A picture of me speaking at yesterday’s TEDxReset in Istanbul.

Yesterday I was honored to be one of the featured speakers at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul, Turkey where I predicted that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030. Since my 18-minute talk was about the rapidly shifting nature of colleges and higher education, I didn’t have time to explain how and why so many jobs would be going away. Because of all of the questions I received afterwards, I will do that here.

If you haven’t been to a TEDx event, it is hard to confer the life-changing nature of something like this. Ali Ustundag and his team pulled off a wonderful event.

The day was filled with an energizing mix of musicians, inspiration, and big thinkers. During the breaks, audience members were eager to hear more and peppered the speakers with countless questions. They were also extremely eager to hear more about the future.

When I brought up the idea of 2 billion jobs disappearing (roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet) it wasn’t intended as a doom and gloom outlook. Rather, it was intended as a wakeup call, letting the world know how quickly things are about to change, and letting academia know that much of the battle ahead will be taking place at their doorstep.

Here is a brief overview of five industries – where the jobs will be going away and the jobs that will likely replace at least some of them – over the coming decades.

No one will miss the clutter and chaos of power lines.

1.) Power Industry

Until now, the utility companies existed as a safe career path where little more than storm-related outages and an occasional rate increase would cause industry officials to raise their eyebrows.

Yet the public has become increasingly vocal about their concerns over long-term health and environmental issues relating to the current structure and disseminating methods of of the power industry, causing a number of ingenious minds to look for a better way of doing things.

Recently I was introduced to two solutions that seem predestined to start the proverbial row of dominoes to start falling. There are likely many more waiting in the wings, but these two capitalize on existing variances found in nature and are unusually elegant in the way they solve the problem of generating clean power at a low cost.

Both companies have asked me to keep quiet about their technology until they are a bit farther along, but I will at least explain the overarching ramifications.

I should emphasize that both technologies are intended to work inside the current utility company structure, so the changes will happen within the industry itself.

To begin with, these technologies will shift utilities around the world from national grids to micro grids that can be scaled from a single home to entire cities. The dirty power era will finally be over and the power lines that dangle menacingly over our neighborhoods, will begin to come down. All of them.

While the industry will go through a long-term shrinking trend, the immediate shift will cause many new jobs to be created.

Jobs Going Away

• Power generation plants will begin to close down.
• Coal plants will begin to close down.
• Many railroad and transportation workers will no longer be needed.
• Even wind farms, natural gas, and bio-fuel generators will begin to close down.
• Ethanol plants will be phased out or repurposed.
• Utility company engineers, gone.
• Line repairmen, gone.

New Jobs Created

• Manufacturing power generation units the size of ac units will go into full production.
• Installation crews will begin to work around the clock.
• The entire national grid will need to be taken down (a 20 year project). Much of it will be recycled and the recycling process alone will employ many thousands of people.
• Micro-grid operations will open in every community requiring a new breed of engineers, managers, and regulators.
• Many more.

San Francisco–based design team Mike and Maaike’s concept car, the ATNMBL (the “autonomobile”).

2.) Automobile Transportation – Going Driverless

Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made by vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

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 in transit with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for substantially less than the cost of today’s limos.

Driverless technology will initially require a driver, but it will quickly creep into everyday use much as airbags did. First as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually it will become a safety feature stipulated 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 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 substantially safer and more effective option.

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

Jobs Going Away

• Taxi and limo drivers, gone.
• Bus drivers, gone.
• Truck drivers, gone.
• Gas stations, parking lots, traffic cops, traffic courts, gone.
• Fewer doctors and nurses will be needed to treat injuries.
• Pizza (and other food) delivery drivers, gone.
• Mail delivery drivers, gone.
• FedEx and UPS delivery jobs, gone.
• As people shift from owning their own vehicles to a transportation-on-demand system, the total number of vehicles manufactured will also begin to decline.

New Jobs Created

• Delivery dispatchers
• Traffic monitoring systems, although automated, will require a management team.
• Automated traffic designers, architects, and engineers
• Driverless “ride experience” people.
• Driverless operating system engineers.
• Emergency crews for when things go wrong.

Apple is involved in another life changing innovation with iTunes U.

3.) Education

The OpenCourseware Movement took hold in 2001 when MIT started recording all their courses and making them available for free online. They currently have over 2080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times.

In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.

Now, the 8,000 pound gorilla in the OpenCourseware space is Apple’s iTunes U. This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.

All of these courses are free for anyone to take. So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?

As the OpenCourseware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.

In the middle of all this we are transitioning from a teaching model to a learning model. Why do we need to wait for a teacher to take the stage in the front of the room when we can learn whatever is of interest to us at any moment?

Teaching requires experts. Learning only requires coaches.

With all of the assets in place, we are moving quickly into the new frontier of a teacherless education system.

Jobs Going Away

• Teachers.
• Trainers.
• Professors.

New Jobs Created

• Coaches.
• Course designers.
• Learning camps.

Prototype of a 40′ X 40′ 3D Printer capable of printing a small building

4.) 3D Printers

Unlike a machine shop that starts with a large piece of metal and carves away everything but the final piece, 3D printing is an object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place.

Chuck Hull in front of stereolithography machine.

The first commercial 3D printer was invented by Charles Hull in 1984, based on a technique called stereolithography.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.

3D Printed Dress

3D Printed Shoes

Jobs Going Away

• If we can print our own clothes and they fit perfectly, clothing manufacturers and clothing retailers will quickly go away.
• Similarly, if we can print our own shoes, shoe manufacturers and shoe retailers will cease to be relevant.
• If we can print construction material, the lumber, rock, drywall, shingle, concrete, and various other construction industries will go away.

New Jobs Created

• 3D printer design, engineering, and manufacturing.
• 3D printer repairmen will be in big demand.
• Product designers, stylists, and engineers for 3D printers.
• 3D printer ‘Ink’ sellers.

Boston Dynamics’ BigDog

5.) Bots

We are moving quickly past the robotic vacuum cleaner stage to far more complex machines.

The BigDog robot, shown above, is among the most impressive and potentially useful for troops in the immediate future–it’s being developed to act as an autonomous drone assistant that’ll carry gear for soldiers across rough battlefield terrain.

Nearly every physical task can conceivably be done by a robot at some point in the future.

Jobs Going Away

• Fishing bots will replace fishermen.
• Mining bots will replace miners.
• Ag bots will replace farmers.
• Inspection bots will replace human inspectors.
• Warrior drones will replace soldiers.
• Robots can pick up building material coming out of the 3D printer and begin building a house with it.

New Jobs Created

• Robot designers, engineers, repairmen.
• Robot dispatchers.
• Robot therapists.
• Robot trainers.
• Robot fashion designers.

Final Thoughts

In these five industries alone there will be hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing. But many other sectors will also be affected.

Certainly there’s a downside to all this. The more technology we rely on, the more breaking points we’ll have in our lives.

Driverless drones can deliver people. These people can deliver bombs or illicit drugs as easily as pizza.

Robots that can build building can also destroy buildings.

All of this technology could make us fat, dumb, and lazy, and the problems we thought we were solving become far more complicated.

We are not well-equipped culturally and emotionally to have this much technology entering into our lives. There will be backlashes, “destroy the robots” or “damn the driverless car” campaigns with proposed legislation attempting to limit its influence.

At the same time, most of the jobs getting displaced are the low-level, low-skilled labor positions. Our challenge will be to upgrade our workforce to match the labor demand of the coming era. Although it won’t be an easy road ahead it will be one filled with amazing technology and huge potentials as the industries shift.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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November 2009 was when Michael Migliozzi and Brian Flatow started a website called BuyaBeerCompany.com who’s lofty goal was to buy the ailing century old Pabst Blue Ribbon beer company. In less than two years, working to match the $300 million sale price, the pair attracted over 5 million investors pledging upwards of $280 million, with an average pledge of $40.

The SEC found out about the money raise and put a stop to it in Sept 2011. The problem? They hadn’t registered the offering with the SEC and they targeted unaccredited investors. These are two major no-nos in investment circles.

Because no money changed hands, only pledges, the two escaped charges, but the entire incident fueled the interest of some very prominent people who saw the potential for invigorating the cash-strapped startup and small business world where most new jobs get created. The concept of crowdfunding was born.

On November 3, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed H.R. 2930, a crowdfunding bill that will allow startups to offer and sell securities online. The Senate will likely vote on the bill in early 2012.

After eight decades of arguably the most restrictive rules for raising capital in the world, we are standing on the precipice of a new era for funding: crowdfunding. Here are 23 unusual ways in which the crowdfunding revolution could redefine the business to investor relationship.

First a Little Background

On the evening of Monday Jan 23, 2012 DaVinci Institute hosted a packed Night With A Futurist event as three experts took the stage to speak on the topic of crowdfunding. Brian Tsuchiya, Karl Dakin, and Steve Reaser all covered different aspects of the topic, but combined, painted an inspiring picture of how crowdfunding could unfold over the coming months.

Here are some of the highlights:

At the same time the Crowdfunding bill was being voted on in the House of Representatives, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts introduced a similar bill in the Senate which was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

There are four significant differences between the House and the Senate Bills so far and more changes may be coming:

• The Senate bill only permits the issuance of securities “through a crowdfunding intermediary”. Accordingly, startups would not be permitted to raise funds via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn (as permitted under the House bill).
• Under the Senate bill, each investor is limited to investing up to $1,000 per year per company; the House bill permits an amount equal to the lesser of $10,000 or 10 percent of the investor’s annual income.
• Similar to the House bill, the Senate bill caps the total amount of capital that may be raised during any twelve-month period at $1 million; the House bill, however, raises the cap to $2 million if the issuer provides potential investors with audited financial statements.
• Finally, the Senate bill permits some form of registration by the State in which the company is organized and/or “any State in which purchasers of 50 percent or greater of the aggregate amount of the issue are…residents.” The House bill preempts State law and, accordingly, there is no State registration requirement.

Opposition groups are forming with the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), a trade group for state regulators lobbying very hard against the House Bill to prevent the preemption of State law and to reduce the maximum investment amount per investor.

The topic of fraud has also been touted by the opposition, and while fraud is a legitimate concern and there probably will be cases of it, that concern is disproportionately small compared to the benefits crowdfunding will ultimately create.

Remember, people had similar concerns about e-commerce when it first debuted, but those fears have since been allayed. Crowd-funding won’t replace venture capital, angel investing or bank lending, nor should it. They encompass a substantially different model and mindset for raising funds.

Popular websites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have already shown the power, possibilities and vitality of crowdfunding. In these models, people request funds online from strangers to back specific projects such as a new invention, filming for a movie, or a cupcake delivery truck. What makes these allowable and legal under the current regulations is that those who pledge money can only receive perks and products like T-shirts, DVDs, or posters in exchange, not actual equity shares.

Lending websites like Prosper.com are another facet in understanding the funding puzzle. They facilitate person-to-person loans. People ask to borrow money for anything from plastic surgery to starting a company and offer a fixed interest rate in return. But again, equity stakes are not allowed.

Reid Hoffman

Speaking recently at an event titled “Silicon Valley comes to Oxford,” Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and serial investor, said many startups seeking investment money still don’t properly think through where they fit in to the markets they aim to penetrate. Incorrect sizing of the commercial opportunity and the company’s competitive circumstances are still widespread barriers that fund raising amplifies.

But in asking the right questions, any funding process arguably forces entrepreneurs to think further ahead and arrive at more water-tight justifications for the paths they are planning to take. If more people thought about raising money, more people would be thinking more seriously about the plans that underpin this activity – and that has to be a good thing.

Crowdfunding in Other Countries

Other nations – such as Great Britain, France, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands – already offer equity-based crowdfunding opportunities to investors and startups to help companies get started. Here are four quick examples:

1. One of the pioneers of crowdfunding in the music industry was the British rock group Marillion. In 1997 American fans underwrote their entire U.S. tour with $60,000 following a highly successful Internet campaign.
2. The British site A Swarm Of Angels raised the first $50,000 of a $2 million feature film that was distributed free online.
3. British documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than $815,000 to underwrite the film – The Age of Stupid. People who gave 20 quid ($35) got a credit on the film’s website; those who gave £5,000 ($9,000) and up got a percentage of the profits.
4. Another Britain project, My Football Club, tapped into global soccer fervor to raise more than $2.6 million from 53,000 fans in less than four months to purchase a British soccer team.

The Future of Crowdfunding – 23 Unusual Examples

The popularity of the House bill with over 90% voting in favor, and the speed with which it cruised through the process has led many to believe crowdfunding is a done deal.

The blocked Pabst purchase brought to light the massive potential for crowdfunding and changing the rules of business funding options from here on out.

Granted, what the two beer-minded gentlemen were doing may have been a bit over the top, it undeniably proves a point. There is a strong interest for the average American to support ideas they believe in. While raising $300 million on the Internet may be excessive, allowing entrepreneurs to raise a limited about of seed or growth capital through crowdfunding can easily be seen as being very beneficial.

Regardless of the details that are put into the final legislation, entrepreneurs will find a way to work with it. Assuming it passes, crowdfunding will either make a huge difference or relatively little, with the devil-in-the-details being the deciding variable.

While there will be an initial rush to “throw things at the wall to see what sticks,” only those who are able to cultivate a loyalist investor following will find the gold at the end of the rainbow.

Investor pitches will likely be much more grassroots and emotional, pulling on the heartstrings of people through cause marketing campaigns, save the city pitches, or “we’re all in this together” movements.

The most effective campaigns will spend time developing a target market of likely investors and custom tailor their strategy around reaching that community.

Virtually every trick in the marketing handbook can quickly come into play with these new parameters for business to consumer investor pitches.

Redefining the Company-Investor Relationship

More than anything else, crowdfunding will re-invent the company-investor relationship. Gone are the days of suits meeting suits to hammer out contracts in the boardroom on the 37th floor.

Companies will no longer be judged solely on their office furnishings, polished appearance, or the address of the company. Instead, we are moving into an era of common people doing business with common people.

Those who are most successful at funding their business will have a unique way of rising above the noise, standing out in the crowded din of “pick me, pick me” language surging through the blogosphere.

For this reason I’ve decided to feature 23 unusual concepts that entrepreneurs might utilize to stand out. Not all of these may fit in the legal category once the final legislation is approved and most will involve a second stage of relationship-building, but marketing the products simultaneously with the investment opportunities will likely create a loyal customer base in the process.

1.) Stage a Positive Protest – Stage a protest in front of the business seeking funding with fake protesters holding signs that read “This company is brilliant” or “These people are too nice.” With a little creativity and the right audience, this strategy could be an overnight sensation.

2.) Guest Blogging – This is for the bloggers and freelance writers out there. Thousands of blogs are starving for good content and getting your article posted will be relatively easy. This will be most effective on high traffic blogs that are closely aligned with the target audience of prospective investors.

3.) Product Demonstrations – For some products or services a demonstration done on a street corner or in a building entrance may be an effective way to get people’s attention. Offering free food, drinks or snacks can be leveraged to attract a crowd of people who can then be introduced to the investment opportunity.

4.) Online Investor Gambling – This one may be pushing the limits, but is “gambling your way to an investment” still gambling? If it were allowable, a business could create an online gambling site to entertain people as they play for the opportunity to invest in your company combined with some other form of return.

5.) Competitions – Offer a series of prizes to people who can figure out new uses for your product or services. The investment offers will follow once you’ve collected all the contact information from the top competitors and participants.

6.) Movie Theater Ads – If the business being funded is a movie production company or music recording studio, movie theater ads could be an effective way to reach a very targeted investor group. Combined with an effective phone app, newly converted investors could invest from their theater seat before the feature even begins.

7.) Borrow a Wall - Get a projector and find someone who will allow you to use the side of their building at night. The wall could host projections of your company logo and website information as well as promo videos of how your product works and other teasers.

8.) Invest $10,000 and Date a Supermodel – Sex still sells, and while posting photos of beautiful women on a website may seem sleazy or lazy to some, for the right company, this could be an effective strategy.

9.) High End Hair Salons and Barber Shops – Hair stylists love to talk. With a little motivation in the form of finders fees or commissions, these people could become a good investment funnel.

10.) Grouponing Your Investment – Deal of the day sites like Groupon and Social Living reach huge audiences. With their current business model, these sites take half of the revenue that comes in through the offer. However, thinking more creatively, an offer could be created that would have prospects “buy” a dinner, tour, or show that was combined with and includes a short no cost investor pitch.

11.) Free Chauffeur – Offer free limo rides to people at airports or hotels and pitch them on the investment while they are being driven to their destination. This approach could reach several dozen good prospects a day in a “captive audience” setting.

12.) Legacy Building – Buy a brick with your name on it or Have your name engraved on the wall are common donor strategies for nonprofits. They could also work as investment incentives in the crowdfunding model.

13.) Framed-Art Stock Certificates – Having artistically crafted stock certificates framed and prominently posted on a wall gives investors bragging rights and also generates conversations within their circle of friends.

14.) Affiliate Marketing Investments – Paying a finders fee has been a long standing tradition within the investment community. Working through affiliate networks should be considered an extension of this in the online world and a natural part of its evolution.

15.) Live Animal Marketing – Walking through town with a cow, water buffalo or cloned triceratops on a leash can be a highly effective attention-getter.

16.) Building Lists – Building lists is all about building a community of online followers. Using fishbowls to have people drop in a business card for a free prize or signing up for a free newsletter are just couple of the many effective ways to build lists, but innovative crowdfunders will create many more and ultimately find techniques of quickly generating large lists.

17.) Riding the Ski Lift – Instead of actually going to a ski resort to ski, people sitting next to you in a ski lift become a captive audience until you reach the top.

18.) Free Seminar – A well-orchestrated free seminar can attract large numbers of people who will listen to an inventive investor pitch on a hot topic.

19.) Limited Edition Artwork – One investment model could be structured around 100 people making a $10,000 investment. If each were offered a limited edition piece of artwork, signed by the artist, some of the money would go to the artist with the rest used to fund the business.

20.) Partner Promotion – Invest $10 and get a $10 gift certificate to Nordstroms, Macys, Dillards, or some other high-end department store. You get the investment, they get the customers.

21.) Personalized App Promotion – Create a smartphone app that is custom designed around the business seeking funds and the person buying it. Since people will pay more for something that is “all about them,” the app could be priced at $10 or more.

22.) Host a Blood Drive – A blood drive for a cause creates a good will atmosphere for the event sponsor.

23.) Underground Music – If there is a genre of music that your target market listens to, host a concert or benefit with live music to set the stage for brief investor pitches between sets.

Final Thoughts

Yes, you may find some of these ideas too far out to consider reasonable investment tools for crowdfunding, but most will not.

Crowdfunding will usher in a new era of thinking, with the advantage going to those who are the most creative, innovative and passionate.

It certainly won’t solve all the problems with funding early stage companies, and it will likely create many more at least initially. But the investment world is overdue for something that will shake it up, and this is exactly that.

Look for many new resistance groups to form as this gains momentum. Even after the legislation is passed, the battle will be far from over.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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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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Understanding trends is more of an art form than an exact science. But for those who can read the tealeaves, and make bold moves, leveraging trends can give them a serious competitive advantage.

As an example, LinkedIn just posted its annual list of top buzzwords, the ones most commonly used on their members’ professional profiles. The top word people in the U.S. use to describe themselves on LinkedIn is “Creative.” Last year “Creative” didn’t even make it into the top ten, where “Extensive Experience” topped the list.

And it’s not just the U.S. This was the most used word in Britain, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany. So what business decisions will you make that tie into people’s recast dreams of being “creative?”

Obviously, trends don’t happen in one-year cycles. They are constantly evolving, and all of the content below is, in one way or another, already happening. Last week we began our journey with trends 1-14 of the “28 Major Trends,” and this week we will finish it. Here are trends 15 – 28.

15.) Exploding Smartphone Industry – With a global population exceeding 7 billion people, we have seen the mobile phone industry mushroom to include over 5 billion members. Smartphones remain a small subset, owned by around 10% of all those with mobile phones. But not for much longer. We are about to see virtually all communication devices replaced with smartphones over the coming decade.

Leading the charge is Google with over 700,000 Android devices being activated daily. Over the past year, Google activated more than 255 million devices compared to 105 million Apple activations. Admittedly this isn’t a true apples-to-apples comparison (no pun intended) because Google doesn’t make their own phones and Apple does.

As smartphones and other devices evolve in this exploding market, look for a near-term push into near-field communications, 4G, and flexible bendable devices.

Critical to the growth of this mobile device market is the global supply of rare earth metals, which China currently controls 95% of known reserves. Looking out for its own self-interests, Chinas has been ratcheting down exports of these metals by 12% per year for the past 5 years. Their reluctance to export enough to meet global demand has touched off a world-wide hunt for new sources with promising finds being uncovered in Canada, Argentina, South Korea, and California. Look for several new mines to come online in coming years and China’s stranglehold on the industry to plummet.

16.) Hyper-Local Urban Farming Going Underground – A few years ago, a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University reported that between 1980 and 2001, the distance food traveled from farm-to-table increased 25%, ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 miles. Since then we have seen a strong push to localize and even hyper-localize the growing of food supplies.

The drive to make all food supplies local has touched off a number of battles to rewrite municipal codes to accommodate everything from rooftop gardens, to backyard cows and chickens, to aquaponic and aquaculture projects, to experimental vertical farms. The next shift with see crops grown underground.

Dutch-based PlantLab recently announced it has figured out how to triple plant yield in a sunless, rainless environment housed in their underground research facilities. PlantLab uses artificial light and only 10% of the water typically needed. Using the correct spectrum from their LED lighting system has increased photosynthesis efficiency to 12-15% percent from sunlight’s 9% range.

By keeping the plants in a contained environment, PlantLab can also recycle evaporated water, which helps them grow crops using just one-tenth the water needed in traditional greenhouses. As an addition bonus, pesticides are no longer necessary. Production facilities can be built almost anywhere – from the deserts of Sahara to the icy plains of the Artic.

17.) The Gamification of Business – Currently a huge buzzword in techy circles, gamification is moving mainstream. Simply defined, gamification involves applying game techniques such as leveling, rewards and competition, to any human experience.

Many limit their thinking about gamification to mobile apps but it has far broader implications. Imbedded game features such as leaderboards, achievements, and skill-based learning are becoming common in day-to-day business processes, driving adoption, performance and engagement.

One recent example is the Nike campaign to gamify the process of personal training. People who visit the site, enter details of their running times and the routes they were on, and compete for prizes with others around the world.

Another example is the geo-location service Foursquare provides which encourages people to use its check-in technology by giving them an incentive, when they checked in to a certain venue. Many restaurants have picked up on this and offer free cupcakes or desserts to customers who talk about their experience on Foursquare and other social networks.

It’s all about adding fun to the daily tedium of living. Look for gamification to start making major inroads into college offerings as well as non-traditional K-12 educational programs.

18.) Going Cashless – Signs of our emerging cashless society has been popping-up in small doses since 2005. And while 2012 may not be the year that consumers instantly go cashless, it will be the year that major players like Google and MasterCard roll out their cashless initiatives around the world.

For consumers, the initial attraction will be convenience, but eventually mobile payments will create an entirely new data-driven eco-system of rewards, purchase history, daily-deals and more. Key to this movement will be Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that allows for encrypted data to be exchanged between two devices in close proximity (”near field”) to each other.

Here are a few of the changes happening in this market over the past few months:

• In October 2011, the Google Wallet, a free, NFC-enabled mobile payment system became operational at select retailers across the US. Licensing MasterCard’s PayPass technology, shoppers simply tap their mobile device on special terminals at points-of-sale to pay instantly.
• In June 2011, PayPal demonstrated its own mobile payment app for Android devices.
• Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s latest venture, Square, is an electronic payments service which enables users to accept credit card payments by using a portable card-reader device that plugs in to iPhone, iPad or Android devices. Both the Square card-reader and app are free, although there is a 2.75% charge for each payment made. In November 2011, Richard Branson and Visa became investors in Square.
• In June 2011, Sweedish-based iZettle was launched to enable consumers to accept anywhere-anytime credit card payments. The iZettle app works with iPhones and iPads. Bills can also be paid or money transferred using this service.

Google CEO Larry Page sees himself as the next great visionary, following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison, as he attempts to rewrite the rules for major industries by pushing initiatives like driverless vehicles, wireless power, and a cashless society. With our hero-based culture, look for Larry Page to emerge as the heart and soul of the movement to turn virtually every electronic device into a payment device.

19.) Ending the Dream of Home Ownership – If you had to choose between starting your own company, traveling around the world, or owning your own home, which would you choose?

Attitudes among Gen X and Gen Y are increasingly shifting towards creating a full life experience rather than settling down and building a nest egg.

Home ownership in the U.S. dropped to 66.9% last year from a high of 70% in 2005, and some are forecasting it will drop as low as 62%, a level not seen since the Census began tracking this data in 1963, as the hurdles to owning a home increase.

Naturally, this begs the question: Is a 62% home ownership rate so bad? It’s still far higher than in most European countries. And, more importantly, why is it assumed we need to own our own homes?

Trillions of dollars have been spent propping up the American Dream of owning our own home. But the dream is shifting, so look for Congress to quit spending money on it. Instead, look for new experimental approached for redefining the relationship between people and the places they’re living in. The stage has been set, it only a matter of time before a new paradigm unfolds.

20.) Accomplishment-Based Education - Writing a book, receiving a patent, or starting a business are all symbols of achievement in today’s world. But being the author of a book that sells 10,000 copies, or inventing a product that 100,000 people buy, or building a business that grosses over $1 million in annual sales are all significant accomplishments that are far more meaningful than their symbolic starting points.

Much of what happens in today’s colleges and universities is based on “symbols of achievement,” not actual accomplishments.

Students that enter a classroom will typically find themselves immersed in an academic competition, a competition that pits students against each other to produce results that best match the teacher’s expectations. Only rarely will the work product of a student in a classroom rise to any notable level of significance. Completing a class is nothing more than a symbol of achievement.

Look for this to change quickly as the tools for creating and managing “accomplishments” remotely become more pervasive. More details here.

21.) Driverless Cars and Autonomous Vehicles – The next revolution in transportation will be here soon, and it won’t be streetcars, monorails, Segway’s, or electric vehicles. It will be self-driving cars, and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation planning.

The idea of jumping into a vehicle and having it shuttle you to your destination without anyone “driving” it may sound like pure fantasy to some, but it’s far closer than most of us think.

• Google’s self-driving car project 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 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.
• 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.

Even though car companies are making plans for the transition, planning departments are not. Most local and regional transportation departments are working with models that assume 20 years from now transportation systems will be basically the same, with only slight variations around the edges.

Driverless cars will be far safer. Human-based foibles like speeding, inattention, inexperience, impairment and fatigue all contribute to road accidents. Driverless cars will remove the human variable from the system. Along with fewer accidents will come the eventual elimination of traffic cops, traffic courts, stoplights, and parking lots.

Look for rapid advancement in this area and for Google to make a play to design an Android-like operating system for all driverless cars.

22.) The Drone Side of Life - Sometime over the coming months you can expect to see a version of the following help wanted ad:

“Help Wanted: Full-time aerial drone pilots needed to help manager our growing fleet of surveillance, delivery, and communication drones. We are also looking for drone repair techs, drone dispatchers, and drone salesmen.”

In 2010 the U.S. Military spent $4.5 billion on drones, increasing to $4.8 billion in 2011.

With this kind of focused spending, military drone technology has improved dramatically over the past decade. But as a technology, future drones will go well beyond military uses. The stage is being set for thousands of everyday uses in business and industry all over the world.

With basic drone hardware being matched up with smartphones, and the bottom-up design capabilities of app developers around the world, drones will quickly move from the realm of personal toys to functional necessities that we interact with on a daily basis.

For those of you looking to switch careers, the drone marketplace will create one of the hot new industries of the future. More details here.

23.) The Coming Transparency Wars – Can you feel the layers being lifted? Transparency is entering our lives in unusual ways and much like having individual veils lifted from a multi-veiled garment; we are now able to see the world around us with far greater clarity.

Recently, several misguided thinkers have proposed the notion that the more transparent our society becomes, the better off we’ll be. Using the logic that a self-watching society will be a safer one, they advocate for radical transparency. This is simply not true. And the privacy advocates will not let it happen.

The greatest danger of too much transparency is that we will become consumed by watching each other, and somewhere along the way, we will lose sight of the big picture. Each day will be filled with constant drama as we exhaust ourselves trying to right every wrong, and solve every problem.

We are all terminally human and have very limited ability to improve who we are simply because someone else may be watching. However, drawing the correct dividing line between privacy and transparency will not come easy. This will continue to be a volatile battleground for many years to come. More details here and here.

24.) Dismantling the Justice System - 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.

A new study by the University of North Carolina now shows a shocking 30% of all young people get arrested at least once by age 23.

People who enter prison cannot lead productive lives. Removing too many from wage-earning positions, turning them into wards of the state, is a recipe for economic disaster.

We are seeing some experimentation and improvements around the edges but so far nothing major. Even with its massive inertia to maintain the status quo, public tolerance has reached its limit for this kind of needless expenditure and constant friction between the government and its citizens.

Look for this to become one of the long-term movements splintering away from the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Ironically, the biggest changes in this area will happen when driverless cars start eliminating the need for street cops. More details here.

25.) Going Waitless – In our highly competitive business and social environments, we have a need to be active and engaged at all times. And waiting in line, for virtually anything, becomes irritating.

For this reason, Los Angeles-based QLess Inc. has devised a text-messaging service to help eliminate the wait.

The department of motor vehicles seems to be the epitome of mind-numbingly long wait times and Johnson County, Kansas was one of the first to implement QLess to alerts customers when it was their turn.

With this type of service, people don’t have to be present as the grueling minutes click away. Many customers now go grocery shopping, while waiting in a virtual line, or come in closer to their estimated appointment time.

Since implementing the system three years ago, customers no longer camp out on the floor and spend far less time complaining.

Look for wait-less systems to spring to life in doctor offices, auto service shops, pharmacies, Disneyland, and virtually every place in society where the wait needs to dissipate.

26.) Power of 10 Interface - The distance between information and our brain is getting shorter.

Twenty years ago if you had access to a large information base, such as the Library of Congress, and someone asked you a series of questions, your task would have been to pour through the racks of books to come up with the answers. The time involved could have easily have been 10 hours per question.

Today, if we are faced with uncovering answers from a digital Library of Congress, using keyboards and computer screens, the time-to-answer process can easily be reduced to as little as 10 minutes.

The next iteration of our information-to-brain interface will give us the power to find answers in as little as 10 seconds. Look for major advancements in “smart contacts” in the coming months to help close the gap towards the 10-second goal. More details here.

27.) Emergence of Food Printers - 3D printing is a form of object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place – a relatively slow process often requiring hours to complete.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines traditional economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.

Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, a couple ingenious minds at MIT working on the Cornucopias Project, have created a very visual way for us to imagine next generation food that will come from similar 3D printers. Each of their designs proposes an advanced way of mixing ingredients, forming new compounds, and building a layer-by-layer aesthetically pleasing menu item with perfect texture and shape.

Look for continuing progress in the area of 3D food printers, even though the Jetson’s style food synthesizers may still be a few years off. More details here.

28.) The Self-Health Movement – No one cares more about your health than you do. So it was only a matter of time until someone invented the self-diagnostic tools, self-monitoring devices, and self-analysis systems to put “self” into the center of the healthcare equation.

Apple’s App Store currently offers 9,000 mobile health apps, along with 1,500 cardio fitness apps, over 1,300 diet apps, more than 1,000 stress and relaxation apps, and over 650 women’s health apps.

But apps are only part of the equation. Peripheral devices are setting the stage for the true self-revolution:

• All Apples stores now carry the Withings’ Blood Pressure Monitor, a peripheral device that plugs into the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and takes the user’s blood pressure. Data can be sent directly to a doctor or saved (confidentially) to the cloud.
• Lifelens has created a smartphone app to diagnose malaria. The app can magnify a drop of blood (captured via a simple finger prick) and identify whether malarial parasites are present.
• In October 2011, Ford demonstrated three SYNC apps offering in-car health monitoring for drivers to track chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hay fever.
• Also in October 2011, AT&T announced it will begin selling clothes embedded with health monitors, able to track the wearer’s vital signs – heart rate and body temperature – and upload them to a dedicated website.
• The X Prize Foundation is co-sponsoring a $10 million prize for the best mobile device allowing consumers to diagnose their own diseases.

Every new peripheral device will create a market for hundreds of new apps, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what will seem like a massive influx of brilliant new peripherals over the coming months. Healthcare industry execs should be nervous.

Final Thoughts

I will end with a few comments about the new systems that will be needed to tie all of these trends together.

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.

This need for future accomplishments will also dictate a need for new and 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. National systems are already putting the brakes on emerging global systems, but it will only serve as a short-term delay of the inevitable.

The era of global systems is coming very soon.

See “28 Major Trends for 2012 and Beyond – Part 1“

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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We are in for a very exciting year ahead. 2012 is 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.

With this in mine, I’d like to take you on a journey into some of the trends I’ll be watching in 2012 as the tectonic plates of change inch their way into new positions. Here is the first half of the 28 major trends to watch in 2012 and beyond.

1.) Retail 2.0 – People still like getting out of the house and being around other people, but the retail world hasn’t quite figured out what people are looking for. New ways of thinking about Retail 2.0 will form around phrases like “experiential entertainment,” “active engagement,” and “interaction with experts.”

Some of the major expenses involved 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). Most will be pay-to-play product placement stations with experts on hand to answer questions. Tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft will be paving the way for these kinds of storefronts. I’ll be writing more on this topic in the weeks ahead. Other thoughts on this topic here.

2.) Crowdfunding – Even though some sites like Kickstarter and Quirky have been getting traction in this space, Congress’ recent effort to pass official Crowdfunding legislation will unleash an entirely new Pandora’s box full of options for entrepreneurs hoping to launch their latest ventures. Many startups are waiting on the sidelines for this new option to kick in, so look for a surge of activity to take place as an entirely new finance industry begins to take shape.

3.) The Persistent “Big Lie” Opportunity – Throughout history we have seen any number of cultural truisms spring to life that were simply not true. If something is repeated enough times, society will begin to believe it. With our ability to post and repost a novel concept, new cultural memes can be formed virtually over night. Yet at the same time, our attempts to debunk any myth with over a million mentions online often runs into a murky wall of ambivalence. For this reason, even though they have been scientifically disproven, “big lies” such as these will persist:

• “In the future everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame”
• “You only use 10% of your brain”
• “The Internet is making us dumber”
• “The more you sweat, the more calories you burn”
• “Listening to classical music turns babies into geniuses”
• “Alcohol kills brain cells”
• “Being skinny means you’re fit and healthy
• “Your IQ is fixed and stays the same throughout your life

If you thought some of the statements above were true, you’re not alone. Many of us still do even though they have been proven false. Look for a new breed of services to appear that will offer solutions for globally debunking the persistent “big lies.”

4.) Emerging Data Marketplace – The data that you currently own can become far more valuable when you mix it with other data. As an example, if you add weather conditions to your customer data, chances are you will find some connection between weather patterns and your customers’ purchasing habits.

Acquiring datasets such as these is presently very time consuming, expensive, and generally a pain to do. Look for emerging big data marketplaces, such as Microsoft’s Azure, that will come complete with directories of the available datasets, along with counselors who can help coach you through the maze.

5.) Smartphone Peripherals – The whole mobile apps revolution began in March of 2008 when Steve Jobs announced the software developer’s kit for the Apple iPhone. When Apple’s App Store officially opened on July 11, 2008, there were a whopping 552 apps to choose from. Over 60 million apps were downloaded within the first 3 days and tech companies around the world began to sense a market shift, and we now have well over a million apps to choose from.

While apps have been getting tons of attention, the piece getting very little is the exploding field of smartphone peripherals that extend our current communication systems far beyond simple person-to-person communications. Virtual every object we come into contact with has the potential for being controlled by our smartphone, and interface designers are working overtime to make this happen.

Look for literally thousands of new peripheral devices to hit the market over the coming year or two. More details here.

6.) The Coming Age of Micro-Incomers – Twitch.tv, or “Twitch,” as it’s called by founder Justin Kan, was built as a way to make professional video gamers more mainstream. It has a partner program similar to YouTube, where the most popular gamers can make money by running commercials during their live streams. Yes, people can actually make money by playing games.

While most of them will not make full-time incomes, they will find it relatively easy to become part of the emerging “micro-incomer” crowd. Here are a few other ways people can make partial and even full-time incomes online:

• Sell stuff on eBay or Craig’s List
• Sell photos to stock photo sites
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
• Transcribing audio files
• Become a virtual assistant
• Interview people and sell the interview
• Enter online competitions
• Write articles on eHow.com

None of these are get-rich-quick schemes, but they can make all the difference between getting by and being destitute. Look for training centers to emerge with a “micro-incomers” kind of focus.

7.) Data Visualization Trends – “I remember seeing a terrific video on wireless power but cannot seem to find it no matter what I do.” Mental faux pax like this are all too common.

For most of us, it’s very difficult to image what information looks like, and when we save a file somewhere, its very often very difficult for us to find it again. Data visualization has been a problem plaguing the online world for years and will become even more pronounced as we move further into the cloud.

Data visualization provides tools for two primary functions – explanation and exploration. While business people might think of visualization as the end result, scientists also using forms of visualization to formulate questions, and for discovering new features of a dataset. More importantly, our ability to find and work with data needs to be so easy that average everyday people can work with it. Look for a few critical new offerings in this area to revolutionize how we store and retrieve the information that will operate and manage our future selves.

8.) Regionalization of the Internet – In the 1990s the Internet was greeted as the New New Thing: It would erase national borders, give rise to communal societies that invented their own rules, and undermine the power of governments. But not so fast!

Even though the Internet began as a utopian dream of a unified world without government intervention, today’s Internet is moving towards the opposite end of the spectrum. In many cases, Internet companies not only welcome governmental restrictions; they are being used as agents of government policy.

The future Internet will see a move towards even more border sensitivity, with hyper-location based services to both improve relevancy of the user experience, and also put themselves in good standing for regional business and government contracts. More details here.

9.) The End of an Era – Faster than Ever – When Dell announced it would no longer be selling netbook computers, it foretold the end of an era. The cute little laptops surged in popularity and came crashing back to earth in a timeframe best measured in months, not decades. Tablet computers, starting with the Apple iPad, made them instantly obsolete.

Our increased awareness of what’s hot and what’s not gives us instant ability to turn our backs on “the old” and to begin embracing “the new.” When Netflix announce they were changing their business model, they instantly got the cold shoulder and had to reverse course. RIM’s Blackberries, once the hottest product in the connected business marketplace, got blindsided by the iPhone and Android and has been plummeting ever since.

The speed with which new companies can emerge, is also the speed with which they can become dismantled. Today’s hotness can become tomorrow’s coldness in a matter of months. So take a close look at the top 100 emerging new companies and know that less than 20% will still be around five years from now. (By the way, I just made that statistic up. Soon to be another one of the Big Lies.)

10.) Poor Lifestyles Hurting Long-term Health – In the past three or so decades, women have increased their calorie intake by 22% and men by 10%, with carbohydrates and sugar-sweetened beverages being major sources of the unnecessary calories.

The inevitable result is that more than two-thirds of U.S. adults and about one-third of children are over the ideal body weight, with the extra layers of fat putting a major strain on people’s hearts. The trend is particularly concerning in children. Today, about 20% of U.S. kids are obese, compared with just 4% thirty years ago.

Neither adults nor children are exercising enough and about 21% of men and 18% of women still smoke. About 20% of high school students also have taken up the smoking habit. This means that 94% of U.S. adults, and that’s almost everyone, have heightened risk factors for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.

However, as always, every problem creates an opportunity, and every one of the identifiable risk factors will become a focal point of activity until each of the problems has become a thing of the past.

11.) Reversing the Obesity Trends – New research documents a 5.5% drop in the number of obese kids in K-8 classes in New York City’s public schools from 2006-2007 to 2010-1011.

It’s no secret that reversing the childhood obesity epidemic in the U.S. will require a long-term effort. Since 1970, the rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has tripled. There have been hints that these rates were leveling off in New York City in recent years, but the new study reports an actual decrease. The bad part is that no one knows exactly why it’s happening.

Look for a trend where researchers flock to every new community that shows progress, to uncover the clues. Also look for the answers to be different than what “the experts” have been telling us in the past.

12.) Fast-Niche Online Universities – We are seeing more and more niche professions without a clear path for getting there. At least not through any traditional University programs. These include everything from social networking experts, to product evangelists, to drone operators, to business colony managers.

Through projects like Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseWare, and iTunesU, the Internet has made it easier for anyone to be a student. Now it’s also making it easier for anyone to become a teacher. Several platforms have launched within the last couple years that democratize teaching.

Online universities such as Udemy, Learnable, Tildee, Skillshare, and Sophia are beginning to capture market share. Look for large associations and businesses, as the early adopters, to start creating their own path-to-profession courseware to fill the demand for rebooting skills in a short timeframe.

13.) Teaching Entrepreneurship and the Rise of the Accelerator – Can you teach entrepreneurship? People like Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup,” think so. He also thinks that entrepreneurship must be taught to far more people if the American economy is to successfully pivot towards a post-manufacturing era.

But as people who have started a business know, is very difficult to teach the emotional side of business, and startups invariably become extremely emotional at one time or another. And the only good counseling for a person going through the trials of getting a business off the ground are other well-seasoned entrepreneurs. That’s why accelerators like Techstars and Y-Combinator have been gaining so much attention.

With their rapid incubation processes, Techstars and Y-Combinator have quickly becoming a natural farm club for VCs in the high tech arena. Look for a variety of other vertical niche accelerators, in fields like healthcare, education, finance, and other sectors, to materialize.

14.) Information Doesn’t Want to be Free – In 1984 at a Hackers Conference, Silicon Valley futurist Stuart Brand was the first to use the phrase “Information wants to be free” in response to a point made by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak but continued, “On the other hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.”

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, keyed in on the first half of the phrase, “Information wants to be free” in a keynote speech at an Open Source Internet Symposium in 1992. This set the stage for an entirely new era of free-thinking “free” advocates. This became another one of society’s “big lies.”

There is always a cost to “free.” While it may not extract a payment from your bank account, there is always a “time” cost involved. Without some amount of friction, the volume of information you have to sift through skyrockets and even with good search technology, your time-costs climb dramatically.

The days of “free” thinking are numbered. Look for this mindset to shift over the coming years. More details here.

Next

Continue to “28 Major Trends in 2012 and Beyond – Part 2.”

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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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.

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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If you listen closely you can almost hear the armaments of battle being rolled into place. The stage is set with warring parties getting organized and the frontlines prepared. 2012 is destined to become the most turbulent year on record, a battleground of epic proportions.

But the primary wars of 2012 will not be fought with guns, tanks, or missiles. Instead, they will be fought inside corporate boardrooms, hacker basements, offices of government policy wonks, startup garages, on central banking committees, and the entire monetary playing field. And while the battles won’t be fought with gunpowder and bullets, battlefield generals will be empowered to use the equally lethal weapons of reputation assassins, privacy snipers, and data-blackmailers.

The U.S. presidential elections are heating up. Dirty politics of the past will seem like child’s play compared to what is about to be unleashed in 2012. During these campaigns we will be witnessing full-frontal reputation-lynchings with play-by-play narratives telling us how to think, shown on every possible surface along the information highway.

The reason I’m bring this up is because the lawlessness with which national candidates use to conduct themselves on the path to getting elected, will set the tone for nearly every other aspect of social life. And this disruptive conduct will lead to problems and chaos like never before. But that’s just a small piece of the driving forces that will influencing our future next year.

Below is a list of the eight colliding forces that will turn 2012 into one of the most memorable in all history:

1.) Atoms Vs. Electrons

While most people don’t think of it this way, there is a war going on between atoms and electrons. Atoms are what I use to describe everything in the physical world and electrons are the embodiment of the digital world.

Digital businesses are moving exponentially faster than anything that requires manipulating physical materials. Companies today are making conscious decisions about whether they should be working with physical products or digital ones.

Physical products require the use of raw materials, designers and engineers, shipping & receiving, inventory, warehouse space, shelf space, marketing & sales, and most importantly, physical products have tax implications. Digital products, on the other hand, can eliminate 90% of the work involved in distributing them.

Digital companies move exponentially faster than physical ones, simply because they can.

We are witnessing a brain drain as employees leave their physical-world jobs in transportation, manufacturing, and service industries to move into positions in digital companies because that is where all the excitement is.

Even though we run the very real risk of becoming a digitally distorted society, giving too much power to geeks and nerds, it will be a refreshing move away from the banking overlords of the past decade.

2.) Student Debt Crisis – Online Education Vs. the Sage on Stage

There has always been competing forces within education, but the looming student debt crisis is beginning to paint colleges with the same brush as Wall Street. And the belt-tightening ahead for colleges will be a precursor to reining in costs in K-12. As the austerity movement in Washington begins to settle in, education, like virtually every other profession, will be asked to do more for less.

At the same time, there’s a new sheriff in town, in the form of online education, holding everyone’s feet to the fire.

As evidenced by the success of the Michael Milken – Larry Ellison funded K12, a Virginia-based company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers. K12 works which children as young as 5 who learn at home at taxpayer expense. With some 95,000 students already enrolled in its system, K12 is demonstrating a strong case for giving new options to students who, until now, have been relegated to attend the failing school next door.

While their efforts are not without its detractors, this sudden shift towards acceptance is causing a new wave of introspection among educators. This introspection can best be summed up in the educator’s dilemma – “Am I really looking out for what’s best for the kids, or is this more about protecting my job, saving the profession, and preserving a way of life?”

3.) Health Food Vs. Brain Amping

A growing number of studies about the downside of vitamins have been sending shockwaves through the alternative health field. Over the years the pattern of media headlines have gone from “Vitamins may be a waste of money” to “Study confirms significant risk of daily vitamin use.”

As with other forms of health food, the sales pitch for vitamins has been pegged to the intangible hope for better health and a better life. But they offer little in the form of instant feedback for the consumer. You may be getting healthier but you won’t know until later.

Currently there is a growing subset of the health food industry that comes with instant indicators of its effectiveness.

Energy drinks, which includes everything from Red Bull and Monster to Starbucks and home-brewed espresso, fall into the food industry category of “functional beverages.” This “functional” classification also involves sports and nutraceutical drinks.

Athletes were the original target market and primary consumers of energy drinks. However, as the energy drink market grew and expanded into various niche markets, athletes are no longer the primary target. Today, the majority of energy drinks are targeted at the 18-34 year old teenagers and young adults because of this generation’s on-the-go lifestyle.

But beyond this marketing shift comes the generational-altering philosophy that if it doesn’t happen instantly, it isn’t happening at all. And simply saying you can feel the results “soon,” will no longer be good enough.

2012 will be the year when a wide range of new self-manipulating products and drinks will be launched involving everything from “instant-strong” to “instant-sleep” to “instant-attraction” to “instant brains.” Look for electronic devices to be added to the mix that push the envelope even further.

4.) The Awareness Revolution – Big Brother Vs. Big Citizenry

Yes, the world has certainly changed since 1850 when Paul Reuters, founder of the Reuters News Service, set a new speed standard for delivering news between Brussels and Berlin by using carrier pigeons.

With the pervasiveness of smartphones and instant connectivity, we are living in a society that is jacked-in 24-7 to the world around us.

Not only are we increasingly aware of the world around us, we are able to focus the frequency of our awareness to precisely the topics and industries we are most interested in.

Those who are uncomfortable with this lifting of the veils tend to be the guardians of the secrets, people entrusted with protecting company assets, government secrets, and the old guard who firmly believes that ignorance is bliss.

With centuries of dark secrets being carefully guarded by governments to prevent retaliations decades after-the-fact, facing off against disenfranchised individuals who are mere button-clicks away from unleashing pandemonium, we are seeing a rapid escalation in legislation and technologies for preventing cracks in the national armor.

Governments are keeping a closer eye on potential disruptors and the disruptors are using what they see as the rampant growth of governmental powers as a reason to create chaos and anarchy.

These two opposing factions are becoming more entrenched on a daily basis.

This will not end well. The power struggles of global politics are on the verge of becoming totally unhinged

5.) Crowdfunding Vs. Banking Industry

On Nov. 3rd Congress moved the economically disconnected pieces of society a bit closer to the American Entrepreneurial Dream of owning a business by expanding the option for attracting angel investors. Even thought the vast majority of Americans are woefully disconnected from knowing how jobs get created, this will have a major impact on virtually everyone’s lives.

Next stop for this bill will be the U.S. Senate. Given its strong bipartisan support, and backing by the Obama administration, it looks likely that the bill – or at least some version of it – will soon become law.

Although little has been written about the long term implications of this bill, opportunists, in all walks of entrepreneurship, are taking notice and beginning to formulate plans to either launch their own crowdfunding operation or unveil a startup that can benefit from it.

Since startups have become an infinitely small portion of most bank’s loan portfolios, and the SBA who guarantees (primarily asset-based) loans for startups has become increasingly out of touch with the lean thinking and digital nature of new business formation, it wouldn’t appear to be much of a banking conflict on the surface.

However, after years of being snubbed by the financial community, startup entrepreneurs have very little love for those working in “the system.” With the right mix of personalities and motivation, a full toolset of crowdfunding options in the right hands will invariably create a powder keg of activity designed around circumventing banks entirely from the system that has dissed them repeatedly.

6.) The Transparency Wars – Privacy Vs. Convenience

As humans we are constantly radiating information, and this information is being detected, logged, and analyzed for use in startling new ways.

People gathering the data are doing so for positive reasons, to make our lives more convenient. But there is a downside to this level of exposure.

Technology for capturing personal data is now being pushed to the nth degree. As humans we need to be able to make mistakes. But transparency increases the pain threshold for making those mistakes.

It sounds good when business people talk about wearing failure as a badge of courage, and how we can improve our success ratio by failing faster and failing smarter. But, in all likelihood, the next generation of transparency won’t even let us get to that point.

As Thomas Edison so aptly reminds us, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the things that don’t work.

As transparency grows, we are approaching a logical breaking point. When we do, look for the small-time rule-breakers of the past to become the full-scale turbo-charged rule-breakers of the future.

The driving forces of those wishing to monetize transparency will find themselves in a full-scale cyber-war with those who have reached their limit. And it may involve much more than online battlefields.

7.) The Retirement Battleground – The Working Poor Vs. the Retiring Rich

Populations around the world are declining. We are seeing negative population growth in Canada, all across Europe, Korea, Japan, China, Australia, and many more. The U.S. is about even with roughly 2.1 children per family.

While the number of young people is becoming proportionally smaller, the number of seniors is becoming proportionally larger – much larger.

Americans over 65 will more than double, from 34.8 million in 2000 (12%) to 70.3 million in 2030 (20%). At the same time, the next generation of retirees are destined to become the healthiest, longest-lived, best educated, most affluent in all history.

But we will pay dearly for this level of prosperity, and with the systems as they currently stand, the working class will become the indentured servants of the retirement class, consuming a growing level of income until it reaches a breaking point.

8.) Healthcare Wars

Five driving forces will cause healthcare to go into a death spiral in 2012 – the new healthcare legislation and forces of transparency combined with the convergence of smartphones, peripherals, and apps.

With every piece of health-related information that an individual consumes, there is an accompanying moment of introspection.

People today are far more adept at connecting cause and effect relationships between everything from food and the body’s energy, to physical activity and mental alertness, to sleep and daily performance.

The more we know about the human body, the more we become aware of its deficiencies. Our health is a common topic of conversation and we now have names for thousands of new medical conditions and physical performance issues that didn’t even exist 20 years ago.

Over time the number of treatable conditions for us to contend with will increase exponentially. Enterprising people will devise treatments for virtually every slight deviation from the norm, and many will prey on those who are hypersensitive to their own physical maladies.

This cumulative awareness is building towards something, and this something I believe will involve more personal control, greater efficiencies, and a focus on the concept of “self.”

Self-diagnostics, self-monitoring, self-medication, and just an overarching need for self-control.

The massive surge in smartphone technology is setting the stage for a wide variety of health-related peripheral devices to spring to life, revolutionizing how healthcare is monitored and managed.

The combination of smartphones, functioning as small anytime, anyplace computers; wirelessly connected peripheral devices such a ultrasound wands, blood pressure cuffs, EKG monitors, skin-monitoring patches, and ingestible cameras; along with a rapidly growing app-builder community capable of finding uses for equipment that manufacturers never dreamed possible, and the stage is being set for an entirely new health system to emerge.

It is this convergence of smartphones, peripherals, and apps that is on the verge of granting us, the consumers, a whole new level of awareness, and the ability to live with far fewer gatekeepers in our quest for optimal health and physical performance.

Many in our current healthcare fields will not appreciate this development.

Final Thoughts

As I started pulling my notes together for 2012 trends, I instantly became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of changes currently in the works. The number of moving parts seems to exceed the number of stationary parts. All of our markets, systems, and technologies have become incredibly fluid, and much like a floating vessel, we are heading to parts unknown.

To a futurist, the chaotic nature of interconnecting trends and the extreme possibilities appear at times like a spinning compass needle. The disarray that we find ourselves in cries out for answers – some glimpse of the uncharted waters that lie beyond the horizon.

In the famous words used by John F. Kennedy at Rice University, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Curing the failing systems that are crumbling around us gives us a far different motivation. We are doing it because we have to. And yes, it will be very hard.

We’re not going to find a way out of this mess if the industry captains and political leaders do not pay attention to the simple chore of engendering trust.

Are we up to the task? Do we have the talent in place to lead us through the coming minefields? Only time will tell.

Ultimately, we have the opportunity to emerge as a far better world.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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.

Mystery Surrounding the Founder

The original Bitcoin architecture was formulated by Satoshi Nakamoto, a person no one has every met. The mystery surrounding Nakamoto seems to have been a key component to its viral success.

In an online profile, he claimed to be living in Japan, but his email address was from a free German service. Google searches for his name turned up nothing; it was clearly a pseudonym.

None of his fellow cryptography junkies had heard of him. But over the next few months he would become the Keyser Söze of digital currency.

Bitcoins are essentially “mined” using CPU processing from individual computers. The faster your system, the quicker you can “mine” a bitcoin. There are technically a finite number of “coins” to be mined, so the more a person works at it the more wealth they create.

Nakamoto himself mined the first 50 bitcoins—which have come to be known as the genesis block—on January 3, 2009. For the first year, his breakthroughs remained part of a tiny group of early adopters. But slowly, word of bitcoin spread beyond the limited world of cryptography.

Other than the clear libertarian tone of his writings, Nakamoto said very little about who he was or where he’d come from. His communications had been limited to a few key insiders using the secret Internet found inside the Tor network, a system designed to protect online anonymity.

To explain this further, Tor is a network where data is encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times, then sent through successive Tor relays, each one of which decrypts a “layer” of encryption before passing the data on to the next relay and ultimately the destination. This reduces the possibility of the original data being unscrambled or deciphered along the way.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote hundreds of posts in perfect English, helping to guide bitcoin into a life of its own. He limited his online statements to technical discussion of his source code and only brief commentary on other topics.

At one point Bitcoin users proposed it be used as an underground funding channel for Wikileaks but Nakamoto rejected the attention it would bring, stating, “The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to Wikileaks not to try to use bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

Then, in April, 2011, Kanamoto sent a note to a developer saying that he had “moved on to other things” and to “deemphasize trying to find out who he was.” He has not been heard from since.

“Trough of Disillusionment” or Total Collapse

The value of bitcoins, a “cryptocurrency” that some believed would overtake some traditional currencies, has recently plummeted across all of its exchanges – to a level where it now costs more to “mine” them than they are worth.

The value of bitcoins on one of its main exchanges, MTGox, has collapsed since mid-June from a high where it was trading at the equivalent of about $30 per “coin” almost to parity now.

The black line = the closing price for Bitcoins on the MTGox Exchange where they are traded;
the red and green lines = volumes of coins sold and purchased.

A recent article in Wired Magazine explains the rise and fall this way:

“Through 2009 and early 2010, bitcoins had no value at all, and for the first six months after they started trading in April 2010, the value of one bitcoin stayed below 14 cents. Then, as the currency gained viral traction in summer 2010, rising demand for a limited supply caused the price on online exchanges to start moving. By early November, it surged to 36 cents before settling down to around 29 cents. In February 2011, it rose again and was mentioned on Slashdot for achieving “dollar parity”; it hit $1.06 before settling in at roughly 87 cents.”

“In the spring, catalyzed in part by a much-linked Forbes story on the new “crypto currency,” the price exploded. From early April to the end of May, the going rate for a bitcoin rose from 86 cents to $8.89. Then, after Gawker published a story on June 1 about the currency’s popularity among online drug dealers, it more than tripled in a week, soaring to about $27. The market value of all bitcoins in circulation was approaching $130 million. A Tennessean dubbed KnightMB, who held 371,000 bitcoins, became worth more than $10 million, the richest man in the bitcoin realm.“

Today the value of a bitcoin is slightly under $2.50. Does this sudden drop mean the currency is about to become extinct?

Bitcoins are, in fact, just very long strings of numbers that are “produced” by a processor-intensive calculation that requires increasing amounts of computing power to create them. There is also a limit to how many can ultimately be produced, according to the algorithm used to generate them. So far, less than 7.5 million bitcoins have been produced. This represents about one-third of the total potential for “mined” bitcoins.

As Charles Arthur states in The Guardian, “With the value of bitcoins dropping so low, and the computing power required to produce them growing steadily, it is becoming uneconomic to generate more except through the use of hacked computers in “botnets”. Although there has been anecdotal evidence of their being used to generate bitcoins, many botnets are hired out on a commercial basis to send spam or host phishing websites – and that may be more profitable, directly, than creating the currency.”

Others point to a rash of bitcoin-related businesses posted for sale as a clear indicator of its ultimate demise.

But the true believers find hope in Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

The Gartner Hype Cycle is based on a theoretical technology-adoption-and-maturation curve that begins with a “technology trigger,” ascends to a “peak of inflated expectations,” collapses into a “trough of disillusionment,” and then climbs a “slope of enlightenment” until reaching a “plateau of productivity.” Using this theory, bitcoin is beginning to climb its way out of the trough, as people learn to value the infallible code and discard the human drama and wild fluctuations that surround it.

Anonymous Money

Much of the value in using bitcoin is the fact that it’s untraceable – anonymous. As a result of this feature, underground marketplaces such as Silk Road have begun to spring to life.

A June 1st article in Gawker titled “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable” explains it best:

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most Internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics—and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon—if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada.

But even Silk Road has limits: You won’t find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of “anything who’s purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction.”

Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don’t point your browser there yet. It’s only accessible through the anonymizing network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.

Lessons for the Future

Currencies like bitcoin are much more about their usability than their hordability. Its single feature, being anonymous, insures a unique usability feature that will give bitcoin lasting value. But it’s functionality as an anonymous currency is directly related to its price stability. So losing the valuation spikes is a good thing.

Every step taken by law enforcement to curb illegal activities will be met with another ingenious shift in how deals are transacted. With cash becoming ever more traceable, drug dealers have evolved from offshore banking to various forms of stored-value cards to the most secret currency so far – bitcoin.

However it’s only a matter of time before the anonymity of bitcoin will be compromised and users can be traced.

One of Nakamoto’s primary breakthroughs in creating bitcoin was solving the double-spending problem. A digital dollar is nothing more than information. Gone are the metal and paper of generations past.

But with digital money, what’s to prevent someone from copying and pasting it as easily as a chunk of text, “spending” it as many times as they want? Our answer traditionally has been to use a central clearinghouse to keep a real-time ledger of all transactions—ensuring that, if someone spends their last digital dollar, that they can’t then spend it again. The ledger prevents fraud, but it also requires people in a position of trust to administer it.

Bitcoin did away with the need for a third party clearinghouse by publicly distributing the ledger, what Nakamoto called the “block chain.”

He also devised an ingenious strategy to determine who gets to create new bitcoins with cryptographic mining puzzles. By increasing the workload on “miners” exponentially over time, he has insured scarcity. With only 21 million bitcoins possible and an entire world wanting to use them, the demand will theoretically continue to fuel a good market for them.

Over time, however, something better will come along.

Mexican artists who paint images of dogs playing poker on velvet canvases are also counting on a certain kind of demand for their limited inventory of artwork. But artists have very little recourse in limiting the supply of their paintings and invariably, over time, supply will always outstrip demand.

Bitcoin is also fiat money, currency based on trust. Most currencies around the world are fiat currencies, not backed by gold or precious metals.

National currencies though, have legal structures and systems to help protect their value. In the U.S. we have layers of trust incorporated into our currencies – our towns and cities honor it, our counties and states use it, and the federal government mandates it. This layering of systems helps insure durability.

Currencies are people-based systems that require human interaction with it. Without people, currencies become meaningless.

Bitcoin, in its current state is not a currency with universal acceptance or appeal. People are hard-pressed to find apartments that will accept bitcoins for their rent, grocery stores that will accept it to buy food, or a DMV that will allow you to buy plates for your car.

There is also no system in place for recovering lost or stolen bitcoins. As a digital currency, it can be hacked, pilfered, erased, or corrupted. Can a bitcoin system be built to be durable enough to survive over time?

As a way to legitimize its existence, new systems could be developed for bitcoin creation. Instead of using it primarily for the trade of black-market goods and services, large reserves could be awarded as prize money to incentivize major scientific advances. As an example, if 10 million bitcoins were awarded to the winners of the DaVinci Institute’s Eight Grand Challenges or to the winners of an X-Prize competition, it would be viewed as a positive force, offering hope for humanity. Rather than the currency of choice for members of WikiLeaks or Occupy Wall Street, the image could be reframed around finding cures for cancer and diabetes, as well as stopping hurricanes and earthquakes.

Once it begins to stabilize, and the supply of bitcoins expanded many fold, it could be used as a trade reference currency, used to write cross-border contracts when national currencies have become too volatile. As an example, if a company in the U.S. writes a contract to buy a ship load of computers from Thailand six months from now, rather than framing the contract around a national currency, the contracted price could be calculated in terms of bitcoins.

In it current iteration, bitcoin has been relegated to the nefarious underbelly of society, appealing to niche groups of Libertarians and social anarchists. But for all its limitations, bitcoin remains a major milestone in our transition from national currencies to global currencies. It also serves as a guiding light for transitioning from labor-intensive systems to automated systems.

The legend of bitcoin is far from over. In fact, with a little tweaking, it could very well be only beginning.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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