There is great value in the unknown.

My good friend Jeff Samson put it this way. “If I am ignorant of something and it is suddenly presented to me, I may find it innovative. The other option is that I will be annoyed by it, but eventually when enough others have accepted it, I will buy in and consider it innovative. So ignorance is as important to innovation as knowledge!”

Ignorance is also a valuable part of the future. Once a future is known, we quickly lose interest. For this reason, our greatest motivations in life come from NOT knowing the future.

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

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

Using this as a backdrop, here are four unexpected macro trends that I see dramatically influencing our future.

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When is the last time you heard a statement that caused you to stop dead in your tracks?

It doesn’t happen very often, but for each of us, there are a few unusual sound bites that will permeate our senses and sway our thinking.

On these rare occasions, it’s usually a statement by someone we trust, with the power, authority, and credibility to make such a declaration.

However, inside all of the statements the world finds important are the crème de la crème, the Richter scale shifting assertions that really stand out. These are statements so insightful and memorable that they have the power to change the course of history.

For this reason, I wanted to focus on eight shocking statements made in 2012, and discuss briefly how they will invariably shift our outlook on the future.

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ABC’s Weekend Breakfast with Andrew Geoghegan

On Nov 26-28th, I will be speaking at the Creative Innovations 2012 event in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of the conference will be “Wicked Problems, Great Opportunities! Leadership and courage for volatile times.”

With over 50 key influencers from around the world on hand to inspire people’s thinking, this will indeed be a world-changing event. In fact, it will be the largest innovations conference ever held in the southern hemisphere.

Leading up to this event I’ve done a series of talks and interviews as a way to help expand people’s thinking about the world ahead.

One rather unusual interview was with The Age Magazine on the future of visual arts. Writer Michael Lallo encouraged me to go a little crazy in our discussions so here is what we talked about.

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For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and find that our air is going extinct?

According to Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, one of the world’s languages dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will disappear, as young people abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish.

Researchers estimate that over the last 500 years, half of the world’s languages, from Etruscan to Tasmanian, have vanished. So what do we lose when a language goes silent?

When you mess with a person’s language, you mess with their heritage, their culture, and their affinity with their ancestors. Changing language somehow invalidates all of the work of the past, disgracing the culture of their forefathers.

For this reason I would like to propose the creation of a Global Language Archive, similar, in some respects, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway which has archived 1.5 million distinct seed samples of agricultural crops from around the world.

Different than some of the online efforts to archive languages that tend to lose much of the dimensionality of culture, I’d like you to think of the Global Language Archive as the “Louvre of Languages” where culture and language collide in a way that all can experience. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

When Charles Corry walked onto the stage of the Shark Tank-like Piranha Pit at Saturday’s DaVinci Inventor Showcase, his iExpander product was still $6,000 away from making the goal of $125,000 on Kickstarter. As of this morning, he has not only passed his goal, now exceeding $140,000, but still has 6 more days to go.

The iExpander is a brilliantly designed case for the iPhone that dramatically improves photo quality and battery life, and adds an expandable SD memory slot for virtually unlimited storage capability.

As the Piranha Pit investors listened to the pitch they started scratching their heads, asking the simple question, “Why do you need us?”

Charles was quick to respond, saying that his product fits into a very competitive marketplace and having a great product and money is simply not enough. He was looking for a smart-money partner.

The story of the iExpander was only one of hundreds of stories unfolding at this event. With influential people, mixed with powerful innovation, and extra large doses of passion, drive, creativity, and determination, it is one of those rare occurrences where people can literally see the future taking shape right in front of them.

As a futurist, it is the brilliance of these visionaries that breathes inspiration into the work that I do. But this is only scratching the surface. Here’s what you really missed.

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The next big innovation in healthcare may very well be a printer. But this is no ordinary printer.

Professor Lee Cronin heads up a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University in Scotland. His team has figured out how to turn a 3D printer into a sort of universal chemistry set capable of “printing” prescription drugs via downloadable chemistry.

According to Cronin, since nearly all drugs are made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, along with readily available agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin, a printer can be developed with a relatively small number of “inks” to make virtually any organic molecule.

However, as you might imagine, not everyone is welcoming this type of innovation with open arms. Here are some of the likely implications this radical new technology may have on the health of humanity.

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In much the same way that we now expect every child’s toy to talk, in the future, we will expect virtually everything we own to be connected to the Internet.

Our mushrooming “Internet of Things” is growing exponentially, and estimates of its progression vary tremendously. GSMA estimates connecting 24 billion devices by 2020, while Cisco and Ericsson think we will hit 50 billion.

Depending on a few key breakthroughs, these estimates may all be on low end, and here’s why.

Telecom carriers are primarily concerned about devices that connect directly to the Internet, but a rapidly growing category of peripheral devices are designed to connect indirectly through smartphones, home or office Wi-Fi, or other smart devices.

Here are some of the innovations that could make this whole industry go viral.

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Anticipatory Computing’s latest trends (yuliang11/Photos.com)

Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on your television and it instantly knew what show you wanted to watch?

We all dream of an easier life, so what if we got into our car and it knew where we wanted to go, or turned on a radio and it played the perfect music, or pressed “call” on our phone and we would instantly be connected to the person we most wanted to talk to.

Our days are filled with countless decisions and the stress level of all these choices is growing steadily. Yes, we want to be in control, but control can be very taxing.

That’s why I was so intrigued when I came across a new iPad app called MindMeld that is based on the emerging science of “anticipatory computing.”

Using video and voice chat capabilities similar to Skype, MindMeld not only facilitates the discussion, but also adds pertinent photos or videos to the conversation as it interprets what is being said.

We tend to worry about computers that are smarter than we are, automating our skills and taking our jobs. But if computers become more human-like in their thinking, adding our own emotional values to everything we think is important, the heartless machine-only qualities of these technologies will disappear, moving computers away from the paradigm of human-replacer to something more akin to human-enhancer. Here’s what I see happening.

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In 2003 the DaVinci Institute produced a landmark event called “The Future of Money Summit” which took place at the Omni Hotel in Broomfield, CO. One of the featured speakers was Bernard Lietaer, chief architect of the Euro.

At the closing session for the event Lietaer introduced his plan for creating a global currency, a digital currency called the Terra.

The Terra, as Lietaer envisioned it, would start as a trade reference currency pegged to a mathematical equilibrium of existing major currencies, and be backed by a basket of commodities, as opposed to a single one like gold.

After the press frenzy and nationally coverage resulting from our event, the Terra has descended into near obscurity, with little more than a Wikipedia entry to show it ever existed.

One speaker we desperately tried to bring to the event was Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who was highly regarded as a disruptive visionary in monetary systems.

While Thiel, a darling of the media, seems to have stopped talking about creating a global currency, I recently came across one of his most recent investments in a company called Stripe, which is causing many to speculate. Here’s what I think is about to unfold.

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In 2004 when Chris Anderson released “The Long Tail,” the world was suddenly awakened to the potential for niche markets that appeal to an increasingly diverse consumer marketplace.

In business terms, it gave rise to the notion of online businesses selling relatively small quantities of unique products, yet generating enough income for a person to live without a job.

In 2007, Tim Ferriss pushed this idea several steps further in his book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” Not only can people create their own niche businesses, but they can build it up to something quite profitable and start regaining their freedom.

In 2008, I wrote an article on “The Empire of One” about one-person enterprises that were being enabled by the rapidly evolving communication structure inside the Internet.

In 2009, writer Tina Brown coined the term “The Gig Economy” as she noticed a growing number of young people (one third of her survey group) were working multiple jobs and as freelancers.

Combining the growing freelance mentality of young people with the relative ease of launching a niche online business and we have an explosive trend driving us towards a future of “workerless businesses.”

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