleaned from watching hair stylists and barbers. I won’t admit to any quality complaints. Sliding my fingers through the hair, I snipped. Easy enough, right?

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Known to most by his pen name, Dr. Seuss, Theodore Geisel lived a life in a magical world populated by unusual characters – characters who are not so refined that a dinner invitation he would decline, he once said with a wink, I think.

Like so many of us, I was raised with the bedtime stories of cats in hats and grinches that stole Christmas. Geisel’s imagination, it seems, had no bounds.

It should come as no surprise that on one dark evening, Geisel had an epiphany, which he put into words in a way that only the Seuss-master could produce. In 1954, he crafted Horton Hears a Who, a nothing-less-than brilliant glimpse into a world of the small. For those unfamiliar with nanotechnology, and many you are, reading about manipulating matter will take you very, very far.

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NOTE: The following article is a reprint of the cover article I wrote for the May/June 2009 issue of The Futurist Magazine.

On a recent trip to the Middle East, I was granted the opportunity to speak at the Leaders in Dubai Business Forum along with best-selling writer Tom Peters, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, and former McKinsey CEO Rajat Gupta. Most of the speakers were addressing our depressingly screwed-up economy. I decided on a different tack and presented some thoughts on emerging new systems of government power.

One idea in particular raised a few eyebrows among the Dubai group: selling islands as autonomous countries.

Dubai and the United Arab Emirates are on the cutting edge of islandbuilding technology. Their creative approach to building Palm Island, a series of artificial islands in the Persian Gulf, along with the coming Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Deira, and The World, have become an inspiration to other countries. In Bahrain, Thailand, and the Netherlands, new islands are also springing to life.

Countries in the Middle East have a distinct advantage when it comes to island building, because the Persian Gulf is a far more stable body of water than most other oceans. The question I presented to the Dubai Leaders who were anxious about how the global economic downturn might affect their tourist industry — the question I now present to you, the reader — is simple: Is there any money in this?

There has always been profit to be made and lost in coastal real estate. But these innovations in the creation of land could lead to the creation of real estate that is unattached and unaffiliated with any existing nationstate or indigenous group — land that can be sold as an autonomous country. No such opportunity has ever before existed in human history.

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