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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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It has always seemed outrageous to me that in a world where so many people are dying of obesity, that we can still have an equally unacceptable number of people dying of starvation.

Approximately 25% of the world’s population is overweight and 13% of the world goes to bed hungry every night. Yes, we have gone from 26% of the world population being undernourished in the 1960 to 13% today, but it remains an intolerably high number.

The problem doesn’t stem from a lack of food. World agriculture produces 17% more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70% population increase.

The principal problem stems from governments that repress economic activities and archaic distribution systems bottlenecked by local powerbrokers that would rather see people die than lose an opportunity to make money.

Emergency rations airlifted into famine-stricken regions often suffer from the same powerbroker issues that prevent desperate people from receiving the food that was intended for them.

For this reason, I would like to explore the idea of a novel delivery system that would involve airdropped rations with an external packaging that would form an airfoil when dropped to insure a broad scattered pattern of distribution. Here is how it would work.

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This was a photo I took of the audience from stage

On April 30th I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote to a group of over 1,200 VIPs at the International Education Forum II: “Innovation in Education” held in Ankara, Turkey. These were remarkable people dedicated to reforming the state of education in a country poised for greatness. (More on the Forum here.)

The event gave center stage to some of the world’s most visionary thinkers in the field of education, and the audience listened intently to every idea being presented.

At issue is a Turkish national education system that remains far behind most industrialized countries when evaluated on the basis of testing scores in the key areas of science, technology, engineering, and math.

With forums like this, where ideas from around the world come together, it’s very difficult to translate these ideas into actionable plans. Free thinkers often frustrate public policy people because ideas that work on a small scale often don’t translate into large-scale implementations, and cultural differences can interfere with things that work well elsewhere.

After leaving Ankara, I spent the past week thinking about the challenges that lie ahead for this critically important country, trying to reconcile the challenges of making changes within a national education system and the needs of the future. Here are some of my thoughts in this area.

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