If you were traveling between Boston and Washington, DC, and had the choice of either flying or riding in a driverless car, which would you choose?

Under good conditions this is an 8.5-hour drive vs. 4-5 hours flying – driving to the airport, wading through security, boarding the flight, landing, and commuting to your destination when you arrive.

Keep in mind that the first wave of driverless vehicles will be luxury vehicles that allow you to kick back, listen to music, have a cup of coffee, stop wherever you need to along the way, stay productive with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for roughly the same price.

If you think this vision is far off, think again. Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made with vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

Here are a few thoughts on how this industry will develop.

Driverless concept vehicle

The Complexities of Going Driverless

Over the past few nights we hosted a couple mastermind groups at the DaVinci Institute to discus how the rollout of driverless cars will begin to disrupt life, as we know it, both in the U.S. and around the world. I truly appreciate everyone’s input, as this is a complicated subject with multiple driving forces, each with a number of “human” variables that will either speed or slow the introduction of this technology.

But we all agreed, nothing will stop it

While the current technology is good enough to navigate roadways and recognize obstacles, it will need some refinement before it’s human-safe, and to push economic viability, the component costs will need to come down.

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

The greatest benefits of this kind of automation won’t be realized until the driver’s hands are off the wheel. With over 2 million people are involved in car accidents every year in the U.S., it won’t take long for legislators to be convinced that driverless cars are a safer option.

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

Many aspects of going driverless are overwhelmingly positive, such as saving lives and giving additional years of mobility to an aging senior population. However, it will also be a very disruptive technology.

At the same time, it will be destroying countless jobs – truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, limo drivers, traffic cops, parking lot attendants, ambulance drivers, first responders, doctors, and nurses will all see their careers impacted.

But before we get into the “good vs. evil” technology debate, let’s look at why this will happen so quickly.

Inside the driverless Personal Rapid Transport vehicle at Heathrow Airport

The Roots of the Driverless Movement

The idea of self-driving cars is almost as old as the car itself. GM had visions of going driverless in its exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

• In 1959, Walt Disney unveiled his driverless monorail at Disneyland, originally envisioned as a practical form of public transport for the future. However, the monorail came about during a time when America’s love affair with the automobile was growing, and even though he offered to pay for a monorail to ease the growing traffic congestion in Los Angeles, his technology never made it past the walls of the Disney’s theme parks.
• In 2004 and 2005 DARPA sponsored the “Grand Challenge,” a competition to produce a driverless vehicle that could pilot itself 132 miles through the Nevada desert with no human intervention. The Stanford team won that competition in 2005 with their modified Volkswagen Touareg named “Stanley.”
• Building on their success, in 2007 DARPA sponsored the next iteration, the “Urban Challenge,” which was won by the Carnegie Mellon team.
• In 2008, John Deere introduced a steering assist option for their tractors, capable of turning, shifting gears and seeing through darkness and dust. The tractors were able to follow a row with sub-inch precision in the moonlight, raising and lowering the equipment to match the terrain, at the same time, saving thousands of hours and countless dollars in the process.
• In 2008, Google launched their driverless car team. The group was headed up by Sebastian Thrun, the entrepreneurial Stanford professor who won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and also co-creator of the Google’s Street View project. So far, their self-driving car fleet has already racked up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. Google reports these cars have required intervention by a human co-pilot only about once every 1,000 miles and the goal is to reduce this rate to once in 1,000,000 miles.
• In 2009, Heathrow Airport introduced their Personal Rapid Transport system consisting of 21 electric shuttles on a two-and-a-half mile pathway
• In 2010 VisLab ran VIAC (VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge), a 13,000 km test run of autonomous vehicles. In this competition, 4 driverless electric vans successfully drove from Italy to China, arriving at the Shanghai Expo on October 28, 2010. This was the first intercontinental trip ever completed by an autonomous vehicle.
• In 2010, Volkswagen sent a driverless Audi TTS to the top of Pike’s Peak at close to race speeds.
• In 2011 the U.S. Military spent $4.8 billion on flying drones. This has been a rapidly growing budget item in the military’s arsenal. With this kind of focused spending, drone technology has improved dramatically over the past decade, but as a technology, the future for drones will go far beyond military uses.
• In 2011, with Google lobbying in the background, the Nevada Legislature passed a law to authorize the use of autonomous vehicles, making it the first state where driverless vehicles can be legally operated on public roads.

These represent just a few of the advances, to date, that are driving this technology forward.

Mercedes concept vehicle

Stepping into Our Driverless Future

Recent advances in computing power and networking technologies are improving the viability of both the technology and economics on a daily basis. Today’s technology uses GPS to recognize where the cars are on the road. Cameras, lasers, and radar help them keep their distance from other cars and recognize objects like pedestrians. Superfast processors weave all the inputs together, allowing cars to react quickly.

Over time, data spidering systems, like those used by search engines, will be used to log details of every road in the country in real time, report potholes, cracks, or other dangerous conditions immediately when they occur, and build an information highway to serve as the backbone for our real highways.

Here are a few of the companies pushing this technology forward:

• Mercedes is equipping its 2013 model S-Class cars with a system that can drive autonomously through city traffic at speeds up to 25 m.p.h.
• Buyers of European luxury cars are already choosing from a menu of advanced options. For example, for $1,350, people who purchase BMW’s 535i xDrive sedan in the United States can opt for a “driver assistance package” that includes radar to detect vehicles in the car’s blind spot. For another $2,600, BMW will install “night vision with pedestrian detection,” which uses a forward-facing infrared camera to spot people in the road.
• Many car companies including General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, and Volvo have begun early testing of driverless car systems.
• General Motors has stated that they will have a driverless model ready for final testing by 2015, going on sale officially in 2018.

Several automakers already sell cars with adaptive cruise controls that automatically applies the brakes if traffic slows. BMW plans to extend that idea in its upcoming i3 series of electric cars, whose traffic-jam feature will let the car accelerate, decelerate, and steer by itself at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour—as long as the driver leaves a hand on the wheel.

According to New York’s ABI Research, the market for “advanced driver assistance” technologies was $10 billion in 2011, but will grow to a staggering $130 billion by 2016.

Driverless car network

Cars that Talk to Each Other

A major challenge for driverless roadways is for vehicles to safely and reliably communicate with one another. That’s where the Google operating system comes into play.

Hidden behind the hype of this technology is Google’s plan to come up with an Android-like operating system for all future driverless cars.

Regardless of whether its Google or someone else, creating communication standards and protocols will be the key to making this all work.

That requires getting all the automakers and regulatory agencies to agree on a standard. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has begun studying various technologies for vehicle-to-vehicle communication and plans to make a decision by 2013. They project intervehicle communications alone could reduce up to 80 percent of vehicle crashes involving non-impaired drivers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

LIT Motor’s new one-person commuter vehicle

Future Power Systems

People tend not to care about the power systems driving vehicles that they don’t own. As an example, few people pay attention to fuel efficiency of the airplane they’re flying in. They only care that they arrive on time.

This, combined with cost, range, and efficiency factors will mean that the first wave of driverless vehicles will likely be powered with old-fashioned gas engines.

However, electric vehicles using drive-by-wire technology will have many advantages over time. Rapid charging stations, silent engines, and the simple act of a vehicle recharging itself as opposed to the dangers of one that has to “refuel” itself will win over vehicle buyers in the future.

Many other power systems will be experimented with including everything from wireless power, to fuel cells, to natural gas, to biofuels. But in the end, fuel efficiency will prevail.

Google’s driverless car

The Promise of Going Driverless

According to the Center for Disease Control, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among the 5-34 age group in the U.S. More than 2.3 million adult drivers and passengers were treated in emergency departments as the result of being injured in motor vehicle crashes last year.

The lifetime costs of crash-related deaths and injuries among drivers and passengers are over $70 billion annually.

Consider the following problems that would go away:

• There were more than 5.5 million car accidents last year in the United States. Nearly 31,000 were fatal, and more than 2 million people were injured.
• Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers.
• At any given moment, 812,000 vehicles are being driven by someone using a handheld cell phone in the U.S.
• An average of four children ages 14 and under are killed every day in auto accidents. Nearly 500 are injured daily.
• While statistics continue to improve, 32 percent of fatal accidents involved alcohol-impaired drivers.

In addition to the known health and accident related issues, there is a tremendous amount of stress involved in driving.

People are not productive when they are driving and the frenetic atmosphere of high traffic situations leaves most commuters drained at the end of a day.

All of these problems will eventually go away.

Driverless taxi

The Downside of this Technology

At the same time, driverless cars will dramatically affect employment around the world.

• Over time over 232,000 taxi and limo drivers in the U.S. will lose their jobs.
• Over 647,000 bus drivers will be out of work.
• Over 125,000 truck drivers will be looking for new careers.
• Other jobs affected will include jobs at gas stations, parking lots, car washes, traffic cops, traffic courts, doctors, nurses, pizza delivery, mail delivery, FedEx and UPS jobs, as well as vehicle manufacturing positions.

In the future, the number of vehicles sold will begin to decline.

Inside a future car

Final Thoughts

The reason driverless cars will prove to be so disruptive for the automobile industry is that it will enable on-demand transportation services to replace the need for individual car ownership. Rather than having to conform to the route and timing of today’s mass transit systems, people will simply be able to request a vehicle through their smartphones whenever they need it, and a driverless vehicle will show up, on-demand, and take them to wherever they desire to go.

An on-demand transportation system will not significantly reduce the overall number of vehicles on the road at peak times, but will be better at matching the size of the vehicle with the number of people traveling. Since the vehicles will be in continuous operation, there will be significantly less need for parking spaces.

To be sure, this is a very complicated topic. Many other countries will be competing with the U.S. to become global leaders in this multi-pronged emerging industry.

With Google pushing the lobbying effort in Las Vegas, look for them to become the initial showcase for the world.

The military will likely find unusual uses in for these vehicles that have few civilian applications.

The coming years will see the public first embracing the technology and at the same time disdaining the tumultuous effects its having.

In the end, we will be driving towards a far safer and more resilient society, but we’ll be traveling down some very bumpy roads along the way.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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On December 29th, Verizon announced it would begin charging a $2 “convenience fee” for any customers paying monthly bills with a credit or debit card via the Internet or telephone.

Within 24 hours, online petitions began to circulate and commenters voiced their condemnation of Verizon’s corporate greed. Instantly, their messages started showing up on websites and message boards across the Internet, and even the FCC responded quickly, announcing plans to investigate the charge. A day after the so-called convenience fee was announced, Verizon caved to public and governmental pressure and scrapped the charge.

This type of public outcry is beginning to happen with ever-greater frequency.

• Netflix subscribers derailed the company’s July 2011 plans to raise prices and spin off its DVD-rental business by overwhelming it with more than 27,000 comments. CEO Reed Hastings instantly moved from media darling to media demon over night.
• In October 2011, Bank of America announced a new $5/month charge to use debit cards. In less than a month, more than 300,000 people signed an online petition to stop the planned fee, and over 21,000 customers pledged to close their Bank of America checking accounts. One news anchor even cut up her card on the air. By the end of Oct, the $5 fee was dropped.

These are just a couple recent examples of how consumers are flexing their newfound muscles. But rest assured, the war against consumer injustice is just beginning. We are witnessing the start of a new era – micro-movements. Here’s what may be happening in the months ahead.

When David Meets Goliath

In 1983, when Apple was on the verge of launching the Macintosh, Steve Jobs sought out film producer Ridley Scott, who was just coming off the critically acclaimed production of Blade Runner, to produce a SuperBowl commercial that would play up the David and Goliath battle being waged between IBM and Apple.

Using an unprecedented $900,000 budget to produce the commercial, Job’s was determined to make a big slash. Even though the Apple Board tried to kill the ad for the Superbowl, through some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the commercial still ran, and the impact was huge.

The commercial opened with an ominous dark feel of some future time, showing a line of bald genderless people marching in unison through a long tunnel with every movement being monitored by electronic screens. This scene sets the stage for the contrasting image a well-muscled female runner carrying a large hammer while wearing a colorful athletic outfit.

As she is chased by four police-like officers representing the “thought police,” she races towards a large screen with an image of Big Brother giving a speech:

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology — where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

As the runner closes in on the screen, she hurls the hammer towards it, at the exact same moment that Big Brother announces, “we shall prevail!” In a flurry of light and smoke, the screen is destroyed, shocking the people watching it.

The commercial concludes with an ominous narrative rising from the hazy, whitish-blue aftermath of the cataclysmic event:

“On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”

The commercial ends by fading to black and as the Apple logo appears.

After receiving numerous other awards, in 2007 the ad was chosen as the “Best Super Bowl Spot” in the game’s 40-year history.

Steve Jobs was a master at leveraging his role as the underdog, always wanting to champion the “little guys” in their battles against the forces of big business.

Big Brother Vs. Big Citizenry

Ever since George Orwell published his 1949 head-turning classic “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” people have had a lingering fear of government usurping too much power, and especially in the electronic age, of them monitoring our every movement.

The “1984” paranoia surrounding Big Brother is still alive today, but with one big difference. The little guys now have the tools to fight back.

People power has gone mainstream:

• In May 2011, a Chicago jewelry artist accused Urban Outfitters on her blog of copying her designs, her post went viral and the company pulled the items within a day.
• When Facebook pushes their transparency plans too far, users scream and Facebook changes their approach.
• Coca-Cola released a special 2011 white and silver holiday design for its cans to raise awareness about the plight of polar bears. But the cans closely resembled the silver ones used for Diet Coke and many diehard Coke drinkers felt misled. As a result, they took to the Internet to complain and the company pulled the can design.
• On Dec 19th a video showed up on YouTube of a FedEx courier tossing a computer monitor over a backyard fence. In days, the video had millions of views, and began showing up on everything from Good Morning America, to CNN News, to the Late Show with David Letterman. FedEx responded quickly with a YouTube video of its own and a blog post saying that the courier’s behavior was “absolutely, positively unacceptable.”

Micro-Movements and the Tools of the People

In the past, most governments could use heavy-handed top-down tactics to foil any protest or uprising. But the toolsets used by the people are changing.

The most powerful tools in today’s arsenals are transparency and instant communication. Spotting injustice and rubbing the public’s nose in it can cause micro-movements to surface and explode in less than a day.

This new trend is all about micro-movements and their ability to self-organize in minutes, not days, and cause the world to change. Micro-movements are an instant checks and balance where other systems fail.

The watchers are watching, so the listeners have to be listening.

Anyone who doesn’t respond quickly runs the risk of being burned at the stake of public ridicule.

When it comes to other tools these architects of micro-movement can leverage, in addition to generating instant awareness, they can influence people’s political vote, their monetary vote (where they spend their money), and their attention vote (where they spend their time). Going even further, leveraging perhaps the most disruptive tool of all, they can cause people to register a defiance vote, ignore the rules, and simply walk away. This can have severe consequences, but if played right, can quickly garner political backing.

As an example, when housing prices began to plummet and the outstanding mortgages were more than the underlying value of the houses, homeowners simply walked away. Even though it wasn’t the result of any well-planned movement, the next one might be.

Given the right circumstances, someone may architect a similar mass exit for the following situations:

• As the price of college education begins to drop, the outstanding student loans will begin to seem unreasonable. At this point it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to convince large numbers of people to stop paying their student loans.
• As frustration over big banks increase, many could be influenced to move to credit unions or “no bank” alternatives.
• As credit card companies continue to press for high transaction fees, companies and consumers could be directed toward Dwolla and other low-fee options.
• As health insurance companies try to raise prices, virtually every increase could become a new micro-movement with people lining up to change it.

Big Citizenry Going Global

The past 18 months have seen extraordinary outpourings of discontent. BBC writer Paul Mason captured the reasons behind this movement well in his column “Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere”

Listen closely as the voice of the people begins to gain momentum. Look for both the technology that supports it to improve, startups to form around the micro-movement industry and spring to life, and political pressure to be felt like never before.

The Arab Spring has set most governments of the world on notice.

On January 1st, probably more as a preemptive strike, the Chinese government ordered the cancellation of what it considered “low brow” programming, dropping many of its most popular TV programs from 126 a week to just 38, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

Each of China’s 34 satellite television channels is now limited to an hour and a half of light entertainment programming between 7.30pm and 10pm. In addition, the regulations now require at least two half-hour news bulletins a night.

Protests are now a daily occurrence in China and officials are responding to each incident differently. But this kind of “people power” will not go away anytime soon, and China will have entirely new kinds of outbreaks to deal with this year.

Economic turmoil is causing uprising throughout Europe, but this time around they will be far more exacting in how the protests are staged.

Even Russia’s Vladimir Putin is now receiving unprecedented push-back from his heavy-handed governing authority. No governments will be exempt.

The age of protest has only begun. With new tools coming online daily, and the overarching reach of the awareness extending even further, those who are caught in the crossfire will no longer have the luxury of planning a response. They will need to react quickly, and correctly. If not, they will end up little more than footnoted casualties of the power of the people and the great consumer backlash.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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The sixth law of the future states, “The “unknowability” of the future is what gives us our drive and motivation.”

The fact that the future is unknowable is a good thing. Our involvement in the game of life is based on our notion that we as individuals can make a difference. If we somehow remove the mystery of what results our actions will have, we also dismantle our individual drives and motivations for moving forward.

There is a whole lot that we don’t know about the year ahead. Yes, it will be messy. Important people will die. We will not cure cancer, just yet. And we won’t find a solution for war. But there is great value in the struggle. Our greatest achievements will come from these struggles.

We can learn much about where we’ve come from, and for this reason I’d like to give you a quick overview of the top articles in 2011 on FuturistSpeaker.com, based on popularity. They touch on jobs, education, crime, food supplies, and most importantly, the future. Join me as we take a look at the future through the eyes of the past.

10.) Four Fundamental Myths Derailing Academic Change

When we think about Benjamin Franklin, we instantly think of the author, scientist, inventor, diplomat who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and has his face on the one-hundred dollar bill. Ben Franklin was a truly remarkable person, yet he had less than two years of formal education.

I recently came across a study that examined the lives of 755 famous people who either dropped out of grade school or high school. The list included 25 billionaires, 8 U.S. Presidents, 10 Nobel Prize winners, 8 Olympic medal winners, 63 Oscar winners, 55 best-selling authors, and 31 who had been Knighted.

With names like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Will Rogers, and Joseph Pulitzer, being an academic failure still left you in the company of some incredible luminaries.

Going one step further, adding the names of well-known college dropouts to the list, names like Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill Gates, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Howard Hughes, Michael Dell, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, and virtually every famous actor, actress, and director in Hollywood, and the dropout list becomes a venerable Who’s Who of American culture.

So what are we missing here? On one hand we are being told that the path to success is through academia. Yet, we have literally thousands of examples of wealthy, successful, business leaders, industry icons, and some of our greatest heroes that took a different route. Continue reading here.

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9.) Why Industries Collapse

It was roughly two years ago, October 15, 2009, when I got a call from a desperate lady, panicking, as she asked for my help.

Being a futurist, I don’t get many calls from people who urgently need my help. Futurists are rarely first responders.

As she described the situation, telling how a young boy’s life was at stake, and the situation was far too complicated for normal emergency rescue crews, she somehow thought of the DaVinci Institute.

“You work with some of the brightest minds in the world and this situation is going to require a very ingenious solution.” Her voice was dripping with trepidation and fear.

Moments after receiving her call, I turned on the television because the problem she described was quickly unfolding across the nation, gaining national attention, as a six-year old boy named Falcon had somehow gotten trapped inside a small weather balloon that was flying over the Midwest. Yes, this was the legendary balloon-boy incident, gripping the nation in panic and fear until the entire hoax started unraveling.

At the DaVinci Institute, we often tackle complex problems to find solutions. But in today’s world, one of the biggest problems threatening society today is complexity itself. Here’s why. Continue reading here.

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8.) Hoping the Crime Rate Goes Up

How many laws are governing you at this very moment?

Driving across America we find ourselves constantly driving through invisible barriers where new laws come into play and old ones fade away. We have no clue as to what laws they are, or even how many, but these laws have the potential to ruin our lives.

In a country that claims to be the land of the free, the number of people under the control of the U.S. corrections system has exploded over the last 25 years to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 U.S. adults, according to a report by the Pew Center on the States. The actual number of people behind bars rose to 2.3 million, nearly five times more than the world’s average.

But true criminals are not the problem.

Headlines in the New York Times have repeatedly showed us the irony of our current dilemma – “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling,” “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops,” “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” and “More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime.”

Logically then, if crime keeps falling, we simply won’t be able to build prisons fast enough.

We can only hope that real crime goes up so our criminal justice system will have real criminals to go after. Continue reading here.

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7.) Introducing the Eight Grand Challenges for Humanity

As I took the stage, my goal was to introduce the crowd to a series of Eight Grand Challenges, incentivized competitions designed to push humanity to another level.

But as with many crowds, there was a formidable issue in the minds of attendees, a hurdle of acceptance before these challenges would be deemed cause-worthy.

At issue was our obsession with solving all of today’s problems before we dare think about advancing humanity. How can we possibly justify advancing humanity when the money would be far better spent solving today’s massive problems?

Answering this objection first, was critically important, so here is the way I presented it.

If we only focus on solving today’s problems, we become trapped in the past. Every solution leads to another set of problems. Much like the whack-a-mole game at video arcades, as one problem gets pounded down, another pokes its ugly head out.

The only real way out is to advance civilization. By advancing civilization we change the nature of the problems we’re dealing with, and that is exactly what the Eight Grand Challenges have been designed to do. Continue reading here.

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6.) The Coming Collapse of Bitcoin?

In 2008 the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Major banks were either failing or near failure, and the entire house of cards seemed to be one 10-of-Clubs away from becoming a meaningless flat stack in the middle of the table.

There was a growing distrust of banks, Wall Street, and our entire monetary system. We had allowed the wrong powerbrokers to gain control and business and industry were collapsing all around us. Visions of the Great Depression and its soup lines were haunting us, like a reoccurring nightmare, causing us to rethink our every move.

Many ideas were percolating in the background, but for one, the timing was perfect. Indeed, it is during the worst of times that we, as humans, often do our best work.

So it was in this collapsing chaos where people were grasping desperately for even the slightest ray of hope when on November 1st in 2008 a mysterious paper appeared on an obscure cryptography listserv describing details for a new digital currency called bitcoin.

It was from this seemingly innocent birthing chamber that this piece of monetary-replacement technology would begin its three-year rollercoaster journey, a journey with great lessons for our future. Continue reading here.

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5.) Eight Critical Skills for the Future

On Monday evening I presented my thoughts on the “Future of Mobile Apps & Peripherals” at our monthly Night with a Futurist event. My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion with three of the industry’s brightest minds – Michael Sitarzewski, Lisa Calkins, and Gary Moskoff with Karl Dakin moderating the discussion.

Several people left this event saying their heads were ready to explode with all the fascinating new ground we covered, and I credit these four with helping us push the envelope on this topic.

At one point the conversation turned to social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, and Buzz that encourage users to log in and share their location. This feature is packaged as a fun way to find friends and stay social. But there is a downside.

Michael Sitarzewski was quick to point out a new site called ‘Please Rob Me‘ that aims to make online tell-alls aware of the potential downside to public location-sharing.

‘Please Rob Me’ aggregates and streams location check-ins into a list of “all those empty homes out there,” and describes the recently-shared locations as “new opportunities.”

While this seems comical on one level, the dangers are quite obvious, and even more apparent is our poor understanding of the demands being placed on us individually, and the skills we will need to function in this unchartered new territory.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of the eight critical skills that we will need in the future that are not being taught in school today. Continue reading here.

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4.) 12 Laws of the Future

For several decades now I have been contemplating our relationship with the future.

Many of my colleagues think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future.

On occasion you can hear me uttering phrases like, “I know it’s going to be a great day because the future is clearly happy with me today.” Or, “no, that’s not a good idea because the future is probably going to push it off a cliff.”

At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car, but she wasn’t buying it.

So why is it so important to study the future? For starters, we all have a vested interest in it. We will all be living in the future. Continue reading here.

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3.) The Coming Food Printer Revolution

Would you buy a product that was advertised as “Naturally grown, completely organic, printed food?”

Anyone who has an apple tree growing in their yard knows how difficult it is to grow one that is worthy of eating straight off the tree. Most have bruises, wormholes, or bird damage that leaves most apples somewhat marginalized. They may be perfectly good on the inside, yet they don’t look very good.

As we shop for apples in the grocery store, we find ourselves looking for the “perfect apple.” Only a small percentage of apples grown on the farm are worthy of making it into the major leagues of food – the fresh produce section of our grocery stores.

But what if we could take all of those bruised and damaged apples and turn them all into “perfect apples” – perfect size, perfect color, perfect crunch when we bite into them, and the perfect sweet juicy flavor and aroma that makes our mouth water every time we think about them.

This is the promise of food printer technology as we move from simply printing ink on paper, to 3D printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers.

These aren’t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising. Instead, they are devices with the very real potential for turning real apples into perfect apples. But this is only scratching the surface. Continue reading here.

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Great lies continue to be propagated

2.) Eight False Promises of the Internet

In early 2003 I had a conversation with Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA. At the time we were interested in hiring him to be the keynote speaker at our upcoming Future of Money Summit, an event that would take place in November of that year.

Ten years earlier, in March of 1993, Hock gave a dinner speech at the Santa Fe Institute where he described his unusual organizational theories in managing VISA, describing them as “chaordic” a term that roughly translates into “ordered chaos.”

In 1996 he formed the Chaordic Alliance, later renamed the Chaordic Commons, for the purpose of furthering his notions that businesses can run more effectively when they are based on a “vital set of living beliefs” distributed through an organization, essentially replacing top-down command and control.

As we talked, his powers of persuasion were quite evident as he artfully described his “chaordic” theories, and by the end of the conversation I was a true believer, wanting to become a disciple of this new business gospel.

But as with many things that sound too good to be true the first time you hear them, Hock’s “chaodic” theories that somehow worked within VISA, proved non-reproducible in other settings, and have now largely been abandoned after numerous attempts to implement them in other companies.

As we enter the 2nd decade of the new millennium we find ourselves in a similar quandary trying to separate the fallacies from the promises of what works and what doesn’t on the Internet. With that in mind I’ve put together a list of eight of the founding theories of the Internet that have proved similarly deceptive. Continue reading here.

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1.) 55 Jobs of the Future

One of my primary complaints with higher education is that they tend to prepare students for jobs of the past. The way a Midwesterner would phrase it, “they are constantly shooting behind the duck.”

Similarly, whenever a column is written about the best paying jobs of the future, jobs like civil engineers, registered nurses, and computer system analysts, they are all jobs that currently exist today.

Yes, many of these jobs will still exist in the future, but every one of them will morph and change as technology and communication systems make their impact.

As an example, technology research firm IDC predicts the amount of data businesses will have access to will grow 50-fold over the next decade. As data becomes cheaper, faster, and more pervasive, the nature of our work begins to change as well.

The first wave of baby boomers has now turned 65. As this generation grays, their needs will change. Their growing numbers and increasing medical needs will require a different kind of health care professionals to take care of them.

As a rule of thumb, 60% of the jobs 10 years from now haven’t been invented yet. With that in mind, I’ve decided to pull together a list of 55 jobs that will be in high demand in the future. Continue reading here.

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Final Thoughts

We are in for a very exciting year ahead. It’s a year where many competing trends will collide, and through those collisions we will see new pathways emerge.

At the same time, many new trends are forming, some with enough steam to form entirely new movements, others that will run their course and splinter into other emerging ways of doing business.

The “new normal” is quickly becoming the “nothing normal,” and our daily routines, the things we use to maintain our own sanity, will need to morph and change if we hope to stay competitive in the emerging job market and even stay current in our own social circles.

The year ahead will be a wild ride. Let’s take that ride together.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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“High expectations are the key to everything” – - Sam Walton

On a recent shopping trip, I went to three separate stores and had difficulty finding what I was looking for. On each of these occasions I talked with a staff person and they told me about an option that either wasn’t apparent to most customers, or that I hadn’t considered.

Yes, the online retail business is stealing a growing percentage of market share, but people-to-people interaction still matters. The problem is that it’s mattering less, and pricing competition is making the people-to-people option a luxury.

Our mobile devices are freeing the retail experience from the confines of the physical storefronts and traditional online locations, allowing shopping to take place virtually anywhere.

In the emerging customer-centric approach to retail, retailers will need to come up with new ways to engage their customers and find ways to lower barriers to purchase. Most importantly, retailers must be prepared to make a sale whenever and wherever a customer is ready. Here are a few thoughts on how they can make that happen.

Retails Downhill Slide

Recently Sears announced the closure of 120 of its Sears and Kmart stores. This was one of a number of similar announcements during the past year as online retailers become much more skilled at stealing market share.

The 2011 list of store closings is a very long list that includes the following:

• 405 – Blockbuster
• 633 – Borders
• 200 – GameStop
• 189 – Gap
• 160 – f.y.e.
• 117 – Anchor Blue
• 117 – Foot Locker
• 100 – Talbot’s
• 71 – A.J. Wright
• 69 – Metropark
• 63 – Friendly’s
• 60 – Rite Aid
• 52 – Destination Maternity
• 50 – Abercrombie & Fitch
• 50 – Hot Topic
• 45 – Big Lots
• 45 – Family Dollar
• 43 – Select Comfort
• 43 – Sonic Drive-In
• 35 – Denny’s
• 32 – Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, Inc. (SuperFresh, Pathmark Super Market)
• 30 – Ultimate Electronics
• 28 – Dominos
• 25 – Superfresh (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company)
• 20 – Lowe’s
• Many, many more

Store closings hurt local communities in a number of ways, primarily with the blighted look of empty storefronts and plummeting sales tax receipts. But a dead Main Street adds to it a sense of declining options, fewer ways to meet the neighbors, and a growing detachment from that all-important sense of community.

Many of the empty storefronts still have large retailers paying the rent in the background, so property owners have little incentive to find a new tenant until the lease finally runs out. It also leaves owners with a delusional view of the property’s true value.

When it comes to sales tax, the system is severely broke, giving preferential treatment to online sales. It can be reinvented, and the issues surrounding sales tax are solvable, but they need to be dealt with on a national level and this is not likely to make it onto any of the dockets in a presidential election year. One approach for solving this issue can be found here.

With declining sales tax receipts, local communities have very few options for engineering their own solutions.

For these reasons, combined with increased competition from the online sector, tradition retail is not likely to recover – ever.

However, every problem creates an opportunity, and the stage has now been set for a new era of retail, what I call Retail 2.0.

Flooring the Customer

People love to shop at places that are new and different. They love to be surprised by their experience, and they are willing to pay for those surprises.

Gone are the days where stores could simply warehouse products for consumer to buy. Retailers need to provide customers with a feeling of excitement and exclusivity; in short, they need to be floored by their experience.

Traditional shopping centers have become stagnant. Sure, some of the displays change along with the merchandise, and occasionally a store is replaced by another store, but the pace of life today is much faster than the glacial speed that transforms the fashion racks at Macy’s.

We don’t remember an evolution. We only remember a revolution.

Inside this ocean of lackluster thinking lies a few shining examples of what the next generation of retail will look like. Retail 2.0 will form around phrases like “experiential entertainment,” “active engagement,” and “interaction with experts.”

Here are 9 different examples of how this grand experiment is beginning to unfold:

Apple Stores, where people go for answers

1.) Experts Shops – People love to talk to the experts and find answers for those nagging questions that create a cloud of uncertainty around most consumer products. The Apple Stores are a perfect example of an “experts shop” because each of their employees is a true expert on the products they sell. While Apple uses several other elements to attract and engage buyers, the expert-to-consumer relationship is a key feature.

Other companies like Amazon and Google are looking to replicate the Apple experience, but they will have an uphill battle. Unless something major changes, Google will ultimately fail with their retail experiment because they have no respect for two-way communications. If you’ve ever tried to contact Google to get an answer to a problem you’ll know what I mean. In the end, retail is all about two-way communications.

Intel’s “3D Magic Mirror” – a gesture-controlled parametric body model display

2.) 3D Mirror Tech Shops – Imagine walking up to a mirror and visually “trying on” 120 different outfits in 15 minutes to find the perfect wardrobe combination to match your personality and the image you’re hoping to portray. Intel is currently experimenting with 3D Mirror technology where an avatar that closely resembles a customer, and move with their movements, can be clothed and re-clothed numerous times as customers search for their perfect outfit. While this technology is still in its infancy, look for some version to make its way into most clothing stores within a decade.

Example of Cornell University’s Body Scan Technology

3. Body Scanner Tech Shops – The key to a perfect fit is clothing that has been custom tailored to your exact specifications, and what better way to achieve that than to have your body scanned and your dimensions fed into some sort of clothing printer.

Leading the charge is Brooks Brothers, a company that already uses body scanners seamlessly. They offer mass-customized suits at their New York City retail store using a 3D body scanner to collect customer measurements. Style, fabrics, and design features are selected from a computer screen in consultation with a trained sales professional, who facilitates the discussion of fit preferences, such as loose or form-fitted clothing. Brooks Brothers uses a proprietary custom pattern-making system to create an individual pattern based on the body measurements. The garment is manufactured remotely and shipped to the store where a single fitting ensures customer satisfaction. Scan data and patterns for each customer are stored for future orders.

Further research is being conducted at Cornell University. Clothing printers are still a ways off.

MERM – Mobile Electric Retail Minivan

4.) Mobile Shops – Rather than having customers come to you, move your store to the customers.

One example, MERM (Modular Electronic Retail Minivan), shown above, creates a mobile retail market wherever people are gathered – at sporting events, theater, concerts, parades, or even busy street corners.

When MERM is in driving mode, all the inner space is used for storing inventory. When it’s switched to retail booth mode, the shelves can be easily unfolded for display outside the car, making adequate space for the vendor to stand inside. This feature minimizes the size of the car and thus reduces its energy consumption. Also, the compact size enables the user to drive in narrow urban streets.

Instead of opening a retail store and trying to get customers to walk in the front door, mobile retail has the flexibility to find the markets, anytime day or night.

Pop-Up Shop by illy

5.) Pop-Up Shops – If new products come and go, why can’t the stores that display them do the same?

Pop-Up Shops, in their current iteration, have a tendency to pop up unannounced, quickly draw in the crowds, and then disappear or morph into something else, adding to retail the fresh feel, exclusivity and surprise that galleries, theaters and Cirque du Soleil-adepts have been using for years.

Look for many new variations on this concept. Much like mobile retail, Pop-Up Shops can easily move to where the customers are.

Conceptual layout for Docking Shops

6.) Docking Shops – The idea of Docking Shops were first envisioned for rural communities where the customer base is too low to warrant a permanent location. But a one-day-a-week storefront in five or six communities might be a perfect arrangement.

For this reason, I’m predicting a new form of shopping center will spring to life – Docking Shops. With a stationary common area at its core, the Docking Shops will be the central gathering place where multiple businesses can “plug-in” and set up shop.

RVs, trucks, vans, and other large vehicles will be converted into traveling dental offices, tax preparation centers, chiropractic clinics, and mobile retail storefronts. As they “dock” with the Docking Shops, merchandise and service areas will expand into the common area creating an “open bizarre” feel for the shopping experience.

Most of the traveling storefronts will be one or two person businesses, nomadically traveling from city to city on their business adventure. Others will work a regular circuit, showing up on the same day each week, building a loyal customer base.

What was the brand and style of shoes you bought last time?
Who has that information?

7.) Complementary Digital Curation – Information about your brand preferences, past purchases, sizes, shapes, colors, and overall shopping habits is a double-edged sword. For privacy advocates, any storehouse of personal data is a recipe for future disasters. But for those looking to improve speed, convenience, and their overall shopping experience, digital curation has the potential to offer an unparalleled shopping experience.

Customers can volunteer for this experience, and retailers would love to have them, but the current privacy-transparency battleground has created too many unknowns for this to be used to its fullest. That will change in the future as the rules get defined.

Cooking Demonstration

8.) No-Inventory Demo Shops – One of the major expenses in traditional retail have been maintaining inventories and shelf space. Look for a new breed of retails shops that carry no inventory, only product demonstration stations with the ability to order on the spot (and receive a discount).

While most people think in terms of cooking demos with chef’s talking about the food and cookware that they’re using, the Demo Shops will extend to everything from athletic equipment, to toys, to hardware, to appliances, and much more.

Most will be pay-to-play product placement stations with experts on hand to answer questions. Look for tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft to pave the way for these kinds of storefronts.

Using smartphone cameras to turn the world around us into our marketplace

9.) Google Goggles Retail – Still in early testing, Google Goggles is an experimental technology that will enable our smartphones to 1.) identify a product, 2.) find the entity selling it, 3.) make the purchase, and 4.) have it delivered – any product, any where, any time.

This technology has the potential to turn the world around us into our marketplace. If we can see it, we may be able to buy it and have it delivered to our home.

So rather than traditional storefronts, some retailers may hire models to walk up and down the street, trying to get people to “click” on them and buy their clothing or whatever they’re selling.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to retail, consumers are in control. They decide what to buy, where to buy, when to buy, and how much they’re willing to pay.

In a connected world, where information is fluid and transparent, retailers must become actively engaged in the global conversation. If not, their customers will begin the conversations without them.

Physical stores still provide the best way to create a high-value relationship with customers and build a branded experience.

Bricks and mortar stores are not going away any time soon, but the value they add to their communities and the variety of products they offer will remain in transition for the foreseeable future.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

Between 1990 and 2005, immigrants created 25% of all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. These included some of our best-known businesses such as Intel, Sun, eBay, Yahoo, and Google. This same group of foreign nationals went on to become the inventors behind 25% of all patents filed in U.S. in 2006.

Ever since the World Trade Center bombing, the U.S. has been tightening the screws on immigration policy. So much so that securing work visas for the thousands of foreign-born engineers and thinkers that U.S. companies desperately need for them to conduct business has become a serious impediment. Many fledgling companies simply can’t afford the effort.

Problems like this are screaming for a solution and a new startup called Blueseed, founded by Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija, may have a solution.

Blueseed, now funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, proposes to create visa-free floating work villages in international waters, with the first to be located within helicopter distance of Silicon Valley.

So will this ingenious plan to circumvent U.S. immigration policy lead to more policy tampering and eventually an erosion of the power of nations? Here are a few possible scenarios that are sure to surprise you.

Illegal Immigrants Vs. Talent-Deprived Businesses

The mismatch between what U.S. colleges and universities are producing and the skills and talent needed by American corporations has been growing rapidly out of balance.

While the rest of the nation has been suffering from high levels of unemployment, companies in the tech sector have been hard pressed to find the talent they need. In 2007 this problem that was reaching a crisis point when Microsoft decided to open a facility in Vancouver, BC to take advantage of the less-onerous Canadian immigration policies. Vancouver was selected because of its drivable close proximity to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA.

This facility is expected to grow to over 5,000 employees, comprised mainly of non-American workers, as an overt attempt to circumvent the increasingly restrictive U.S. policy for handing out work visas.

The U.S. is a nation built by immigrants, and it has been the pooling of cultures and combined thinking from people around the world that has made this a great nation. At the same time, immigration doesn’t work well if we simply open the floodgates. So whenever demand exceeds supply, we see natural friction points develop around the edges.

At the same time businesses are clambering for more immigrants, law enforcement officials dealing with the seedy underbelly of the criminal world are wanting tighter restrictions.

It is precisely for this reason that a tightly controlled staging area like Blueseed may prove to be the wisdom-of-Solomon needed to solve this dilemma.

András Gyõrfi winning design for the 2009 Seasteading competition

Seasteading

Seasteading, an idea first advanced by Ken Neumeyer in his 1981 book “Sailing the Farm,” is the concept of creating permanent homes and communities at sea, called seasteads. These would exist in international waters, outside the 12-mile limits claimed by most nations.

In 2008, Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded the Seasteading Institute, an organization whose primary focus was to establish autonomous, mobile communities on ocean-based platforms in international waters.

The project picked up steam in 2008 when Peter Thiel invested $500,000 and became a vocal spokesman for the institute, most recently with his essay “The Education of a Libertarian.”

In 2009, the Seasteading Institute hosted a global 3D design competition and received 41 entries with the top award going to Hungarian designer András Gyõrfi. The Seasteading concepts tied to the 3D illustrations were so captivating that major media outlets, such as National Geographic, Archiworld, and Bloomberg Markets heightened people’s attention around the world.

Palm Island off the coast of Dubai

Micronations on Man-Made Islands

In 2007 I began working on a similar project for forming micronations on man-made islands.

At the time, Dubai was receiving considerable attention for their cutting edge island-building technology. The creative approach used to build Palm Island along with plans for four others, Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Deira, and The World, became an inspiration to other countries such as Bahrain, Thailand, and the Netherlands where new islands also began 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 any of the major oceans.

In November 2008, my keynote at the “Leaders in Dubai Conference” centered on the concept of building islands, and rather than selling them as real estate, to sell them as autonomous countries.

An article on this topic written for The Futurist Magazine in 2009 can be seen here.

Let’s face it. Who doesn’t want to own their own country? If this were an option, I would venture to say that the secret desire to own their own country would rank at the top of most people’s list.

Blueseed’s Plans

Blueseed founders Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija both worked on the Seasteading project before branching off onto their own.

Within the next year, they hope to raise a venture capital round that will give them sufficient money to lease or buy a ship large enough to create a working community for around a thousand workers. If they are successful, it will not only open up Silicon Valley to a broader range of entrepreneurs, it will also draw international attention to the barriers American law places in the way of immigrants seeking to start businesses in the United States.

Even though Blueseed’s efforts to overcome the limitations of American immigration law should be applauded, its business model also depends heavily on the goodwill of American immigration officials. A major component of the Blueseed sales pitch is that residents will be able to make regular trips into the Bay area.

While there’s an annual cap on the number of H1-B visas available for American employers to hire skilled immigrant workers, permission to travel to the United States for business or tourism reasons is much easier to get.

Blueseed ferry service to the mainland

Currently they have plans for regular ferry service between the ship and the Bay area. While Blueseed residents would need to do their actual work—such as writing code—on the ship, Marty envisions them making regular trips to Silicon Valley to meet with clients, investors, and business partners.

With the ship only 12 miles offshore, it should be practical to make a day trip to the mainland and return in the evening, although B-1 visas also allow for overnight stays.

Blueseed’s research has uncovered that across America over 7,000 Computer Science Master’s and PhD graduates each year are foreign nationals. With current immigration policies, many of these 7,000 highly talented people will have difficulty continuing to stay in the U.S. and a high percentage will be forced to return home.

Blueseed has also signed up a number of advisors in matters of admiralty law, immigration law, and maritime operations.

Small island, or a new micronation waiting to be formed?

First Steps

According to founder Max Marty, “Blueseed is starting by conducting an environmental impact study. Once completed, we will need to acquire or lease a large ship. Then we’ll need to retrofit it for use as a floating apartment and office complex. We’ll need to hire a crew with a variety of skills—cooks, doctors, psychologists, lawyers, security officers, and many more. We are planning for a crew consisting of 200-300 members in total.”

Internet service will be essential. They’re still researching options, but the tentative plan is for a high-speed fixed wireless connection with a satellite backup.

Next they’ll need to find paying customers. Marty envisions the Blueseed ship as a floating incubator. They’ll charge rent, but also take a small equity stake in each startup that comes on board. He hopes to cultivate a network of investors to help identify promising entrepreneurs.

Most of Blueseed’s income will come from charging rent – $1,200 per month for the smallest rooms to $3,000 for the largest. These are figures similar to what other professionals are paying for an apartment and office in Silicon Valley.

Runner up in the Seasteading 2009 3D design competition

Primary Elements to Consider

Projects like Blueseed always start out with the best of intentions but have a way of becoming marginalized over time by influence and personal interests. For this reason they need to achieve a delicate balance between what’s right for the business, what’s right for the community, and what’s right for their relationship with the host nation.

Below are eight primary elements that ventures such as Blueseed will need to keep in mind as they move further through the planning process:

1. Host Nation Relationship – Even though the operation is located in international waters, the relationship forged with the host nation will be crucial. Never under estimate a country’s ability or willingness to shut down an operation like this on a whim.

2. Symbiotic Benefit – Blueseed is creating a win-win relationship with U.S. based companies. When that type of relationship is achieved, the host nation can become a huge ally.

3. Built-in Economy – Ships are expensive to build and operate. Unless the operation is making a sustainable income or has an extremely wealthy benefactor, the costs will begin to cannibalize the operation into a death spiral.

4. Noble Purpose – Operations need to be based on a cause or purpose that people generally have respect for. A Blueseed-like operation formed for the purpose of tax evasion, slave trade, pirate Internet, or for dealing drugs will be doomed to fail.

5. Neutral Ground – One of the most compelling aspects of having an outpost in international waters is that it can be free of legacy systems and legacy influence. Decisions can be made without bowing to special interests. This, of course, becomes eroded every time a contract is signed, or treaty inked, but it is still a valuable asset that shouldn’t be overlooked.

6. Reduced Legal Environment – Even though the rules of business transcend national boundaries, most businesses will be able to operate with considerably more freedom without having to constantly check some manual for possible code violations.

7. Sufficiently Scaled – Projects like this need to be large enough to house a vibrant economy and at the same time large enough to care for the social welfare of the inhabitants. In general, the larger the operation, the greater the autonomy and less dependent it will be on the host nation.

8. Portability – As with the cruise ship industry, when one market dries up, it will be very easy to move the ship to another port. Floating incubators are easily transportable, so in case the relationship with the host city/country began to sour, they can always move to a new location.

Will your next job offer a clear view of the ocean?

Future Scenarios

With these thoughts in mind, I’ve put together six brief scenarios to help expand your thinking.

Scenario #1 – Large Scale Adoption: Our first scenario would see large-scale adoption of the incubator concept with Blueseed-like vessels parked off the east and west coast of several major U.S. cities, along with others located in the Mediterranean as well as in the oceans by Japan, Korea, China, Britain, and Germany. With the fickle nature of immigration policy, this is unlikely unless operators can prove a serious economic advantage for doing so such as highly talented individuals willing to work for minimal wages or offering otherwise illegal research or service offerings that are highly profitable.

As an incubator, startups will invariably want to take advantage of business opportunities that are outside the bounds of what could be conducted inside most countries. Depending on the severity of the infraction, host countries may or may not decide to look the other way.

Scenario #2 – Experimental Nation State: A floating ship, much like an ungoverned territory is a blank slate that lends itself to experimentation and the testing of new ideas. The operating system for the world today is composed of a series of intertwined, complex legal systems. Some, like trade agreements and treaties, are global in nature while others are specific to an individual country or region. People generally don’t want to live without some form of legal, law-based protection. In a democratic society, however, laws can move much slower than technological know-how and can have a stifling effect on innovation. This is part of the reason large corporations shop the globe for the best regulatory environment in which to conduct their operations and research. An autonomous floating community with no existing structures, or government, becomes a perfect laboratory for experimentation.

Scenario #3 – Staging Area for Work Visas: Many companies will be willing to pay considerable sums to attract the right talent. With the right policy changes, a floating community could serve as work-staging area for people seeking work visas. Perhaps one approach would be for the sponsoring company to post a bond that could be drawn upon to cover all of the costs associated with deportation if that becomes necessary.

Scenario #4 – Floating Embassies: In port cities it may be easier to maintain a secure setting for a foreign embassy, and its diplomatic mission, if it were located offshore. Maintaining ties and relationships inside a volatile community when an uprising may have recently occurred may be a challenge. Moving into a floating embassy may solve some of those problems.

Scenario #5 – International Court on the High Sea: Many companies have issues in dealing with the complexities of the national court systems and may well want to circumvent national courts in favor of international courts for handling disputes. If the right kind of court system were put into place, on the neutral ground of a floating vessel, companies may voluntarily opt to use it as a more efficient system for dispute resolution.

One approach may be to rewrite the rules of deciding verdicts by opening up the decision to the masses. More on this concept here.

Scenario #6 – Global Election Center: One central features of a floating community like this is neutral ground. So the operation behind conducting a global election, one that crosses national boundaries, is an operation best managed from a location with no national ties.

Sometime in the future, global elections will be used as a marketing tool, to expand awareness of certain events and to give the public the feeling of ownership when it comes to a specific selection process. As an example, each of the following could be handled with an initial slate to choose from, with people around the world making the final selection.

• Location of the Olympics
• Location of the World Cup
• Time Magazine “Person of the Year”
• Selection of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Over the coming years we will see a number of variations to the global election theme and you will be asked to weigh-in on a variety of major global topics.

• Should plastic bags and bottles be banned worldwide?
• Should research be banned on creating new forms of life, human cloning, or genetically modified organisms?
• Should there be a global standard for human rights, issues of right and wrong, or other life-related matters.
• Who owns the Moon or Mars? Who has the right to mine asteroids or mineral deposits found deep within the center of the earth?

To many of us, global elections like these will come across as a nuisance, background noise with very little credibility. But all will be contributing to a larger movement involving global democratic processes.

Living a working at sea …sometime in the future

Final Thoughts

A prospective investor often looks at a new idea and asks the question, “How will this fail?”

An entrepreneur will usually look at it from a vastly different perspective asking the question, “How can I make this succeed?”

In the mind of an entrepreneur, nothing is static or fixed. Everything is changeable, re-workable, and no barrier is too big to overcome.

The idea of large, mainstream corporations using floating ships for scientific or entrepreneurial experimentation may have seemed unrealistic in the past, and surely some of the ideas above — intended as thought pieces and conversation starters — are more likely to come true than others.

But consider that it wasn’t long ago that a small group of English Protestants set out on a much more perilous and unlikely journey. Their aim was simply to establish a new settlement where they might be free to live in accordance with their beliefs and experiment with self-rule. Their journey played a key role in the development of modern democracies. The yearning to live, explore, and pursue liberty has inspired people throughout history to venture out upon the waves.

In the years ahead, we may once again return to the sea to find our true calling.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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As I took the stage, my goal was to introduce the crowd to a series of Eight Grand Challenges, incentivized competitions designed to push humanity to another level.

But as with many crowds, there was a formidable issue in the minds of attendees, a hurdle of acceptance before these challenges would be deemed cause-worthy.

At issue was our obsession with solving all of today’s problems before we dare think about advancing humanity. How can we possibly justify advancing humanity when the money would be far better spent solving today’s massive problems?

Answering this objection first, was critically important, so here is the way I presented it.

If we only focus on solving today’s problems, we become trapped in the past. Every solution leads to another set of problems. Much like the whack-a-mole game at video arcades, as one problem gets pounded down, another pokes its ugly head out.

The only real way out is to advance civilization. By advancing civilization we change the nature of the problems we’re dealing with, and that is exactly what the Eight Grand Challenges have been designed to do.

Three Questions

I began by setting the stage with a series of questions. For this crowd the questions were framed around the vast areas of white space, what we don’t know, compared to the tiny areas of certainty, what we do know.

The three questions were as follows:

1. “If you could live on any planet in the universe, where would you live?” Asking where we want to live on earth is a perfectly reasonable question. But as we all know, we know virtually nothing about the other planets in the universe. To some, this is merely a question too absurd to fathom. But to others, it demonstrated the very real limits we place on our thinking.
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2. “If you had a choice of living at any time in the past or in the future, what would you choose?” Hmmm. Turns out that we don’t know anything about the future, and when we look backwards, we only have a very crude understanding of the past. For all our claims to brilliance and ingenuity, we remain a very unenlightened species.
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3. “In a non-religious context, who is the world’s most famous person?”
   The answers I got from the audience to this question ranged from Leonardo DaVinci, to Isaac Newton, to Michael Jackson, to Thomas Edison, to Gandhi, to Oprah Winfrey. These are all good answers. But my assumption is that the world’s most famous person has not been born yet. Using that assumption, the logical next question is, “What is the accomplishment that will make that person so incredibly famous?”

Put another way, what are the big things that still need to be accomplished?

Answering this question is exactly what led the DaVinci Institute to develop the Eight Grand Challenges in the first place, as well as our work on the Museum of Future Inventions project a few years ago. While still a work in progress, the Museum serves as the long-term guiding vision of what we hope to accomplish in the years ahead.

History of Prizes

In the middle 1800s one of the most popular sports in the United States was billiards. Restaurants and saloons were quick to pick up on the game’s popularity, using it to attract new customers, and soon after the concept of a billiard parlor took hold, with many communities feeling left out if they didn’t have one.

One of the driving forces behind the sport was Michael Phelan, an Irish immigrant, who wrote one of the first American books on the game, and was influential in setting rules and standards of behavior for the game. He founded the Phelan and Collender company, which developed new table and cushion designs and heavily promoted the sport. Later, in 1884 his company merged with the Brunswick.

However, billiards was a sport that created a huge demand for ivory, the only known substance at the time for manufacturing billiard balls. By 1860 the demand for ivory had grown so intense that industry experts estimated over 100,000 elephants a year were being slaughtered to fill all the orders. To make matter worse, because of the imperfections in the ivory, they were only able to extract around eight billiard balls per elephant. A truly sad commentary on American consumerism.

Michael Phelan recognized the problem and in 1863 offered up the $10,000 Phelan and Collender prize for the best ivory substitute for making billiard balls. Six years later in 1869, John Wesley Hyatt came forward with his invention of Celluloid, the world’s first practical synthetic plastic. Although he was never paid the prize money, he went on to found the Albany Billiard Ball Company and the prize inspired a major milestone in the early days of the plastics industry.

Throughout history there are many examples of incentive prizes that produced amazing results.

• In 1714 the British Parliament offered a cash prize for reducing shipwrecks by creating a precise method for determining a ship’s longitude. The prize of ₤14,315 was won by John Harrison for a specialized precision clock: a chronometer.

• In 1919, Raymond Orteig, a New York hotelier, announced a $25,000 prize for the first person to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh won that prize, opening the door to transoceanic air travel.

• In 1980, a $100,000 prize was created by computer science professor Edward Fredkin, for the first computer to beat a reigning world chess champion.  The prize was awarded to IBM’s inventors of the Deep Blue machine in 1997.  Deep Blue beat world champion Gary Kasparov in the final game of a tied, 6-game match in May, 1997.  The Deep Blue inventors were Fang Hsu, Murray Campbell, and Joseph Hone.
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• Launched in 1996, the Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X-Prize Foundation offered a $10 million prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The prize was won on October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch, by the Tier One project designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, using the experimental space plane called SpaceShipOne.

These are but a few of the many prize competitions used to shift public attention.

The Hamilton Project, an effort spearheaded by the Brookings Institute, endorses the use of prizes to stimulate technological innovation. It states that technology prizes are “an old idea whose time has come again.” The project went on to state, “Prizes can also generate public excitement and enthusiasm for science and technology, and encourage more young people to pursue careers in science, engineering, or technology-based entrepreneurship.”

Our Need to Compete

The most famous prizes in the world today are the Nobel Prizes. However, those are backward-looking prizes intended to reward some of the world’s best and brightest for past accomplishments.

Incentive prizes are different. They serve a vastly different purpose, to incentive people for future accomplishments.

Our need to compete is something that has been instilled in us at an early age. We compete with people physically in athletic competitions, and intellectually in academic competitions. But when it comes to science and math, the fundamental building blocks needed to advance civilization; we have very few finish lines.

Eight Grand Challenges

The Eight Grand Challenges have been framed around incredibly difficult fetes and at stake will be a combination of national pride, personal legacies, and laying claim to unprecedented achievements in science and industry.

Here is an overview of the “Eight Grand Challenges”:

1. Race to the Core: First team to build a probe that makes it all the way to the center of the earth with a communication system capable of sending real-time sensory data to the surface.
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2. Viewing the Past: Create a technology capable of replaying an unrecorded event that happened no less than 20 years earlier in actual-size, in holographic form.
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3. Disassembling Matter: First team to reduce a solid block of granite (2’ cube) to particles no larger than molecules in less than 10 seconds, using less than 500 watts of power without causing an explosion or physical damage to objects more than 10′ away.
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4. The Gravity Challenge: Demonstrate gravitational control over an object weighing no less than 2,000 lbs. by doubling the force of gravity to 4,000 lbs., reducing the force of gravity by 50% to 1,000 lbs., and creating negative gravity by lifting the object 1,000 ft and returning it back to the original position with no explosions and in less than 10 minutes.
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5. The Ultimate Small Storage Particle: Create an electron-based data storage system no larger than 10 millimeters cubed that can be manufactured for less than $1 per 100 terabytes and is capable of uploading, storing, and retrieving a volume of information equal to the U.S. Library of Congress in less than 10 minutes using less than 1 watt per TB/month.
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6. Travel at the Speed of Light: Create a scientific probe capable of traveling at the speed of light for a distance no less than the Earth to Saturn with information sensors to capture stresses, impacts, and details along the way.
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7. Swarm-Bots: Create a swarm of 10,000 synchronized micro drones no larger than 10 millimeters across (height, width, and depth) capable of lifting a 250-pound person to a height of 100 feet and gently returning him/her to the ground.
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8. The 10-Second Interface: Create a direct-to-the-mind interface that will allow 25 average people to answer a series of questions within 10 seconds with no harmful side effects to the user.
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Teams

Unique to these competitions, only countries will be allowed to enter teams, and each country will be limited to no more than two teams. All teams will be required to maintain accurate records of their personnel, research data, and stages of progress.

The Prize

Similar to the Olympics, members of the winning team will each receive a gold medal. However, the true value will come from the accomplishment. Each has the potential to unlock vast new industries.

More importantly, the team that wins will have carved out their own legacy with a permanent place in the next generation of history books.

Entrance Fee

The cost of managing competitions of this nature will be significant. For this reason the entrance fee for each team has been set at $1 million USD per team. The money will be used to fund an endowment to insure the long-term viability of each competition.

As the competitions ramp up, an entirely new organization will be created. The resulting organization will require a highly skilled management team and staff members who possess extraordinary technical expertise. The management team will need to be in place for many years, perhaps even decades.

The entrance fee represents a tiny fraction of one percent of the amount each team will need to budget for their efforts. Team budgets for each competition will likely be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Governing Bodies

Each competition will also require its own governing body. Since each will be a venture into the unknown, pushing the limits of science and technology, there will need to be an international governing body responsible for oversight and dealing with unforeseeable circumstances.

The exact makeup and responsibilities of the governing bodies will be determined over the coming months. But minimally they will include one representative per team from the countries they represent.

Final Thoughts

Some competitions may not be completed in our lifetime, and each will be constructed around a framework that will allow it to evolve with our understanding of science.

They are designed to stretch human thinking and push the envelope. More than just a series of competition, we view them as a turning point in world history. Our hope, at this stage, is that they will stir the imagination of people around the world and incite a global conversation.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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I often describe the future with human-like characteristics. By doing so, it helps me think through our relationship with the future in novel ways. So here is an example of this:

The future hates complacency. It hates complacency so much so that it has built-in self-sabotaging mechanisms to continually hold our feet to the fire. It will not allow us to shift into neutral. If we are not moving forward, we are moving backwards. There is no middle ground.

People are at their best when they are challenged. If we don’t challenge ourselves, the future has a way of giving us challenges anyway. There is great value in our struggles and human nature has shown us that we only tend to value the things we struggle to achieve.

We are currently out of balance between backward-looking problem-solving and forward-looking accomplishments. Forward accomplishments help erase past problems. They solve problems in a different way. We need more forward-looking accomplishments, and our greatest undertakings in the future will come in this area.

Yes, I understand this sounds a bit abstract, but bear with me.

Our need for future accomplishments will also create a need for better systems to regulate, manage, and leverage the activities surrounding them. These systems will need to be global in nature, and over time, a few will emerge to challenge the power of nations. That time is coming very soon.

From National Systems to Global Systems

For decades the ringing of the bell marked the opening and closing of each day on the New York Stock Exchange.  This symbolic beginning and ending of the workday had set the pace for business in the US.  To many, work only seemed to mattered when the money people were watching.

However, that all changed once the Internet gave day-traders the ability to manage accounts around the world on the Tokyo, Honk Kong, Indian, Athens, and London stock exchanges. Start and stop times suddenly became blurred, and eventually went away.  The metronome of business began to pulse to a different beat, and the once distinct start and stop times of Wall Street ended, it created a stream of never-ending business opportunities.

This ever quickening pace of business has given strategists a whole new playbook, which has, in turn, forced companies to devise new systems and strategies to not only give them a competitive edge, but in the process, trump the competition.

Government, on the other hand, has virtually no competition, and consequentially, little motivation to innovate.  Like a lumbering elephant alongside the sleek cat-like speed of business, government has done little to keep pace with change, and even less to experiment, innovate, and improve.

Our governmental systems are evolving at speeds that are exponentially slower than the businesses that use them.

People in government are synchronized to a radically different clock. They are neither driven to compete nor incentivized to reinvent themselves.  With their change-resistant inertia firmly anchored in the past, internal government systems have grown increasingly dysfunctional, sparking a growing voice of discontent among business veterans.  Deteriorating education, increasingly expensive healthcare, a legal system with an unfathomable number of laws, seemingly corrupt financial institutions, incomprehensible tax codes, and an adversarial attitude toward change have all paved the way for a new breed of governing entities to emerge.

FedEx as a Global System

The original idea for FedEx came when Fred Smith wrote a term paper as an undergraduate at Yale about a very simple observation: As society automated, as people began to put computers in banks to cancel checks, and people began to put sophisticated electronics in airplanes, the corporate world was going to need a completely different logistics system.

Fred was working as a charter pilot at the Tweed New Haven Airport flying to various airports in the New England states talking to pilots who worked for many of the high-tech companies like IBM and Xerox and found out what a difficult proposition it was to keep their field-service engineers and their parts and logistics systems operating. Many of the corporate airplanes had to be repurposed to fly computer and machine parts around whenever something broke down.

Several years later, after a stint in the Marines, Fred revisited the problem and found out that things had become significantly worse.

Emery Air Freight was trying to solve the exact same problem, but was trying to use an infrastructure built around passenger planes, which weren’t designed to handle freight. So they were force-fitting the rapid movement of high-value-added and high-technology products into a transportation system that wasn’t designed for it.

So FedEx was proposed as a customized system to solve this problem. To do this they had to have a nationwide clearinghouse – an integrated system with trucks and planes to give the level of service that customers needed.

For their network, they used the Federal Reserve Bank clearing house system, where all payments converge on a central location to complete the transaction, as their model.  And that’s where the Federal Express name came from. Fred wanted something that sounded substantial and nationwide, and American Express had already been taken.

It was all made possible when the government began to deregulate the airline industry. Prior to that time, both surface and air transportation was erroneously based on linear routes, with complicated systems for making connections.

It all came together during 1977-78 when the airlines were deregulated. A couple years later in 1980, the US federal government deregulated interstate transportation. Because the Postal Service had a monopoly on delivering mail, document delivery wasn’t allowed from a legal standpoint until 1978. The standards changed in 1978 as to what constituted an item that was covered by the postal monopoly. Merrill Lynche and a few others waged an ongoing assault through lobbyists and the press, telling Congress that the USPS service was not acceptable.  At the time, Merrill was being hamstrung in its efforts to move bond “Blue Books” and other types of financial prospectuses.

Bowing under the pressure, congress exempted certain types of publications and documents from the postal monopoly in legislation called the Private Express Statutes. As long as a company was delivering something overnight, and charged twice as much as the First Class postage stamps, then it was exempt from the Postal monopoly. So that defined the business FedEx went into.

Backed with venture capital funding amounting to $91 million, along with another $4 million that Fred Smith had personally received as an inheritance, FedEx started out with 14 planes, initially flying between 25 cities.

In 1985 FedEx began regularly scheduled flights to Europe, adding service to Japan in 1988, the Middle East in 1989, and the rest of the world in 1991.

In just 18 years FedEx had become a global delivery system, not unlike many of our other global systems, most of which took centuries to develop.

Eight Current Global Systems

Global systems are a fascinating area of study because they provide a context so few ever consider.

When we look at early systems such as written communications with Phoenician cuneiform, Mayan numerals, or the systems that had to be in place for engineering and building the Egyptian pyramids, it’s easy to see that system thinking has been around a long time.  But global systems are a more recent innovation.

The most obvious advantage to global systems are the efficiencies they create.  As an example, when a person who has spent their life hunting and fishing for food is able to walk to a store and purchase food, they suddenly have far more time in their life to do other things.

Similarly, when a company who has had to make painful arrangements for the delivery of goods from the other side of the world can begin working with FedEx who provides painless global delivery, the company suddenly has time to focus on other critical problems.

Here are eight examples of global systems and their development:

1. Global Trade – In 1264 when Marco Polo traveled the fabled “Silk Road” from Europe to what is now Beijing, China, he made some of the first inroads into creating a system for global trade.

2. Global Sea Transportation – On the evening of August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail under the Spanish flag from Palos, Spain with three ships on his journey to America.  This historic journey triggered an age of exploration, but more importantly gave rise to a new era of global sea transportation system.

3. Global Measurement System - In his 1670 book, the Observationes diametrorum solis et lunae apparentium, French scientist Gabriel Mouton proposed the basis for what would later become the metric system.  Mouton described a decimal system of measurement based on the circumference of the Earth, creating a global measurement system recognized (although not fully adopted) by countries around the world.

4. Global News Service – While the telegraph was still in the early stages of development, in 1848 Paul Reuter founded the Reuters News Agency using carrier pigeons to provide the missing link between Berlin and Paris. The carrier pigeons were much faster than the post train, giving Reuter faster access to stock news from the Paris stock exchange. In 1851, the carrier pigeons were retired with the installation of a direct telegraph line. Paul Reuters played a critical role in the development of today’s global news services.

5. Global Time Zones – In October 1884, at the request of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur, the International Meridian Conference was held in Washington, D.C. to form the basis for times and time zones around the world. Twenty-five countries were represented by 41 delegates to establish what has become today’s global time zone system.

6. Global Air Transportation – Charles Lindbergh, better known as “Lucky Lindy,” became famous for completing the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic, from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, to Paris in 1927 in the “Spirit of St. Louis.” This single act ushered in the age of global air transportation.

7. Global Navigation System – Launched in 1978, the GPS system serves as a Global Navigation Satellite System utilizing a constellation of 24 medium Earth orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals enabling a GPS receiver to determine its location, speed and direction.

8. The Internet – In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee developed the Internet protocols that would become the World Wide Web, as a hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.

While these are just a sampling of the global systems that now exist, many more are on their way.  In fact, the Internet has become the perfect platform for global systems to be designed, tested, and flourish.

Eight Emerging Global Systems

Here are some examples of global systems that are currently emerging online.  I think it is safe to say that none of these were started with the intention of becoming “global systems,” but in the DNA of their business structures, they now exist as global systems in the making.

1. Global Search – Google, Yahoo, Baidu
2. Global Encyclopedia – Wikipedia
3. Global Atlas – Google Earth, Google Maps, Mapquest
4. Global Social Networking – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hi5
5. Global Video Archive – YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe
6. Global 3-D Virtual World – Second Life, World of Warcraft, Club Penguin
7. Global Marketplace – eBay, Amazon, Craig’s List, Buy.com
8. Global Music Store – iTunes, last.fm, Amazon

Pay close attention to the nature of this list.  We have just made the transition from top-down organizational structures to bottom-up organic systems that are participant driven and constantly evolving.

The driving force behind developing new global systems is that each one represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity.  Yes, in addition to making life easier, they make great economic sense.

The next wave of global systems, however, will not be run by corporations, but rather by a new breed of what I call Experimental Nation States, governmental-like entities that experiment with new ways for managing the world.

Eight Future Global Systems

Future global systems will emerge from today’s existing industry associations. Many already have members living in multiple countries, and many seek to balance their decision-making councils with representation from each member country.

Here are eight possible future global systems:

1. Global accounting standards for publicly traded companies
2. Global currency
3. Global airport authority to manage airport standards and policies around the world
4. Global oceans authority for managing everything that happens in international waters
5. Global genealogy systems and standards
6. Global ownership authority to govern standards and regulations, for personal ownership rights
7. Global ethics standards
8. Global patent systems

Many of these organizations already exist on some level. But over time, the organizations that manage global systems will grow in influence and authority and begin to usurp the power of nations.

As an example, WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization is responsible for bridging the chasm between existing intellectual property laws that exist in nations around the world. Even with WIPO in place there are huge problems with competing rules, laws, and standards in the world of patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

If we start with the vision that sometime in the future, a person will be able to file a patent and it will be universally recognized and honored around the world, the natural question becomes, who will that organization be and what will it take for them to achieve that level of clout and authority?

By its very nature, any global system aspiring for power will become a threat to existing national organizations. The evolution of global systems will involve countless hard fought battles against their current member base. Even though the need for global systems will be billed as a solution for the bias, fraud, and self interest found in current national systems, it will be more complicated than that.

In some cases, the corruption and self-interest inside global leadership teams will be greater than the corruption inside the country systems they’re intended to represent. This is simply the nature of this type of authority.

Defining moments will occur when the global organizations begin to challenge the authority of their national counterparts. In some cases the organizations will be set up as e-democracies with members voting on every key issue.

Global System Architects – Tomorrow’s Great Power Brokers

If you think into the future, 100 years from now, what will be the most powerful entities in the world?

Will it still be nations like the U.S. or will it be something else?

As an example, will it be possible that corporate CEO’s have far more power and control than leaders of individual countries? Will religious organizations, wielding their international clout, begin to usurp the authority of their host nations? Will groupings of countries such as the European Union, OPEC, and the UN supersede the power of their member states? Will non-governmental organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and perhaps even ICANN rise in influence to a point where they can usurp the authority of individual countries? Will the economic ties of large professional organizations, such as IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – currently with 365,000 members worldwide), transcend the authority of the countries where their members live?

In the past, the power of a nation was considered the ability to defeat an enemy and protect its own people. But power today is more about the ability to influence and control others, even though a few still cling to the notion that it’s about defeating the enemy on the battlefield.

In the future, a few dominant countries will continue to serve as the global police to quash uprisings and resolve disputes. But as communication systems improve, we will see fewer and fewer willing to openly wage war with an enemy.

Most of the power shifts between now and 2050 will result from subversive economic battles, and the ability to control or disrupt revenue streams. For the disruptors, the tools for creating chaos are becoming more destructive, and soon a single individual with the right kind of gear will be able to shut down, perhaps even destroy, an entire nation.

The power centers of the future will be the countries with systems most adept at competing in the global marketplace. Large countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India, Japan, England, and USA will still play major roles, but smaller countries will have a distinct advantage with their ability to quickly adapt and experiment with new approaches.

So how does all this play out? My prediction is that global system architects will emerge as some of the dominant power brokers of the future, and those who recognize this shift will begin to position themselves in way to take advantage of it. A few enlightened people have already recognized this shift and the change is already beginning to happen.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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In 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the famous Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that granted some freedom to slaves. But true freedom was still a century away for those who lived in the black vs. white world leading up to the Civil Rights movement, an effort that began in earnest in the 1950s.

The movement for freeing the slaves was a social cause that tore the country apart, resulting in a civil war and a century’s worth of social scarring that needed to heal before the effort could begin again.

In 1954 the stage was set with a Supreme Court ruling that made school segregation illegal. After years of marches, protests, and demonstrations, the Civil Rights movement peaked in 1963 with Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. After a few more tumultuous years of social unrest involving the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King the movement came to an end in 1968 with the passage of several pieces of legislation aimed at outlawing racial discrimination.

In the past, movements like this were filled with tension and riddled with conflict. But that is quickly changing.

Every cause has a beginning, middle, and end. When deep-seated differences are involved, tensions will rise and fighting will occur. But for most movements, where the stakes are less divisive, society simply adjusts and moves on.

In the fluid society we find ourselves in today, with massive communication systems for organizing and influencing public opinion, social causes are far easier to orchestrate. And this ease with which we can manage a movement is giving rise to a new breed of influencer – the cause-architect.

As our ability to communicate, influence, and organize increases, the likelihood of violence decreases. This also means the life-cycle of most causes today will be far shorter than those of the past. More things happen quicker.

It has also turned the “cause architect,” the key person serving as the movement’s organizer and inspirational leader, into a respected position.

Once we begin to understand the life-cycle of a cause, and the stages of activity that take place at the beginning, middle, and end, leaders can begin to manage far more organized efforts than ever in the past.

Stage One – Launching a New Cause

Whenever there are polarizing differences between two groups of people, there is an opening for a new cause to emerge. In the past, the launching points stemmed from things like poverty and wealth gaps. Today it may be caused by differences in customs, immigration standards, ethics, and values.

However, those ingredients alone do not constitute a movement.

Movements begin with a single event that triggers a significant reaction, something I call a fuse-lighting event. This particular event will begin a chain reaction of other events leading to the creation of a stage-one social movement. For example, the Civil Rights movement grew from the reaction to Rosa Parks, a black woman, riding in the whites-only section of a bus.

Similarly, the Polish Solidarity movement, which eventually toppled the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, resulted from trade union activist Anna Walentynowicz being fired from work.

In one we know far less about in the U.S., the South African shack dwellers’ movement began because a road blockade was set up in response to the sudden selling off of a small piece of land promised for housing to a developer.

Typically, social movements are created around some charismatic leader with the right combination of skills to both engineer and execute a strategy, and organize and manage a following.

After the social movement sees its first sparks of activity, there are two likely phases of recruitment. The first phase will gather the people deeply interested in the primary goal and ideal of the movement. The second wave of recruits will usually come after the movement has had some success and becomes trendy. The later recruits typically don’t stick around very long.

Stage Two – Defining Success

Many movements fall apart because they are not focused around any kind of success strategy. If there is an implicit demand for change, there needs to be a clear description of what that change will look like.

The most successful movements will develop a series of benchmarks to help measure progress along the way. And they will not succeed if the whole effort is simply oriented around a need.

Needs are ongoing but causes have a definable life cycle with an actual endpoint. More important than the endpoint, definable life cycles have definable criteria for success. Success criteria creates the foundational underpinnings of good management metrics.

Tomorrow’s tools will allow us to micro-analyze virtually any situation and find the primary inflection points where a change can be most effective, and good metrics can be put into place. If the metrics are measurable, progress can be tracked.

In the past, people with a big heart, who dedicate their lives to helping the needy, were held in high esteem. It was a virtuous life filled with personal fulfillment. In the future, an even greater virtue will be bestowed upon those who are capable of solving the predicaments that create the needy class in the first place. Cause architects will extend their work far beyond working with the disadvantaged, and set out to wrestle social injustice to the ground. Cause architecture will become an exciting new profession well suited for inspired young people who both want to make a name for themselves and live a life of meaning.

Stage Three – Finding the End

Virtually every piece of music has a beginning, middle, and end. Much like telling a good story, books and television scripts also have a discernable beginning, middle, and end.

The best cause architects will be the ones who continually work themselves out of a job. Their role will be to construct a realistic action plan, execute, and complete the process of solving major social problems.

Future cause architects will come armed with tools unimaginable by today’s standards, as well as tools they invent along the way.

However, the most important element in the whole equation comes with knowing when it’s over. Asking for too much is as bad as asking for too little. A good cause architect will know when they’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.

Final thoughts…

Causes represent a natural system for checks and balances. Done correctly they can be a very effective tools for righting social wrongs and correcting the excesses of government and the political system.

The reason why movements are not used more often is because they’re messy. In a social setting with lots of moving parts, it’s very challenging to find the right way to puzzle everything together and make something significant happen.

But that’s about to change.

With the right tools, a cause architect can be very effective in bringing about change quickly. People with money will find a change-agent with a plan very attractive.

Philanthropists aspire to a higher calling. They don’t want to just fund the needy, they want to change the outcome of the poor. And they are far more likely to funnel money through someone who understands what success looks like.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

On Tuesday evening we had a packed audience at the DaVinci Institute to discuss the future of micro farming. Admittedly, we weren’t terribly well organized and the range of topics we touched on were far more than most of us could reasonably consider in a single setting. But for those who took part in the discussion groups, some amazing ideas came to light.

Our primary goal was to build a community of interest, and judging from the responses afterwards, we have all the makings of a very vibrant community coming together.

The next step will be to push the envelope of thinking and begin creating visions of the future that will influence others around the world.

As part of our effort to help people think more creatively, I mentioned the idea of tree-jacking where we will someday be able to jack into trees and more directly influence their growth patterns. One example I gave was the rocking char tree.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could cause a tree to grow so all of the branched grew into perfectly shaped rocking chairs? So, come harvest time, we just climb up the tree and cut down all the rocking chairs?”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Plant Intelligence

So how smart are plants?  And, can we make them smarter?

Plants like the Venus Flytrap demonstrate a small amount of intelligence when they attract a fly into their sticky trap and close their mouth around it.

In a somewhat similar display of plant intelligence, Poison Ivy plants are able to sense danger through the proximity of a person or animal, and as a defense mechanism, the plant will shoot out a poisonous spay.

But are plants trainable?  Can we implant shapes or design specs into a plant and have them grow into that shape?

As I mentioned above, will it be possible to “train” a tree to have its branches grow into the shape of end tables, coffee tables, chairs, or rocking chairs.  So once the branches are fully grown, we can walk up to the tree and harvest the rocking chairs by cutting them down.  This will be similar to harvesting apples or cherries.

If you think that sounds crazy, a Chinese man has already patented a technique for growing his own wooden chairs.  In an article published in the China Morning Business View, the inventor, Mr. Wu, from Liaoning City, Shengyang province, moulds branches into shape while the tree is still growing.

He uses elm trees which are pliant and do not break easily.  Mr. Wu, who’s in his 60s, says it takes him about five years to grow a tree chair, from saplings to the finished article. As the ‘chair’ grows, he constantly trims and guides it into shape before the chair is finally harvested.

It was reported that Mr. Wu has one tree chair in his home, which he harvested in September 2006, and six more growing in his field. He hopes that one day people will be able to grow all of their furniture instead of having to buy it from a store.

While still a confusing technology in its Neanderthal stages of development, it becomes an important piece of building the visions of what’s possible.

Will we someday be able to “grow” our own clothing, clothing that is intelligent, self-repairing, able to change colors to match our mood, and protective in extreme elements? Can this “grown” clothing be physically enhancing, capable of making us stronger, faster, able to stop bullets, but also capable of keeping our weight down and at the same time keeping out body trim and fit?

If these ideas seem a bit too extreme, rest assured they are only scratching the surface.

World’s Most Dangerous Animals

After doing some research, I’ve assembled a list of the top eight animals that pose the greatest threat to humankind.  These numbers are global estimates of the human casualty count associated with each of these creatures.

1. Mosquito – An estimated 2-3 million fatalities a year
2. Venomous Snakes – An estimated 50,000-125,000 fatalities a year
3. Deer - An estimated 2,000-4,000 fatalities a year.
4. Scorpions – An estimated 800-2,000 fatalities a year.
5. Big Cats (Lions, Tigers, Leopards, etc) – An estimated 800 fatalities a year.
6. Crocodiles – An estimated 600-800 fatalities a year.
7. Bees – An estimated 400-600 fatalities a year.
8. Elephants – An estimated 300-500 fatalities a year.

For those of you who think in groups of 10, you can add hippos with estimated 100-150 fatalities a year and that most over-rated of evil sea creatures, the shark, with somewhere around 100 fatalities a year.

The reason I find this to be such an intriguing list is because of the animal in the number 3 slot, that vicious creature we’ve learned to love and hate, the deer.

On a recent trip to South Dakota my wife and I had the misfortune of colliding with a deer late one evening.  While I had just enough time to stomp on my brakes and wear a flat side onto my tires, it wasn’t quite enough time to avoid the deer that appeared out of nowhere in the darkness.  The deer apparently had no way of intellectually connecting the engine noise, screeching tires, and blazing headlights with the coming danger.

The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that the white-tailed deer alone kills around 130 Americans each year simply by causing car accidents. In 1994, the “predator” deer had a banner year, causing 211 human deaths in car wrecks.

In the U.S. there are about 1.5 million deer/vehicle collisions annually, resulting in 29,000 human injuries and more than $1 billion in insurance claims in addition to the death toll.  Approx 50% of all the accidents happen in Oct, Nov, and Dec during mating season.

Deer also carry the ticks that transmit Lyme disease to about 13,000 people each year. Economic damage to agriculture, timber, and landscaping by deer totals more than $1.2 billion a year.

Yes, one of the world’s most dangerous animals in the world is the lowly deer.  This is one of those facts that if told to people living in the 1800’s, they would have found it quite amusing.

But it also points to the fact that, up until this point, deer are an animal that is not capable of learning.  Evolutionary theory would lead us to believe that given the confrontational nature of deer and cars, that some amount of learning should have been passed down from one generation to the next.

Indeed there is empirical evidence of this being true with birds, where the number of dead birds found stuck in the grills of cars has dropped dramatically over the past few decades.  But the same is not true for deer.

So the question becomes – are deer incapable of learning, or have we simply not found the proper systems or techniques for training them?

Speculating on this notion, if we were able to increase the intelligence of deer just slightly, then logically they would become aware of the dangers of running in front of cars.  Nearly all other animal species have learned to avoid cars, so it seems reasonable that deer must simply be missing something.

In fact, if we push this line of thinking to the comical extreme and we increase deer intelligence a few steps beyond collision avoidance, the deer-crossing signs found many places along roads could be rotated 90 degrees and changed from “deer-crossing” signs to “car-crossing” signs for the deer to read.

Perhaps this comes across as little more than an amusing idea, but it brings us to a much larger topic to consider – animal intelligence.

Animal Intelligence

Are animals capable of learning?

Many animals have special cognitive abilities that allow them to excel in their particular habitats, but they do not often solve novel problems. Some of course do, and we call them intelligent, but none are as quick-witted as humans.

In the 1970s, Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University, trained a chimp named Nim Chimpsky to recognize 125 different sign language gestures and use these signs to communicate on an elementary level.  Circus trained animals such as horses, elephants, and tigers have learned to respond to human voice commands.  In fact most dogs are able to display a high degree of perception from being immersed in the communication of their owners.

But is it possible to raise this existing level of intelligence even further?

As an example, if we were able to raise the intelligence of a silk worm, could a silk worm be trained to automatically “weave a tie” or “create a shirt”?

To make this a more plausible, would it be possible to create a material frame that a silk worm could navigate around, effectively creating a shirt that could later be “harvested”, dyed, and packaged for sale?

Swallows are the pesky birds that create the dirty mud nests on the sides of buildings.  With a little training, would it be possible to teach the swallows to work with cement instead of mud, and use cement to build foundations for buildings instead of their mud nests.  Perhaps they could even be trained to build monuments or towers.

Think that sounds a little too farfetched?  Well, here is another variable to consider.

Growing Rocks

The idea of growing a rock sounds equally far-fetched at first glance, but there are many instances of rocks and rock-like material being grown in nature.

One obvious example is crystals.  The process of forming a crystalline structure is often referred to as crystallization. When heating liquids, the cooling process often results in the generation of crystalline material.

Crystalline structures occur in many classes of materials, with numerous types of chemical bonds. Almost all metal exists in a polycrystalline state; amorphous or single-crystal metals must be produced synthetically, often with great difficulty. Ionically bonded crystals can form upon solidification of salts, either from a molten fluid or when it condenses from a solution.

Covalently bonded crystals are also very common, with notable examples being diamond, silica, and graphite. Polymer materials generally will form crystalline regions, but the length of the molecules usually prevents complete crystallization. Weak Van der Waals forces can also play a role in a crystal structure; for example, this type of bonding loosely holds together the hexagonal-patterned sheets in graphite.

Another example of growing rock-like material is found in ocean coral.

Corals are marine animals that exist as small polyps, typically in colonies of many identical individuals. The coral group includes reef builders that are found in tropical oceans, which secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.

A coral “head”, commonly perceived to be a single organism, is actually formed of thousands of individual but genetically identical polyps, each polyp is only a few millimeters in diameter. Over thousands of generations, the polyps lay down a skeleton that is characteristic of their species. A head of coral grows by asexual reproduction of the individual polyps.

Using what may be considered a more abstract view of nature, some view the earth itself as capable of “growing” its own rocks and mountains.  When volcanoes spew forth their rivers of molten lava, we are able to witness the creation of new rocks.  The key question is not “can it be controlled?” but rather “when will we be able to control it?”

Where do we go from here?

Placing boundaries around our thinking can have both positive and negative effects. On one hand, a boundary can keep us focused and more productive. At the same time, it will prevent us from seeing the logical next step.

While it’s easy for me to blur the lines between plants and animals and between organic and inorganic material, it may not be terribly useful to go down that path.

As the micro agronomy group meets over the coming months, we will begin to settle in on common visions and common goals.

It will be a fascinating process to watch, and I feel quite honored to be part of it.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Futurist Thomas Frey at the TEDx University of Chicago event

We are a very backward looking society.

We’re very backward looking in that we’ve all personally experienced the past.  As we look around, we see evidence of the past all around us.   The past is very knowable, yet we will spend the rest of our lives in the future.

My job as a futurist is to help turn people around and give them some idea of what the future holds.

Our visions drive us forward.  Great visions have a way of infecting nearly everyone they touch.  As ideas flow into a crowded room, they create wants, needs, and desires, and these, in turn, create markets.  Businesses have become very good at spotting the unmet desires of people, by developing products that fulfilling them. This cyclical force of meeting market demand creates entirely new economies.  And it all starts with the vision.

A vision can be a very powerful tool.

Visions come in many forms.  Sometimes a vision is nothing more than a fleeting thought in the middle of the day, other times they spontaneously develop into elaborate plans demanding a person’s full attention for days on end.

The more detailed a vision is, the more doable it becomes.  A vision comprised of only a few words on a page cannot possibly compare on the likelihood-of-things-happening-scale to a detailed vision that comes with a complete business plan, pro formas, schematic diagrams, parts lists, and animated video.  The vision is only the start.

A great vision begins more as an art form than a science, later adding details, attributes, and emotional commitment as it progresses along on the path to realism.

Most visions are like tiny seedlings, fighting for the nutrients they gain from mindshare, as they spring to life.

It’s quite common, however, for industry politics to come into play, and many of these seedling-like visions get destroyed prematurely.  For some, a new way of doing things can be a threat to another person’s research, and a preemptive strike is considered necessary as a way of protecting a few square miles of scientific turf.

It’s interesting to note that industry observers are becoming far more savvy.  For some, a preemptive strike on the credibility of one form of research can also be viewed as a signal to pay attention to the situation.  It also has a way of driving key pieces of research underground, to emerge later as a more durable body of work.

Contact:

If you’d like to get more information about the process for “Communicating with the Future” or to have Futurist Thomas Frey speak at one of your events, please contact Deb at deb (at) davinciinstitute.com or 303-666-4133.

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

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